Neither Pure Nor Simple: The AFL-CIO & LA
UnpublishedMay/June
1988
Volume:
22
Number:
3
Report
"I'M SCOTFISH AND I'M SOUTHERN AND! like revenge," AFL-CIO president Lane Kirk- land told the labor federation's 1985 convention. "When the Bible says, 'The Lord says, Vengeance is mine' I think He just knew a good thing and was keep- ing it all to His own self.
Article
Hobart A. Spalding Jr.
THROUGHOUT ITS HISTORY AIFLD HAS been bedeviled by accusations of CIA involve- ment. The Institute's first director, Serafino Romualdi (1962-65) worked for the OSS during World War II; in the 1960s the Institute received grants from founda- tions later revealed to be CIA conduits; and ex-CIA agent Philip Agee maintains that a "CIA case officer is undercover in almost every AIFLD office abroad.
Hobart A. Spalding Jr.
AIFLD CLAIMS TO HAVE TRAINED OVER half a million Latin American and Caribbean un- ionists since 1962. Of these more than 4,000 attended select study courses at the George Meany Labor Center in Silver Spring, Maryland and over 200 attended univer- sities in the United States.
Sarah H. Beckjord
According to the Lawyers' Com- mittee for Human Rights and Ameri- cas Watch, there were more political killings in Colombia last year than in the rest of the Western Hemisphere combined. Violence has grown beyond dnig wars and politics to take on a dynamic of its own.
Marketing the Good Guys "We are the good guys, but it's like marketing. We have to keep telling it to the world which is always a changing picture, always successive generations who haven't heard about how we are the good guys.
Jan Knippers Black
Imagine the president of a poor country throwing a Christmas party, inviting all the little urchins to the presidential palace, and then placing the military and police in charge of distributing the gifts. That is precisely what Dominican president Joaquin Balaguer did, although as in most Latin countries it was the Three Kings, not Santa Claus, who arrived Jan Knippers Black, who teaches at the University of New Mexico, has au- thored, edited or co-authored more than two dozen books on Latin Ameri- ca and U.
Tunnel Vision: Labor, the World Economy, and Central America by Daniel Cantor and Juliet Schor. PACCAISouth End Press, 1987, 87 pp.
Darrell Levi
When Jamaica's elections are held in the coming months, Michael Man- ley, the controversial and outspoken former prime minister, will probably be elected over incumbent Edward Seaga, the Reagan Administration's point man in the Caribbean. Elections are due no later than March 1989 and might occur much earlier.
MF
Freedom of the Press EARLY ON ThE MORNING OF JUNE 10, THE offices of Guatemala's weekly La Epoca were firebombed. Twenty armed men carried off files and equipment before destroying the place.
Jack Clark
ONE EXPLANATION FOR THE OBSESSIVE anticommunism of AFL-CIO foreign policy is the unusual congregation of ex-leftists in its Depart- ment of International Affairs (DIA). For more than three decades, foreign affairs at the AFL and then the merged AFL-CIO was dominated by former Com- munist Party leader Jay L.
Hobart A. Spalding Jr.
LAST JANUARY, JESSE FRIEDMAN OF THE AFL-CIO'S American Institute for Free Labor De- velopment (AIFLD) addressed the executive board of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers' Union (ACTWU). Friedman had been invited to ex- plain the Institute's activities in Latin America after some union members accused it of being a tool of the Reagan Administration.