ustxtxb_obs_1986_04_04_50_00008-00000_000.pdf

in Europe.* This revelation came shortly after Victor Reuther in 1966 told the Los Angeles Times that the AFL-CIO had been accepting funds from the CIA to finance specific union operations abroad, particularly in the Western Hemisphere. By the mid-’60s the United Auto Workers had changed its position regarding labor’s proper role in foreign affairs. But other labor leaders did not change, including AFL-CIO President George Meany, whose minister of foreign affairs, Jay Lovestone, was said to have worked closely with the U.S. government abroad. intervention in the Dominican Republic. The overthrow of Arbenz resulted in the restoration of lands confiscated from United Fruit, the abolition of restrictions on foreign investments, and a carte blanche for foreign-owned oil companies to extract Guatemalan oil at will. Ten days after the overthrow of Arbenz, Serafino Romauldi of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union helped ORIT re-organize Guatemalan labor on an “anticommunist” basis. Three years later, wages on 75 percent of the Guatemalan plantations were significantly reduced. According to A.J. Langguth, in Hidden Terrors ganizations set up by the AFL-CIO were intimately linked to U.S. covert operations in Brazil and Uruguay operations which contributed to the overthrow of democracies and to the institutionalization of political torture in those countries. In 1963, the AIFLD held a And the National Workers’ Confederation, set up by the AIFLD in Chile, served as the chief labor organ for the Chilean junta. In Honduras, United Brands used AIFLD to destroy the banana workers federation. [Contrary to the popular perception in this country that Latin American nations have no great democratic traditions and, hence, are susceptible to the lure of fascism or communism, it has been the United States that has worked to overthrow great Latin American democratic traditions in a number of countries. The torture of political prisoners in some Latin American countries may also be attributed, at least in part, to encouragement, training, and equipment received from the United States by agents of government torture in Latin America and is not due to some purported Latin propensity to torture.] Penny Lernoux, in her Cry of the People AIFLD “a Trojan horse for the multinationals sponsored by the AFL-CIO.” According to Lernoux, AIFLD was promoted by J. Peter Grace, AIFLD’s first board chairman and a signer of the March 1986 PRODEMCA statement, and was funded by U.S. AID, the State Department, W.R. Grace, ITT, Exxon, Shell, Kennecott, Anaconda, American Smelting and Refining, IBM, Koppers, Gillette, “and 85 other large corporations with interests in Latin America.” Grace said the institute “teaches workers to increase their company’s business.” Drew Pearson reported that it received CIA funding for an operation that trained 300,000 Latin American union members in the United States, most at the Front Royal Institute in Virginia, set up originally by the Communication Workers of America. Among its other operations, Lernoux reports, AIFLD. collects detailed information on Latin American labor leaders. “It is all too probable,” she writes, “that this information was passed on to the military regimes and their secret police.” In El Salvador the AIFLD helped set up a new labor coalition, Popular support the efforts of the Salvadoran junta headed by Christian Democrat Napoleon Duarte. Part of this effort was an agrarian reform program drawn up with the help of AIFLD. AIFLD hired Roy Prosterman, an architect of Vietnamization, to create a program whereby peasants could apply for title to lands they were renting or sharecropping. This replaced an agrarian reform measure that would have affected the medium-sized landholdings of the coffee-growing elite. By 1984, /N LATIN America specifically, leaders of organized U.S. labor worked hand-in-glove with leaders of the budding U.S.-based multinationals. In February 1945, Assistant Secretary of State Will Clayton \(of Texas and the Anderson, Clayton international to be called the “Clayton Plan.” It required lower Latin American tariffs in order to bring about increased exports from the United States. This was disastrous to local Latin American industrialization and, therefore, to Latin American labor. The Clayton Plan also demanded that Latin American governments institute policies favorable to the free and uninhibited investment of foreign capital. The Latin American largest worker confederation in Latin America, opposed the plan. Instead, it called for state control of foreign capital investments and a foreign trade policy to prevent the purchase of raw materials at low prices for U.S. manufacture to be sold back to Latin America at high prices. This, of course, was unacceptable to U.S. labor leaders, who announced their support for the Clayton Plan. Speaking to the International Labor Relations Committee of the AFL in 1946, Nelson Rockefeller whose family had no little interest in Latin America said the U.S. was trying to organize a Pan American Union for Latin American labor since the CLAT was opposed to the political goals the United States had set for the region. The AFL then set about establishing the Inter-American Regional OrganizaCLAT, and, in 1962, the American Institute for Free Labor Development dorsed the overthrow of democratically elected presidents of Guatemala 0 Funneling money to the Third World. training session in Washington, D.C., for 33 Brazilian labor leaders, who then returned to Brazil and took clandestine roles in the anti-Goulart conspiracy. “What happened in Brazil,” said William Doherty, Jr., executive director of AIFLD and a signer of a June 2, 1985, PRODEMCA ad, “did not just happen it was planned and planned months in advance. Many of the trade union leaders, some of whom were actually trained in our institute, were involved in the revolution, and in the overthrow of the Goulart regime.” According to Langguth, the AIFLD served as a front for the CIA in Uruguay, with CIA agents working through AIFLD offices. The AIFLD-backed union in the Dominican Republic welcomed the U.S. Marines when they invaded that country. *Jack Scott, Yankee Unions, Go Home!, New Star Books, 1978. 8 APRIL 4, 1986