[Shadow_Group] National Endowment for Death Squads? The AFL-CIO and the NED

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National Endowment for Death Squads? The AFL-CIO and the NED

Published: Thursday, December 30, 2004Bylined to:
http://VHeadline.com Reporters

National Endowment for Death Squads? The AFL-CIO and the NED
US journalist Jon Quaccia writes: Few 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 US 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.
With these scandals fresh in the public's mind, the Reagan 
Administration created the National Endowment for Democracy in 1983 to 
take care of its unfinished business. As an NED founder, Allen 
Weinstein, stated in 1991, "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 
25 years ago by the CIA."
Some of the NED's political accomplishments include the successful 
manipulation of elections in Nicaragua in 1990 and Mongolia in 1996, 
and the overthrow of democratically elected candidates in Bulgaria in 
1990 and Albania in 1991-2. By indirectly contributing "soft money" to 
the campaigns of candidates friendly to U.S. business, the NED is able 
to successfully buy elections in poor countries with only a few hundred 
thousand dollars.

With a 2004 budget of $40 million, and a 2005 budget of $80 million 
requested by President Bush, the NED will be capable of buying quite a 
few elections in the coming years.
>From 1983 to 1994, the NED was funded exclusively by congress, at which 
point it began accepting private donations. These sources include 
several oil companies and defense contractors-Chevron, Exxon Mobil, 
Texaco and Enron among its 2001 contributors. Its funding is a very 
controversial subject, and its opponents frequently cite the inherent 
contradiction of a publicly funded organization charged with executing 
foreign policy, while remaining exempt from nearly all political and 
administrative controls.
Octopus Arms: The NED works through multiple constituencies: The 
International Republican Institute, The National Democratic Institute 
for International Affairs, the Center for International Private 
Enterprise, the Free Trade Union Institute, and American Center for 
International Labor Solidarity (ACILS), better known as the Solidarity 
Center. Among its strongest U.S. supporters is the Heritage Foundation, 
a right wing think tank which has been very influential in policy 
issues. Each constituent is given almost five million dollars, which 
they issue as grants to organizations or political parties all over the 
world. The remainder of the NED's budget is also given out as grants. 
In her study of the NED, Barbara Conry, associate policy analyst for 
the free-market advocacy CATO Institute, states: "NED, which has a 
history of corruption and financial mismanagement, is superfluous as 
best and often destructive. Through the Endowment, the American 
taxpayer has paid for special-interest groups to harass the duly 
elected governments of friendly countries, interfere in foreign 
elections, and foster the corruption of democratic movements..."

The National Endowment for Democracy and its constituents call their 
actions "supporting democracy," but the governments and movements they 
target know them as "destabilization."
One Empire, one development model: US business could not destabilize or 
overthrow as many foreign governments as it does without the cover and 
aid of conservative, "old-guard" unions and labor groups who disorient, 
counter, and generally undermine radical unions and militant labor 
leaders. Union leaders, in turn, couldn't enjoy six figure salaries 
without an approval of capitalism, without seeing labor and business 
along with government as "partners" in political and economic 
development.
On September 11, 1973, Chilean President Salvador Allende, along with 
thousands of Chilean workers, students and political activists were 
killed in a particularly bloody military coup that ended a brief 
experiment in democratic socialism. It was the culmination of a 
campaign by the Nixon Administration, working covertly with ITT, 
Kennecott Cooper, and other US multinational corporations to destroy 
the Chilean economy and punish Allende for nationalizing industries in 
which US corporations held major stakes. The goal, in Nixon's 
unforgettable words, was to "make the economy scream."

While no direct link exists between the AIFLD and the CIA's actions in 
Chile, the AIFLD's program was synchronized closely with the CIA's plan 
to create social unrest by sowing divisions within the labor movement 
and financing middle-class and professional organizations leading the 
opposition to Allende's populist program.
Unable to divide and weaken Chile's largest labor federation, the 
one-million-member, communist led, Central Unica de Trabajadores (CUT), 
the AIFLD channeled millions of dollars into right-wing unions and 
political parties that opposed CUT and Allende's socialist agenda as a 
whole. In the fall of 1973, widespread social unrest and a paralyzed 
economy provided the pretext for General Pinochet's violent coup, and 
justification for his seventeen-year dictatorship. Pinochet saw all 
unions, not just leftist, as the enemy, and one of his first acts after 
seizing power was to outlaw CUT. In the months that followed September 
11th, hundreds of trade unionists, including some who had worked with 
AIFLD, were rounded up, many never to be heard from again.
>From 1971 until the mid-eighties, the AFL-CIO, despite its pledge never 
to support government controlled unions, financed and supported the 
Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU), with full knowledge of the 
government's penetration. A government puppet, the FKTU's activities 
were restricted by law, leaving it no real power. In the late 
seventies, U.S. religious and human rights organizations began calling 
attention to the appalling treatment of South Korean workers. They were 
particularly concerned with the brutality directed at young women 
laborers in the textile and garment industry, and the lack of response 
by the FKTU.
Rather than denouncing the repression in South Korea, or severing its 
ties with the FKTU, the AFL-CIO tried to whitewash the violence, 
blaming it on "differing ethnic standards of Koreans," amongst other 
things. When Korean industrial workers finally organized the Korean 
Confederation of Trade Unions as an alternative to the FKTU, it wasn't 
officially recognized by the AFL-CIO until 1997. Just recently, pilots 
represented by KCTU protested its government's decision to deploy 3,000 
troops to Iraq by refusing to transport any troops or equipment there, 
and engaged in street demonstrations against the war.
ACILS: Reforming Or Restructuring? In 1995, John Sweeney was elected 
AFL-CIO president with the support of a broad coalition of union 
leaders who broke with the former president, Lane Kirkland, over 
foreign policy. In particular, they disagreed with the AIFLD's support 
for US policy in Central America and hoped to get rid of what they 
believed was a cold war relic, a pro-corporate anti-communist extension 
of the McCarthyism still dominating US foreign policy.
Two years after taking office, Sweeney reorganized the four labor 
foreign policy institutes into a single organization, the American 
Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS), better known as the 
Solidarity Center. Although the Solidarity Center has retained a few 
staff members from its predecessor labor institutes, it claims to 
represent a fresh start at building a stronger labor movement abroad by 
focusing on solidarity rather than intervention. Some of the Solidarity 
Center's goals in the past six years include facilitating an organizing 
campaign in Honduras that led to a viable maquila union in the free 
trade zone, helping set the stage for a labor law reform campaign in 
Ecuador by working with Bonita banana workers, and playing a crucial 
role in convincing a GAP supplier to finance the reopening of a plant 
shut down due to union activity.
While many union leaders are hopeful about the reforms in U.S. labor's 
foreign policy, as well as its accomplishments to date, a great deal of 
skepticism remains. Much of this skepticism revolves around the 
Solidarity Center's funding; three quarters of its $18 million budget 
still comes from government sources. It receives annual grants from the 
State Department, the Agency for International Development, the Labor 
Department, and the NED.

Requests for a complete list of donors, including private foundations, 
and the amount of their contributions have been repeatedly denied by 
the AFL-CIO. While Congress no longer dictates the Center's policies, a 
lack of independent funding makes a truly autonomous global labor 
movement impossible.
Meddling in Venezuela: Critics also point to the Solidarity Center's 
recent operations in Venezuela, which they feel are dangerously 
reminiscent of the AIFLD's actions in Chile. In Venezuela, the world's 
fifth largest oil producer, the Solidarity Center funds a corrupt union 
amalgam, the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV). CTV organizes 
destabilizing strikes and works with oil company management, the 
Catholic Church, and right-wing military officers to create opposition 
to the populist elected president Hugo Chavez. How the Center's 
largest, US$150,000 contribution to the CTV was spent is unclear. Stan 
Gacek, assistant director for the AFL-CIO's International Affairs 
Department, says it was for internal union elections, but the CTV's 
Institute director, Jesus Urbieta, says the money was used for 
conducting training courses. In 2001 the Solidarity Center invited CTV 
leader Carlos Ortega to Washington, to discuss strategies to oust 
Chavez with US government officials and representatives of the US State 
Department.
A series of widespread strikes orchestrated by the CTV paved the way 
for an insurrection on April 11th, 2002, that killed over a dozen 
citizens and injured hundreds more. Pedro Carmona, a pro-US 
businessman, was selected to run the country. He immediately dissolved 
the National Assembly, but only two days later Chavez was swept back 
into power by the military and a flood of support from working people 
and the poor, much to the shame of the Solidarity Center, the US State 
Department and the White House.

Not surprisingly, the NED tripled its annual Venezuela budget to almost 
$900,000 in the weeks and months leading up to the attempted coup.
While the CTV was disbanded after the attempted coup and replaced by 
the leftist Unione Nationale Trajabadores, Chavez's opposition hasn't 
given up. The NED is currently handing out grants totaling more than a 
million dollars to organizations it feels can be useful in getting rid 
of Chavez. From September 2002 to March 2004, the Endowment contributed 
$116,000 to the Solidarity Center every three months for this purpose.
Between September 2003 and September 2004, Sumate ... a Venezuelan 
company that worked to organize a referendum to recall President Chavez 
... was granted over US$50,000 from the NED. Sumate released a poll 
just before the vote claiming Chavez was sure to lose. To the chagrin 
of Sumate and the NED, Chavez won 59% of the vote.
Iraq and Beyond: On November 6, 2003, President Bush gave a speech 
commemorating the NED on its 20th anniversary, and placing it at the 
center of the "democratization" of Iraq. For the Bush Administration, 
the NED and the Solidarity Center, democratization is synonymous with 
privatization, as is evidenced in their attempts to hold the largest 
state liquidation sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union. A key 
strategic aim of US imperialism in the Middle East is to break state 
control over oil production and reserves and open them up to the direct 
control of US-based energy conglomerates. The first act of L. Paul 
Bremer, who led the US occupation of Iraq from May 2, 2003 until his 
early departure on June 28, 2004, was to fire 500,000 state workers 
including teachers, doctors, nurses, publishers and printers.
Next he opened Iraq's borders to unrestricted imports, declaring it 
"open for business." Enacting a radical set of laws unprecedented in 
their generosity to multinational corporations, Bremer allowed foreign 
companies to own 100 percent of Iraqi assets outside the natural 
resource sector, and to take all of these profits out of the country 
tax free with no obligation to reinvest in Iraq.

The only remnant from Saddam Hussein's economic policy was-a law 
restricting trade unions and collective bargaining!
Rather than creating an economic boom, these policies instead fueled a 
resistance that has ultimately made reconstruction impossible. Labor 
relations reached a bloody peak under Bremer's occupation; faced with 
job loss, workers feared starvation, and managers in turn feared their 
workers, making privatization far more complicated than the Bush 
Administration anticipated.
Violent protests have kept investors out, and forced Bremer to abandon 
many of his central economic policies. Several state companies have 
been offered up for lease, and thousands of the state workers fired by 
Bremer have been rehired.
Nonetheless, the Bush administration's plans to "democratize" Iraq are 
still underway. In January, 2004, Bush requested to double the NED's 
Middle East budget, putting it at US$40 million. According to Abd 
al-Wahhab al Kabsi, the NED's program officer for the Middle East, the 
NED's involvement is "expanding and we expect it to continue to 
expand."

In the months before the Bush administration invaded Iraq, the AFL-CIO 
for the first time in its history openly challenged a US decision to go 
to war.
However, once the invasion began, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney 
shifted his antiwar stance, declaring that the federation would 
"support fully" the Bush administration's war goals. Within two days of 
Bush's request for an increased NED budget in the Middle East, Sweeney 
said that "training and other kinds of support from the international 
trade union movement should be encouraged" in Iraq.
Since then, he has applied for US$3-5 million in grants from the NED. 
The money will be used to counter independent labor organizing by 
leftist groups like Union of the Unemployed in Iraq (UUI), which has 
sponsored and supported strikes and demonstrations for jobs and against 
US occupation. The NED and Solidarity Center have chosen to support the 
General Federation of Trade Unions in Iraq, a discredited Ba'athist 
union formation sitting on the US appointed Iraqi Governing Council. 
According to the UUI, its history "is as gloomy and bloody as the 
history of the Ba'athist regime."
The Reform Movement: Given the Solidarity Center's actions in Venezuela 
and Iraq, many unionists are concerned about its true motives, and what 
it is doing around the world in its more covert operations. Over the 
past four years, labor councils and grassroots labor activists on the 
West Coast have been pressing AFL-CIO leadership to come clean about 
its past and set a more honorable course for the future by opening its 
archives, which include material from the Reagan era that remains 
off-limits to researchers. They also wish to create a truth commission 
to analyze and publicize the contents.
Resolutions passed in 2000 by the San Francisco and South Bay labor 
councils in California, and in 2001 by the Washington State AFL-CIO, 
asked the federation to renounce what it did in Chile, the Philippines, 
and other places in the name of labor, and allow union members and 
independent researchers to make a full accounting of the past. In 2002 
the South bay AFL-CIO Labor Council submitted its "Clear the Air" 
resolution to the two million member (with over one sixth of the 
AFL-CIO's members) California Federation of Labor. The resolution was 
withdrawn in favor of a substitute resolution, submitted by the 
Federation leadership, which simply asked the AFL-CIO to meet with the 
California Federation and its affiliates to open a dialogue about its 
government-funded foreign affairs activities, both past and present, 
and to affirm a policy of genuine global solidarity in pursuit of 
economic and social justice.
It was clearly understood that if the meeting failed to resolve the 
issues, the leadership of the Federation would fall back to support the 
"Clear the Air" resolution. In March, 2004 the California Federation of 
Teachers unanimously passed a resolution at its annual convention 
calling for the AFL-CIO to accept no government funding for its work in 
Iraq and elsewhere, claiming this would be the first step in achieving 
true global solidarity. That resolution was submitted to the July 
13-14, 2004 Convention of the California Federation of Labor.

It took 15 months to organize the meeting on foreign policy called for 
in the resolution passed by the California Federation in 2002. Not 
satisfied by the October 2003 meeting, the Plumbers Local 393 and the 
Labor Councils of the South Bay, San Francisco and Monterey Bay passed 
a resolution for "Unity and Trust among Workers Worldwide," and 
submitted it to the California Federation of Labor 2004 convention.
The "Unity and Trust" resolution and the CFT resolution were combined 
by the convention's resolutions committee to become a more strongly 
worded version of the 2002 "Clear the Air" resolution. The new 
resolution, passed unanimously by the convention delegates, urges the 
AFL-CIO to "exercise extreme caution in seeking or accepting funding 
from the US government, its agencies and any other institutions which 
it funds such as the NED for its work in Iraq or elsewhere, and to 
accept these funds only to further the goals of honest international 
labor solidarity, not to pursue the policies of Corporate America and 
the United States government."
Fred Hirsch, vice president of Plumbers and Fitters Local 393 in San 
Jose, played an important role in getting both resolutions before the 
Federation. "We expect tremendous resistance from the AFL-CIO to having 
their power base removed, and being forced to seek more funds from 
their affiliates, rather than the government," says Hirsch. "This will 
also force them to be more accountable to their affiliates by giving 
them total freedom of information on their actions abroad."
Resisting Disclosure: Unfortunately, the AFL-CIO archives remain firmly 
closed. Under the archives rules, documents can only be released twenty 
years after their creation, which means that material about 
controversial AFL-CIO activities during the eighties, such as support 
for the Nicaraguan contras and cooperation with US-backed 
counterinsurgencies in El Salvador and the Philippines, remains 
classified. According to Michael Merill, director of the archives, 
there is no consistent policy on what to do when someone wants to open 
the books sooner.
Any request to shorten the twenty-year waiting period, he added, would 
have to be approved by the senior leadership of the AFL-CIO.
It is highly unlikely that this will occur without a great deal of 
pressure from the AFL-CIO's constituents. Since Sweeney and several 
members of his executive council were board members of the AIFLD and 
the other institutes, they are likely to be uncomfortable with an open 
record. This also applies to the Solidarity Center's current head, 
Harry Kamberis, a former US State Department employee who worked with 
the Asian American Free Labor Institute (AAFLI), the AIFLD counterpart 
for Asia, while the institutes were known to be in collusion with the 
CIA. His endeavors with AAFLI include donating six million dollars to a 
corrupt labor federation allied with right-wing death squads in the 
Philippines throughout the eighties. In order to put pressure on the 
AFL-CIO, it is important for resolutions like the "Unity and Trust" to 
be passed in locals, then moved to statewide labor federations, and 
eventually, national and international affiliates of the AFL-CIO.

While the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American 
Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), who 
passed anti-war resolutions at their national conventions in late June, 
are already having an impact on the AFL-CIO's executive council, it is 
unlikely to open the books or significantly change its policies without 
pressure from a larger portion of its affiliates.
"To counter corporate globalization, we need labor globalization," says 
Hirsch. "But we can't embark on a path of genuine solidarity, nor can 
labor unions overseas trust us, until we own up to the past and divorce 
ourselves from those actions and the government funding which made us a 
pawn of US foreign policy."
This article by Jon Quaccia was originally published at
http://Alia2.net






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