http://www.handsoffvenezuela.org/afl-cio_collaboration_ctv0505.htmLabor Imperialism Redux?: The AFL-CIO's Foreign Policy Since 1995<snip>
The AFL-CIO, through its American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS), was actively involved with both the CTV and FEDECAMARAS in Venezuela before the April 2002 coup, and these organizations both helped lead the coup attempt. ACILS was given over $700,000 by the National Endowment for Democracy for work in that country between 1997 and 2002. These efforts and receipt of the money were not reported to AFL-CIO members and, in fact, the AFL-CIO has actively worked to keep these operations from being known, despite a growing number of AFL-CIO affiliated organizations formally requesting this information. These activities and receipt of this money has not been reported in any labor press, including its own Web site, by the AFL-CIO. And this intentional refusal to address member organization concerns has also been formally condemned by a number of AFL-CIO affiliates.
As if that weren’t bad enough, labor leaders also have been actively participating in the State Department–initiated Advisory Committee for Labor Diplomacy (ACLD), which has been designed to advance the labor diplomacy efforts of the United States. While considerable benefit to the U.S. government has been established, there has been no or little benefit to workers either in the United States or in the rest of the world.
http://venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1340National Endowment for Death Squads? The AFL-CIO and the NEDFew tax payers familiar with the National Endowment for Democracy, a publicly funded yet privately owned organization operating in at least forty countries. NED's mission? To help the United States set up capitalist economies around the world, backed by regimes that are friendly to U.S. big business.
With no interference from the public or congress, the NED is free to accomplish its goals by manipulating and buying elections, starting political as well as economic turmoil, funding counter-insurgency material to right-wing groups, and using other tactics that would be considered illegal in the United States.
Equally disturbing, yet more surprising, is the role that leaders of the U.S. labor federation, the AFL-CIO, play in carrying out the NED's dirty work. The AFL-CIO's Solidarity Center is at work in twenty-eight countries, discouraging radical organizing among workers and promoting privatization by assisting unions and labor groups that support private enterprise.
A glimpse into this NED constituent's predecessor organization shows a history of collusion with Central Intelligence Agency terrorism since the early sixties.
The AFL-CIO Solidarity Center's predecessor, the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), was one of the four government-funded labor institutes created during the cold war to prevent foreign countries from establishing independent economic systems. AIFLD was instrumental in the overthrow of democratically elected leftist governments in Guyana in 1963, Brazil in 1964, the Dominican Republic in 1965, and Chile in 1973.
By the late 1970s, the CIA was exposed for its sabotage of governments and labor movements around the world. Corrupt dictatorships in Central America, backed by local death squads armed and trained by the CIA, massacred hundreds of thousands of peasants during popular insurgencies in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=45&ItemID=8107AFL-CIO Foreign Policy in Venezuela<snip>
For over fifty years the interventionist work of the AFL-CIO has been financed by agencies of the U.S. Government. Among those agencies are the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of State, the Department of Labor, the U.S. Agency for International Development and some other agencies. In recent years, most ACILS funding comes from U.S. taxpayers through NED, the National Endowment for Democracy. Formerly, Latin American labor intervention operations were manipulated by AIFLD, the American Institute for Free Labor Development, which worked hand-in-hand with ORIT, the InterAmerican Regional Labor Organization. Three other AFL-CIO “institutes” operated on other continents. AIFLD operations, strengthened sellout unions and attacked militant unions, paving the way for transnational corporate globalization and influencing regime changes with disastrous results for workers.
An AFL operative, Serafino Romualdi, was a founder of ORIT. His clandestine work in Guatemala, fifty one years ago, was pivotal in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz. It resulted, through ensuing decades, in the deaths of uncounted tens of thousands of workers. Romualdi later set up AIFLD, whose work under his protege, William C. Doherty Jr., was critical to the Pinochet putch against democracy in Chile, unleashing terror, torture and death for seventeen years. Over three thousand lives were taken. I fear that US. government manipulations in Venezuela duplicate its work in Chile in 1973.
These issues have been on my mind many years. It began in 1973 when I learned that the AFL-CIO was part of what happened to democracy in Chile. I was outraged - simply outraged. As the facts came clear, I saw that our Federation’s role was fundamental to that coup. It could not have happened without us! In my city, we organized and welcomed hundreds of Chileans from Pinochet concentration camps. They had suffered torture and lost husbands, wives, children and lovers - their lives torn asunder. I told them though their tears that when the U.S. workers learn the grief our AFL-CIO collaboration causes, we would end that treason to the workers and to what we stand for. We’re still working on it and our California resolution against such collaboration may strike a blow at the July AFL-CIO convention.
I mention this hsitory because AIFLD had the same boss-labor collaboration as we see with FEDECAMARAS and the CTV. Bosses from the biggest U.S. corporations with interests in Latin America sat on AIFLD’s Board of Directors. Representatives of the CTV, already a client of AIFLD in the sixties, sat on that same Board with the bosses. A CIA whistle blower identified both Romualdi and Doherty as CIA agents who funneled U.S. federal money into their so-called “solidarity” operations. Of AIFLD’s work, Doherty said: “Our collaboration (with business) takes the form of trying to make the investment climate more attractive and inviting.”
Though discussion of this history has never been welcome in the AFL-CIO, delegates to the 2004 Convention of the California Labor Federation, representing 2.4 million workers demanded unanimously that the AFL-CIO “fully account for what was done in Chile and Venezuela and other countries where similar roles may have been played in our name, and to describe, country by country, exactly what activities it may still be engaged in abroad with funds paid by government agencies and renounce any such ties that could compromise our authentic credibility and the trust of workers here and abroad and that would make us paid agents of government or of the forces of corporate economic globalization.”
Just a sampling. I would say, F**K the AFL-CIO!
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