Reply #313: The Batista 'government'

[GirlinContempt]

and Batista himself, befriended the Mafia and corporations. This wealth flowed in to their pockets. His opponents, people who organized, were gunned down in the streets (see Antonio Guiteras). This is not a situation for Unions. He suspended the Constitution, and rights to strike. He completely reorganized the government to ensure that he and his cronies received the wealth flowing in from gangsters and the US. When rebellions happened, he ordered his soldiers to kill ten rebels for every lost solider. He sold contracts to the highest bidder with no regard to fairness, he pocketed 30% of profits, above and beyond what he siphoned off through the
government that should have been going to things like health and education for his people. His police force and military beat down students and shut down universities when they protested. The military police would patrol the streets at night and pick up people that could possibly be organizing anything that the government didn't like. They were arrested and tortured. José A. Echeverría was killed for making a radio broadcast. Frank País was killed for organizing for change.

This is not a situation for unions. You can not just introduce the idea of unions in that kind of political system. It doesn't work. You'd get shot, or disappeared.

Now, lets look at unions in other Latin American countries:

The AFL-CIO and AIFLD work actively to take the teeth out of South American unions. George Meany, President of the AFL-CIO and also of AIFLD, boasted support from the "largest corporations in the United States . . . Rockefeller, ITT, Kennecott, Standard Oil, Shell Petroleum . . . Anaconda, even Readers Digest. . . and although some of these companies have no connection whatsoever to US trade unions, they are all agreed that it was really in the US interest to help develop free trade unions in Latin America, and that's why they contributed so much money".

J. Peter Grace, Chairman of the Board of AIFLD and also Chairman of the Board of the W.R. Grace Corporation, one of the ninety five transnational companies that back the Institute, applies the doctrine in tactical terms. Grace says AIFLD urges "cooperation between labour and management and an end to class struggle" and "teaches workers to increase their company's business". He says the goal of AIFLD is to "prevent communist infiltration, and where it exists . . . get rid of it".

And thus to an outline of their practise: AIFLD played an important role in the destruction of the Cheddi Jagan government in Guyana. They worked with massive funds, up to $800,000 in a country with less than a million people, funnelled through the Public Service International and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. At least eleven graduates of AIFLD's Front Royal, Virginia Centre were maintained on a payroll to organise the riots and company union opposition to the leftist head of government.

In the Dominican Republic, where AIFLD worked to unseat the government of Juan Bosch and tried to organise labour support backing the 1965 US invasion, they have continued to play a role towards stabilising the repressive status quo. One AIFLD plan in the Dominican Republic gives some insight into AIFLD "training". It called for "a stepped up propaganda and education campaign in addition to motorised brigades (vigilantes) . . . a specially trained mobile group of 'educator organisers' . . . used to confront and battle . . . the extreme left." In a specific reply to this charge, Director Doherty's Washington office says "AIFLD is glad to take credit for giving fraternal and material support".

http://www.counterpunch.org/scipes03292004.html
Massive mobilizations, strikes, street conflict, hysterical mass media, social and economic disruption: Chile in 1972-73 Venezuela in 2002-04.

The AFL-CIO is once again on the scene, this time in Venezuela, just as it was in Chile in 1973. Once again, its operations in that country are being funded by the U.S. government. This time, the money is being laundered through the quasi-governmental National Endowment for Democracy, hidden from AFL-CIO members and the American public.

Once again, it is being used to support the efforts of reactionary labor and business leaders, helping to destabilize a democratically-elected government that has made major efforts to alleviate poverty, carried out significant land reform in both urban and rural areas, and striven to change political institutions that have long worked to marginalize those at the lowest rungs in society. And also like Allende's Chile, Venezuela's government under president Hugo Chavez has opposed a number of actions by the U.S. Government, this time by the Bush Administration.

ACILS-also known as the Solidarity Center-has overseen all of the AFL-CIO's foreign labor operations since 1997, centralizing a previously decentralized set of regional bodies that had long worked in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. These organizations, which played a key role in the Cold War, had a terrible affect in the developing regions of the world.

There is a consensus that ACILS' work under President John Sweeney has been considerably better than foreign operations carried out under previous AFL-CIO presidents George Meany and Lane Kirkland. But the continuing lack of transparency, accountability and even simple reporting to AFL-CIO members about ACILS has generated concerns among activists about what the organization actually does in the many countries in which it operates. Solidarity Center Director Harry Kamberis' background is not a typical labor background and looks suspiciously like CIA, which also adds to activists' unease. (See my report in Labor Notes, February 2004.).

Most of ACILS' funding comes from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), not the AFL-CIO. The NED was created by the Reagan Administration in 1983. One of the authors of the enabling legislation has said that NED was to do at least some of the work previously done by the CIA, albeit publicly: its talk appears progressive, but its actions are reactionary. One of the NED's initial directors was that well-known democrat, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon's point man in the campaign against Chile's elected president, Salvador Allende.

http://www.selvesandothers.org/article10406.html
he UNT seeks to displace the Confederation of Venezuelan Labor (CTV), historically the dominant union body in the country. It aims to undo decades of decline by organized labor: Gil estimated that real wages in his plant haven’t risen in 18 years.
There is a history of union corruption in Venezuela-overwhelmingly within the CTV. In her book The Failure of Political Reform in Venezuela, the British academic Julia Buxton describes it as one of the “richest and most powerful union confederations in the world” in its heyday. <9> The CTV’s intimate ties with the political establishment allowed “for the illicit enrichment of union leaders, who acquired a personal interest for maintaining the model of party control,” she wrote. In fact, the Venezuelan state provided 90 percent of the funding for the CTV in the 1960s and 1970s. <10> The AFL-CIO’s ties to the CTV, moreover, have been among its closest with any foreign labor federation. This relationship has continued despite the CTV’s alliance with the forces that mounted the April 2002 coup-of which the CIA had foreknowledge-that was embraced by the Bush administration. <11> The AFL-CIO’s support for the CTV continued through the devastating oil industry lockout, and the strike that followed.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Labor/AFL_CIO_Venezuela.html

http://www.workertoworker.net/afl_cio_foreign_policy_venezuela_kim_scipes.html
Although not generally known by union members as it has been consciously hidden by its leaders, the AFL-CIO actually has a long-time foreign policy program that goes back to the days of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) during the 19-teens under then-president, Samuel Gompers. And, in fact, much of this foreign policy program--during Gompers' time but also since 1962--has been carried out in Latin America
This foreign policy program has been initiated and carried out behind the backs of American workers, although "in our name." The AFL-CIO has long been known to carry out a reactionary labor program around the world. It has been unequivocally established that they have worked to overthrow democratically-elected governments, have collaborated with dictators against progressive labor movements, and have supported reactionary labor movements against progressive governments (Scipes, 2000: 12; Shorrock, 2002, 2003; see, among others, Snow, 1964; Morris, 1967; Radosh, 1969; Scott, 1978; Spaulding, 1984; Barry and Preusch, 1986; Cantor and Schor, 1987; Weinrub and Bollinger, 1987; Armstrong, et. al., 1988; Sims, 1992; Scipes, 1996; Carew, 1998; Nack, 1998; and Buhle, 1999).

And while the AFL-CIO's regional organization, AIFLD (American Institute for Free Labor Development), was especially known for its involvement in events leading to the 1973 coup in Chile (Hirsch, 1974, n.d.; Scipes, 2000; Shorrock, 2003), what is less well known is it's long-standing ties with the Venezuelan CTV. In fact, according to labor journalist Lee Sustar,

Venezuela--a key focus of U.S. foreign policy since the oil boom of the 1920s--became Washington's counterweight to the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The headquarters of the AFL-CIO-initiated Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers (ORIT) was moved to Caracas. In 1962, Venezuela was the linchpin of the AFL-CIO's newly launched American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD); the AIFLD board included both the AD leader Betancourt and his COPEI counterpart, Rafael Caldera. Next, in the mid-1960s, the AFL-CIO even provided funding for a CTV-owned bank. AIFLD chief Serafino Romualdi, later alleged to have been a CIA agent, called his relationship with Betancourt "the most fruitful political collaboration of my life." Romualdi helped engineer the expulsion of the Communist Party and other leftists from the CTV; elsewhere, AIFLD collaborated with the CIA and the State Department to undermine or overthrow Latin American governments opposed to the U.S. (Sustar, 2005; 3 see also Hirsch, 2005).

In other words, not only has the AFL-CIO had a long-standing foreign policy program, it long has been active in Latin America, and especially in Venezuela.

http://labornotes.org/node/230

http://labornotes.org/node/1307

In mid-March, Valmore Locarno Rodriguez and Victor Hugo Orcasita were riding the company bus from their jobs at the Loma coal mine in northern Colombia. Locarno and Orcasita were chairman and vice-chairman of the union at the mine.

The bus was stopped by 15 gunmen, some in military uniforms. They began checking the workers' identification, and when they found the two union leaders, pulled them off the bus.

One of the gunmen shot Locarno in the face, as his fellow workers watched in horror. Orcasita was taken off into the woods at the side of the road. There he was tortured. When his body was later found, his fingernails had been torn off.

Protesting the deaths, 1,200 miners at Loma stopped work. In Colombia, labor activism is often punished with death. By mid-May, 44 union leaders had been violently murdered this year alone. Last year assassinations cost the lives of 129 others. The National Labor School reports that 1,500 have been killed in the past decade. Out of every five unionists killed in the world, three are Colombian, according to a recent U.S. union report.

Last year the AFL-CIO called for ending military assistance to Colombia. Labor's strong reaction to the Colombian murders stands in contrast to its relative silence during the Reagan administration-sponsored wars in Central America in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

During that era, AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland tried to suppress criticism of U.S. foreign policy in union ranks and to stop local efforts to organize support for Salvadoran unionists.

During the cold war, Kirkland and other labor conservatives accused most Colombian unions of being too left-wing. In turn the Colombians, like many third world labor federations, accused the AFL-CIO of supporting only anti-communist unions which defended U.S. foreign policy.

http://www.venezuelafoia.info/ned-english.html

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?sectionid=45&itemid=5074

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?sectionid=45&itemid=3374
For some time, there has been a lot of confusion outside Venezuela about what exactly has been happening there. How could progressives and trade unionists support the Venezuelan government despite its support of the poor through land reform and income redistribution and its attack on neo-liberalism and the FTAA---- given the dedicated opposition of the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV)? How, when there was a general strike, could we side with the government rather than workers? For trade union organisations, the problem has been even more difficult--- given the support for the CTV by international labour organisations (including the ILO). Nevertheless, as the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) noted in the statement issued by Ken Georgetti on 18 April last year after the defeated coup, the role of the CTV in that coup against the democratically elected government of Hugo Chavez raised serious questions about the character of the CTV and its place in the crony capitalism and sham democracy that had left 80 % of the population in poverty in an oil-rich nation.

Today, though, there should be no confusion. Because the CTV has been exposed as just an arm of the Fedecamaras, the Employers Association with which it has been allied-- in the coup and in the so-called general strike. A strange general strike, indeed. One in which workers in the oil industry (blue collar), electricity, transport, public sector, basic industries and the subway, among others, kept working. One in which workers were laid off by the conglomerates (the monopolies) and transnationals and told that they would get full pay for the period of the lock-outs--- only now to discover that this promissory note was dependent on the c! ompanies defeating the Chavez government. (They are being offered half-pay, loss of vacations, etc... and those that protest? They're in the queues at the Ministry of Labour filing complaints over their dismissals.)


How's that for a start? You could always learn about it for yourself. Do a little research. I find it tiresome to have to educate people who're too lazy to learn about a thing for themselves. Maybe you should bother to learn about this stuff before you decide what the solution is. I know this makes me an arrogant bitch, but it would be just as fair to call you an arrogant asshole for expecting people to educate you about your own opinions, and believing that the American solution is the worlds solution. So I guess we're even.