Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon : Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil

This extraordinary saga moves from the Oval Office to the Amazon rain forests to show how Cold War intrigue linked a powerful American family, the U.S. government, and a missionary organization in a forty-year campaign to conquer the Amazon. At the heart of this story are two intensely ambitious men: Nelson Rockefeller, scion of the liberal and immensely wealthy Standard Oil family, and William Cameron Townsend, founder of the ultraconservative Wycliffe Bible Translators. Although leaders of opposing camps, they found common cause in the struggle against fascism and then communism, with the result that hundreds of thousands of Amazonian tribespeople died or were displaced. The systematic campaign of colonization fathered by Rockefeller and Townsend was a chilling foreshadowing of American intervention in the Third World to secure valuable natural resources in the name of democracy.