AIDED BY WASHINGTON, AFL-CIO UNIT BACKS LATIN GOALS OF U.S.

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00806R000100070001-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 13, 2010
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: December 31, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
--~ Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/09/13: CIA-RDP90-00806R000100070001-2
WALL J lKt,l;l JUUKIVAL
ARTICLE APPEARED
ON PAGE !. ___
Labor Activists
Aided by Washington,
AFL-CIO Unit Backs
Latin Goals of U.S.
AIFLD Promotes Moderate
And Conservative Unions;
Its Methods Can Backfire
Does Piper's Payer Call Tune?
By CLIFFORD Krauss
Staff Reporter of THE WAL . STREET JOURNAL
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador - As
AFL-CIO representative Donald Kessler
tours a local textile union's sewing school,
union leaders tell him that one of the buses
used to take members to work needs $8,000
of repairs.
Mr. Kessler promises to arrange an
easy loan.
Later the American says he will delay
approval of the loan until after the union's
board election next Match-so that the un-
ion's moderate leadership, which he sup-
ports, can use the prospect of the loan to
help fend off a Marxist challenge. "I'm go-
ing to tell them that you can safely say. 'If
we're elected, you'll get the loan,' " he
tells a reporter.
As surely as any Green Beret trainer or
pinstriped American diplomat, Mr.
Kessler, a former Miami postal-union
leader, seeks to advance U.S. aims in Cen-
tral America. But he acts as a representa-
tive not of the U.S. government but of U.S.
labor. He is an official here of the Ameri-
can Institute for Free Labor Development,
or AIFLD (usually pronounced "A-field"),
a largely government-financed arm of the
AFL-CIO that has been operating in Latin
America for 24 years.
A Major Force
Over the years AIFLD has been a ma-
jor force in forming or assisting moderate
and conservative trade unions throughout
the region, where unions are traditionally
seedbeds of radicalism. It has angered left-
ist governments in Brazil, the Dominican
Republic, Chile and Guyana by helping or-
ganize and train workers who opposed offi-
cial policies. Today it is doing the same in
Nicaragua-by long distance because the
Marxist-led Sandinista regime closed
AIFLD's office there in 1981.
AIFLD also, though less frequently, has
taken on the right; it was kicked out of El
Salvador for five years in the 1970s be-
cause its support of land reform enraged a
military regime.
"If it hadn't been for AIFLD," says Mr.
Kessler, a 21-year veteran of the organiza-
tion and currently its deputy director in El
Salvador, "I'd hate to see what Latin
America would look like today."
Under Attack
But in recent years, as the U.S. has be-
come more involved in Central America,
AIFLD's policies have increasingly come
under attack.
Even its supporters say it creates de-
pendent unions that often can't stand up on
their own, and its heavy-handed tactics
have in some cases, notably in El Salvador
and Costa Rica, divided the very moder-
ates it is trying to strengthen. It was em-
barrassed in 1984 when it was disclosed
that $20,000 it gave to a Panamanian union
was used to promote the presidential cam-
paign of the army-backed candidate-at a
time the U.S. was trying to appear neu-
tral.
"AIFLD is a disaster for workers,"
charges Adrian Esquino, an Indian peasant
leader here, whose union lost its AIFLD fi-
nancing, radio and jeep when it refused to
join a new AIFLD-sponsored labor confed-
eration. "AIFLD says if you do what we
want, we'll give you money," he says.
The institute buys union leaders."
Relations With Washington
Perhaps the biggest source of contro-
versy involves AIFLD's relationship with
the U.S. government. The institute was
founded in 1962, with the encouragement of
President Kennedy, as an effort to promote
democratic unionism in Latin America.
From the beginning, AIFLD has received
the bulk of its funds from the govern-
ment-although it insists it sets its policy
without official guidance. Last year,
AIFLD had a total budget of $20 million, of
which more than 90% came from Washing-
ton. One often-used conduit is the Agency
for International Development: in El Sal-
vador, it contributed 98010 of AIFLD's 1985
financing.
Today AIFLD, a unit of the AFL-CIO's
International Affairs Department, operates
in 22 countries and has a full-time staff of
175 in Washington and Latin America. Al-
though it is active throughout the region,
its current focus-like that of the Reagan
administration-is Central America, where
it has trained more than 200.000 union and
peasant activists. It is helping build a
moderate labor confederation in Guate-
mala, which is just starting down a shaky
road toward democracy. It also has helped
design and administer El Salvador's land
reform, a central part of U.S. efforts to
build a political middle here.
Until recently, few members of the
AFL-CIO knew their organization even had
a policy toward Latin America. (Or other
parts of th
other AFL-CIO arms carry out the same
sorts of activities in more than 50 countries
in Africa, the Middle East and Asia; but
AIFLD's budget is larger than those of the
other two combined.)
But that began to change in early 1981,
when two AIFLD land-reform advisers,
along with a Salvadoran peasant leader.
were shot to death at a San Salvador hotel,
apparently by rightists opposed to land re-
form. Now AIFLD no longer has a low pro-
file, and some uniob leaders worry that the
AFL-CIO is involved in an alliance with
Republican conservatives to perpetuate re-
pressive regimes and somnolent unions.
"Given the anti-union bias of the Rea-
gan administration, are we able to do the
job in Central America we want to do?"
asks Victor Gotbaum, vice president of the
AFL-CIO's American Federation of State,
County and Municipal Employees. Refer-
ring to possible manipulation by Washing-
ton of U.S. labor activities in the region, he
adds: "The one who pays the piper may be
calling the tune."
Compounding the controversy is the
fact that over the Years. AIFLD has at
times been rumored to have links with th
Central Intelligence Aeencv. Several _for-
mer CIA agents have said they worked
with it in the But most outside ob-
servers think the intelligence agency
doesn't play a big role in AIFLD these
days. and AIFLD denies any connection
whatsoever.
Part of the official interest in AIFLD
stems from the fact that it competes head
to head with the Soviet bloc's World Feder-
ation of Trade Unions. That group, based
in Czechoslovakia, provides money and
training to Central American labor leaders
through affiliates in Mexico, Cuba and
even the Soviet Union. The head of Hon-
duras's Marxist labor confederation, for
example, was educated in Moscow. But the
World Federation's activities are generally
considered to be dwarfed by those of
A I FLD.
Performance Varies
AIFLD's performance differs from
country to country, partly because each
country director has a considerable
amount of autonomy, within wide guide-
lines set by the Washington office. But in
Central America, it is possible to see the
entire spectrum-from success in Hondu-
ras to tough slogging in Nicaragua to frus-
tration in El Salvador.
Of the three countries, none is more
controversial for AIFLD than Nicaragua,
where it is still actively opposing the San-
dinista government despite having been
formally expelled from the country four
years ago. AIFLD's executive director in
Washington, William C. Doherty Jr., is a
founder of Friends of the Democratic Cen-
ter in Central America, a U.S.-based citi-
Contnued
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/09/13: CIA-RDP90-00806R000100070001-2