LABOR ACTIVISTS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000403560008-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 27, 2012
• Sequence Number: 8
• Publication Date: December 31, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403560008-9
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ARTICLE APPEARED
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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 WALL 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 March-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 98% of AIFLD's 1985
financing.
Today AIF'LD, 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 the
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 union 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 heat
times been rumored to have links with the
Central Intelligence Agency. Several for-
mer CIA agents have said they worked
with it In the But most outs(e 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
AIFLD.
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-
Continued
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403560008-9
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403560008-9
zens' group that tries to rally popular sup-
port for U.S. aid to the anti-Sandinista
"contra" guerrillas-by, for instance,
sponsoring speaking tours in the U.S. by
leading contras.
AIFLD also is the major financial
backer of a Nicaraguan union confedera-
tion known by its Spanish-language acro-
nym, CUS, which, with 20,000 members is
the largest non-Communist union in Nica-
ragua. AIFLD funnels about $60,000 a year
to the CUS from funds it receives from the
National Endowment for Democracy, a
quasi-governmental, congressionally fi-
nanced foundation whose board includes
AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland and
Utah's conservative Sen. Orrin G. Hatch.
Farming and Volleyball
The CUS spends the AIFLD money on a
variety of image-building activities. It
sponsors some 70 agricultural and fishing
projects, donates uniforms and equipment
to baseball and volleyball teams, and pro-
vides Miskito Indian refugees with eye-
glasses and transportation back to for-
merly lost homelands.
The union also won a new lease on life
for the El Triunfo farm cooperative, a CUS
affiliate, situated on a dry northwestern
plain near the base of smoking San Cristo-
bal volcano. Six months ago a Sandinista-
linked farmers' group ordered the coopera-
tive to either disaffiliate from the CUS or
give up its rights to the only water well in
the area. The CUS brought an AFL-CIO
delegation to the site, and the American
unionists donated $600 on the spot to begin
drilling a new well for insurance. Today,
the cooperative is prospering and is still
affiliated with the CUS.
Despite all that, the CUS opposes U.S.
aid to the contras as counterproductive. It
fears that support by some AFL-CIO and
AIFLD officials of Reagan administration
policies will jeopardize its position in Nica-
ragua.
Success Story
Neighboring Honduras is an AIFLD suc-
cess story. Between 1975 and 1983, a time
when leftist unionists were rising up all
across Central America, the Honduran
Communist Party tried to wrench control
of more than a dozen key unions from cen-
trists. But AIFLD engineered moderate
victories by planning and financing expen-
sive and sophisticated anti-Communist
campaigns among the unions' member-
ships.
"If the AFL-CIO hadn't come here, our
labor movement would be Communist,"
says Andres Victor Artiles, the secretary-
general of the moderate Confederation of
Honduran Workers.
Radicals in 1984 took aim at the Central
Federation of Free Trade Unions, an um-
brella group including hospital, communi-
cations and hotel workers. As the federa-
tion's secretary-general and treasurer pre-
pared to link the group with the Marxist-
led Unity Federation of Honduran
Workers, AIFLD moved to reinforce union
moderates with money for seminars,
where union members were told of the
dangers of communism and encouraged to
pay their dues so that they could vote. The
left lost control in an election.
Union radicals now are organizing
again, particularly in public-sector unions,
and U.S. and Honduran government offi-
cials worry that AIFLD isn't anticipating
future tests. Hector Lara, the chief of staff
of the Honduran Labor Ministry, argues
that "AIFLD waits for problems before
acting."
Criticism in El Salvador
Complaints about AIFLD performance
in Honduras, however, are benign com-
pared with criticisms leveled at the organi-
zation in El Salvador. AIFLD is at the cen-
ter of a conflict here that pits former mod-
erate union allies friendly to President
Jose Napoleon Duarte against one an-
other.
The crisis began in 1984 amid com-
plaints by several top union activists that
Mr. Duarte wasn't working hard enough
for a negotiated settlement to the war.
Worried that the moderate labor sector
was becoming bogged down in politics,
AIFLD's then-director for El Salvador,
Bernard Packer, started the Democratic
Workers Confederation, a bread-and-but-
ter, hands-off-politics organization that he
hoped would include most moderate un-
ions.
Instead of making things better, the
move made them far worse by creating
disunity. Many moderate unions wouldn't
join the new group. AIFLD cut off their fi-
nancing, then went ahead with its plans-
with Mr. Packer himself swearing in Dem-
ocratic Workers Confederation officials.
Last March, Mr. Packer was transferred
out of the country, which partly calmed the
brouhaha. At the same time, AIFLD prom-
ised to grant the recalcitrant unions $150,-
000 to campaign for Christian Democratic
congressional candidates if they would join
the new federation. They still wouldn't
budge. Moderate labor remains divided;
meanwhile, Marxist-led unions are on the
rise.
Mr. Packer says criticism of his perfor-
mance is "sour grapes." He says he swore
in the Salvadoran union officials because
"in El Salvador, it's good for your health
to have an American connection."
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403560008-9