El Golpe

US Labor, the CIA, and the Coup at Ford in Mexico

Rob McKenzie, Patrick Dunne

• Editorial: Pluto Press
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780745345642
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia messicana

'Early in my research, a friend with excellent knowledge of the United Auto Workers internal operations told me, "Don't give up. They are hiding something"…'

It's 1990, and US labour is being outsourced to Mexico. Rumours of a violent confrontation at the Mexican Ford Assembly plant on January 8 reach the United Auto Workers (UAW) union in the US: nine employees had been shot by a group of drunken thugs and gangsters, in an act of political repression which changed the course of Mexican and US workers' rights forever.

Rob McKenzie was working at the Ford Twin Cities Assembly plant in Minnesota when he heard of the attack. He didn't believe the official story, and began a years-long investigation to uncover the truth. His findings took him further than he expected – all the way to the doors of the CIA.

Virtually unknown outside of Mexico, the full story of 'El Golpe', or 'The Coup', is a dark tale of political intrigue that still resonates today.

PART I

U.S. Labor’s Cold War in Latin America

1

The Birth of AIFLD and the Coup in British Guiana

As Kirkland has always done, and as I would always do and George Meany, vigorously deny that the CIA ever had anything to do with the AIFLD. I would be willing to swear on a Bible, and I’m a practicing Catholic, that the CIA did not finance the AIFLD. But, that doesn’t do any good because even if they did, I would have to deny it.

William Doherty Jr., 1996

The American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) was incorporated as a non-profit organization in late 1961. Created as an immediate response to the success of the Cuban revolution, it was the product of over a decade of prior collaboration between the CIA and the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) in the Cold War struggle.¹

As the ultimate defeat of Nazi Germany became evident in the final months of World War II, the Soviet Union and the U.S. began planning for a post-war confrontation. The devastation caused by the war and the pre-eminent role of communists and labor militants in the anti-Nazi resistance had helped put leftists in a strong position in post-war European unions. As early as 1944, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), calculated that it would have to make significant efforts in foreign labor unions to meet the communist challenge. Serafino Romualdi, who later would become the first executive director of AIFLD, was assigned as an OSS Special Agent with the rank of Major, to work against the communists in labor unions in the liberated areas of Italy in 1944.²

In 1920, as a young man of 20, Romualdi joined the Italian Socialist Party in his native province of Perugia. Two months later, fascist squads from nearby Tuscany overran the region and began looking for socialist leaders. Romualdi fled, eventually landing in New York City in 1922. He got a job with an anti-fascist Italian-language newspaper associated with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), eventually joining the editorial staff in 1933. With the entry of the U.S. into World War II in 1941, Romualdi began organizing anti-fascist groups among Italian communities in South America. In 1945, with the support of ILGWU President David Dubinsky, Romualdi was granted an earlier request to establish a Latin American operation under an American Federation of Labour (AFL)-affiliated organization.³ After the end of the war, he would spend the rest of his career working with U.S. intelligence in Latin America.⁴

In 1944, the AFL also began a campaign against communist influence in foreign trade unions. At a convention that year, the AFL passed a resolution, drafted by Jay Lovestone, creating the Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC). Nominally independent from the AFL, it directed the foreign policy of the AFL throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Its members included George Meany, David Dubinsky, Mathew Woll, Irving Brown, and Jay Lovestone.⁵ Lovestone would be the executive director of the FTUC and become the international affairs director of the AFL-CIO in 1963. The FTUC gave money to anti-communist unions and anti-communist political forces. Starting in 1948, it received most of the funds for doing this from the CIA or its component, the Office of Policy Coordination.⁶ A proposed contract between the CIA and the FTUC clarifying their alliance and goals was found in the Hoover Institution Library Archives.⁷

With the Allied victory, the U.S. began the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe. The Soviet Union and the communist-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) opposed the plan. The American Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) ceded from the WFTU in protest, and, along with the AFL, which had never joined the WFTU, they helped initiate the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) in 1949.⁸ One of the organizers of the ICFTU was William C. Doherty Sr. Doherty had close links to the CIA and his son, William C. Doherty Jr., would be intimately connected with the conception, life, and ultimate end of AIFLD.

Doherty Sr.’s career fighting communism began at a young age. He joined the army in 1919 and was part of the U.S. Army’s Expeditionary Force sent to Russia to support the White movement, a loose coalition of anti-communist forces who opposed the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War (1917–22). He spent three years in Vladivostok, Russia, and became a chief communications officer. On returning to the U.S., he got a job with the U.S. Postal Service and became the president of his local union. In 1941, he was elected president of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC). In 1941, Doherty Sr. also became the youngest person to be elected as vice-president of the national AFL-CIO. At the end of World War II, General Lucius B. Clay chose him to help the trade union movement re-establish itself in the Allied controlled areas of West Germany.⁹ In addition to his work with the NALC and the ICFTU, Doherty Sr. was also involved in the post-war revival of the Postal, Telephone and Telegraph International (PTTI), an International Trade Secretariat (ITS).¹⁰ The International Trade Secretariats were created around the turn of the century, but following World War II they became tiny and were quickly dominated by American affiliates, due to their dependence on CIA finances.¹¹ In 1962, Doherty Sr. was appointed ambassador to Jamaica, the first trade union leader selected for an ambassadorship.¹²

Much of what we know about the senior Doherty’s CIA links comes via former CIA agents Paul Sakwa and Tom Braden, who remember Doherty Sr. parceling out cash to foreign union leaders.¹³ The CIA hired Sakwa in 1952, and he served until 1962. He was sent to Paris to work in the French branch as a case officer. According to Sakwa, the CIA paid Doherty Sr.’s expenses.

Tom Braden was an assistant to Agency Director Allen Dulles and vigorously defended CIA activities after his retirement. In a phone interview conducted for Jonathan Kwitny’s 1984 book Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World, Doherty Sr. admitted to working with Braden “very closely.” To the suggestion that he had funneled CIA money to foreign unions, he would only say he had “never been on a CIA payroll” or “I never supplied money to anybody except on behalf of the organization I represented.”¹⁴

These earlier government-supported, anti-communist activities on the part of labor organizations would soon lead directly to the establishment of AIFLD. Perhaps the most important player in this episode was Joseph A. Beirne, President of the Communications Workers of America (CWA). According to AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, “The most significant thing, as I recall, about Beirne was his role in the creation of the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD). I think that Joe was the moving party in that.”¹⁵

Serafino Romualdi claimed that the idea for the Institute came to Beirne in somewhat of an epiphany while flying over the Andes mountains on the western side of South America.¹⁶ According to Romualdi, Beirne was contemplating the poverty of the region and decided that what these people needed to do was change their outlook and view of the world. Upon his return, Beirne inaugurated a training program for Latin American labor leaders, an effort for which he would rely on the assistance of a fellow Irish Catholic, William C. Doherty Jr.

In April 1958, Beirne arranged to have Doherty Jr. tour Latin America with Romualdi’s deputy at the AFL-CIO, Andrew McLellan. McLellan was working at the Federation’s International Affairs Department. The trip’s goal was to select a group of anti-communist labor leaders who would undergo on-site training at a new PTTI school in Washington, DC.¹⁷ Beirne brought 16 of these Latin American communications workers to the nearby CWA Training Center in Front Royal, Virginia, for a three-month stay in 1959.

William Doherty Jr. worked for the PTTI and supervised Beirne’s 1959 training program.¹⁸ On completion of the training course, the Latin American workers would return home and have their salaries paid for nine months while they organized anti-communist unions and did administrative work for those organizations.¹⁹ When Beirne’s Latin American communications workers went home, their wages were paid by the PTTI, according to Romualdi.²⁰ In a 1996 interview, William Doherty Jr. said that this funding came from the International Cooperation Agency (ICA), a forerunner of the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID).²¹ The PTTI’s member unions included Beirne’s communications workers as well as the letter carriers of the NALC, of which William C. Doherty Sr. was president.²² This training model would become the core activity of AIFLD in the coming decades.²³ (See Appendix.)

Beirne went on to play his critical role in the formation and development of AIFLD. In April 1961, he approached the National Institute of Labor Education (NILE), a small non-profit, with a one-page proposal to train around 250 trade union officers from Latin America. The training content would include “regular tool subjects, plus consideration for functioning of a free society and methods of dealing with Communist efforts to capture control of unions.” On May 12, 1961, AFL-CIO President George Meany convened a “Policy Design Committee,” with the idea of growing this original concept into a program that would encompass all of Latin America.²⁴ In July 1961, NILE sent Beirne’s concept to the University of Chicago’s labor education department, the University Research and Education Project (UREP), to develop an organization that could fulfill the plan.²⁵

That year, the University of Chicago’s UREP was contracted to develop an organizational blueprint for an institute that would train Latin American labor leaders. The AFL-CIO provided $20,000 for this. That model organization, which became known as the American Institute for Free Labor Development, would include business leaders as well as union officials. The UREP director was John McCollum, a young sociologist from the University of Chicago. McCollum was certain he would be the director of the new organization.²⁶

Conflict arose early in the formative period of AIFLD. The parties hadn’t clearly defined the role of government in the new organization, and Professor McCollum explained that he preferred a program that was “not dominated by the government.” The question of government participation was still unresolved when McCollum presented his formal proposal to the AFL-CIO policy committee in September. The only major part of McCollum’s proposal, which excluded the Federation’s typical anti-communist, pro-free-enterprise rhetoric, that made it through Meany’s Design Policy Committee was the new organization’s name: “The American Institute for Free Labor Development.”²⁷ McCollum and Beirne quickly got into another dispute about the size and scope of the initial AIFLD training program. McCollum was struggling to find enough foundation money to pay for the 25 trainees he envisioned. The much larger number of students Beirne wanted would require substantial government funds. The issue became a pretext for Beirne and Meany to force McCollum out. Beirne said McCollum’s resignation would be a “sound alternative” and there was “a very sharp difference between you and me.” In November 1961, McCollum finally got the message and offered his resignation to Meany, which was accepted in January 1962.²⁸ But the reality of his departure, according to AIFLD donors in the Rockefeller family, was that McCollum “did not resign but got fired— ‘out and out fired’—by George Meany.”²⁹

In his autobiography, Romualdi wrote that McCollum resigned for “personal reasons.” Romualdi recounts that he was then offered the AIFLD director job by George Weaver, Assistant Secretary of Labor for International Labor Affairs...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Photographs
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Prologue
• Part I U.S. Labor’s Cold War in Latin America
• Part II El Golpe
• Part III Tracking The Assassins
• Conclusion: Putting Together the Pieces of the Puzzle
• Appendix: On the Home “Front”
• Photographs
• Notes
• Index