HANDS OFF VENEZUELA: No Faustian Bargain
Event by Hands off Venezuela San Francisco, CA 7/15/05
Fred Hirsch, 831/475-4192 <fredsam (at) cruzio.com>

Brothers, Sisters and Friends,

Congratulations on the establishment of Hands Off Venezuela. The urgency for solidarity with the people of Venezuela demands an ongoing organization which can bring people together, coordinate events and distribute information.

Venezuela’s position today is very similar to that of Chile in 1972. Then, progressives the world over focused their hopes on Chile, a nation following a democratic course which challenged imperialism. The program of the Unidad Popular, the coalition which empowered the government of Salvador Allende was, essentially, class conscious, nationwide community organization. Its example and potential threatened, not only U.S. investments in Chile, but U.S. economic and political domination in Latin America. Richard Nixon corralled his covert intelligence apparatus and drowned Chile’s vitality in a bloody coup. The Pinochet coup was aided, abetted and enabled by the AFL-CIO. In his last words, Salvador Allende spoke of the “treason” of the leaders of “gremios,” unions of professionals, subsidized and supported by the AFL-CIO. In 1975 Hortencia Allende identified Robert O’Neill, the AFL-CIO’s chief in-country operative, as the “number one” intelligence agent in Chile. The Pinochet coup could not have happened without the destabilizing role of the AFL-CIO. Over three thousand militants, largely trade unionists were tortured, killed and disappeared.

Chile was no exception. Similar AFL-CIO foreign operations were undertaken against many governments and/or labor movements that have challenged the interests and dominance of Corporate America. AFL-CIO operatives helped overthrow democratically elected governments in Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964) and Chile (1973). They subverted and repressed progressive movements in countries such as Guyana (1964), Dominican Republic (1965), El Salvador (1980s) and South Africa (prior to 1986), Nicaragua, (1980s & early ‘90s). In the Philippines, Korea, Indonesia and South Africa they backed labor movements which supported dictatorships. The AFL-CIO has refused to “clear the air” with an honest accounting of any of these events.

Today, as we saw in Chile, we see in Venezuela a nationwide movement to empower the people through participatory democracy, the engine of national development at a grassroots community organizing level. We see a defiant fist raised against “neoliberalism,” today’s term for corporate driven imperialism. In Venezuela today, democracy is a robustly muscular force that shouts out fro m the heart of the people. That force was palpable,surging in the crowds of voters who waited on lines, some overnight and into the next day, to vote “No!” to defeat last year’s Referendum to oust President Hugo Chavez Frias and to support their Bolivarian Revolution. With critical oil reserves in the balance, the example of Iraq, and with Bush and his junkyard dog neocons in power, the stakes and the danger are much higher than in Chile in 1973.

As in Chile, and in most Washington interventions, a main strategy is to penetrate the labor movement, to divide it where possible and to use it to win state power for a reliable elite. We hardly ever hear the term “class consciousness” used in the AFL-CIO. With Cold War abuse and red baiting the term was tarnished, and may remain tarnished for many years in the U.S. vernacular. It is, however a common term in Venezuela, and among Latin American trade unionists generally. In Colombia thousands of trade union leaders and activists have been murdered. When you ask union leaders why the paramilitary forces target trade unionists, their most common answer is something like: “Because we are the organized working class. The transnational corporations and elites know that when we get it together we can make a new society. We can build a better future where there will be no special privilege for the rich. They kill us to decapitate the future.”

The truth of such understanding is that the wealthy elites who control so many governments have an acute class consciousness. They will violate any moral boundaries to maintain control. They share that class consciousness - from diametrically opposed interests - with the trade unionists of Colombia, of Venezuela, and of much of the world. Unfortunately, with almost a century of mostly business unionism with anti-communism more important than winning for workers, and a pervasive corporate culture, the AFL-CIO has been starved of the rich food for thought and action which such class consciousness would provide.

In that context, it should be no surprise that forty three years ago top leaders of the AFL-CIO sat down with top leaders of the corporate elite to form the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD.) Their aim was to destroy class conscious unions and support business unionism in Latin America, paralleling U.S. government efforts to make Latin America safe for transnational corporations. With the wealth of Venezuelan resources, the corporate CEOs and their AFL-CIO counterparts gave the corrupt leaders of the CTV (the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers) a seat at the table and drew on government funds for their operations. The CTV was taken on as a junior partner. That may be when the corrupt officials of the CTV learned to sit in the laps of the bosses where, for forty plus years the CTV was nourished and nurtured with our tax millions, from the deep pockets of the State Department, the CIA and assorted other agencies.

John Sweeney was elected AFL-CIO President in 1995, he dissolved AIFLD in Latin America, and the other three regional labor institutes, AAFLI in Asia, AALC in Africa, and FTUI in Europe. Sweeney replaced them with a centralized operation, ACILS, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (called the Solidarity Center.) ACILS operates in forty countries, federally funded mostly through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED,) and financed to the tune of $32 million In 2003. To give you an idea what that figure means - on December 1, 2003 the AFL-CIO budgeted $35 million for member mobilization and political action to beat George W. Bush. It was, perhaps, the biggest nationwide campaign in AFL-CIO history. BUSINESS WEEK estimated the AFL-CIO budget at $100 million in 2001. ACILS gets federal money, equivalent to about one third of that AFL-CIO budget and passes it off for use and distribution as union “solidarity.” If money laundering were as much of a legal crime as it is an amoral sleight of hand, the top leaders of the AFL-CIO would have been behind bars years ago.

ACILS does some good things with the multi-million dollar sop from the Bush administration, but “he who pays the piper calls the tune.” In Venezuela the tune they played promoted collusion with the bosses and treason.

The facts as stated by my union, and the labor councils of San Jose, Monterey-Santa Cruz and San Francisco are the following:

“ACILS received a 2002 grant of $116,001, awarded by the NED under ‘theauthority contained in P.L. 98-164, as amended ...and Grant No. S-L MAOM-02-H-0054 between the United States Department of State and the National Endowment for Democracy..,’ part of $703,927 that had been granted by NED to ACILS between 1997 and 2002 for ACILS’ work in Venezuela. During 2001 NED granted $154,377 to ACILS as part of a massive increase in NED funding that year to $877,000 for activities which coincide directly with the efforts of the Bush administration leading toward the April 11, 2002 coup in oil rich Venezuela”

We accuse that: “according to ACILS’ VENEZUELA: QUARTERLY REPORT 2001-045 January to March 2002, ‘The CTV and FEDECAMARAS (Venezuela’s Federation of Chambers of Commerce)...held a national conference on March 5...to identify common objectives as well as areas of cooperation ...the culminating event of some two months of meetings and planning...during which the two organizations announced a ‘national accord’...The joint action further established the CTV and FEDECAMARAS as the flagship organizations leadingthe growing opposition to the Chavez government’” - THIRTY SIX DAYS PRIOR TO THE APRIL 11, 2002 COUP!

We are outraged at ACILS’ boasting that they “helped to ‘support the event in planning stages, organizing the initial meetings with...FEDECAMARAS... Solidarity Center (ACILS) provided assistance for the five regional preparatory meetings...held between January 22nd and March 1st...The March 5 national conference was financed primarily by counterpart funds,’” ACILS money. Our unions question why “ACILS...is operating...as part of the Bush administration’s drive for regime change in Venezuela, a replay of the Nixon administration’s bloody collusion in crimes in Chile over 30 years ago.”

But for them, enough is never enough. Their history shows that they will attempt to penetrate, poison and destabilize Venezuela until they can, one day, put its resources back into the claws of the oligarchs and transnational corporations. Witness 45 years of the same in Cuba! The Venezuelan workers and the solidarity movement have to be in this for the long haul.

When, after the 2002 coup the people returned Chavez to power, the CTV facilitated the boss sabotage and lockout of the oil industry. When the workers overcame that shameful treason, the Washington neocons, FEDECAMARAS and CTV at their side, financed and promoted the Referendum against Chavez. Beaten back by the democratic and overwhelming power of the people, they now twist the screw of destabilization with a fraudulent complaint to the International Labor Organization of the “denial” of trade union rights.

If their complaint is recognized, the ILO will send a Commission of Inquiry to Venezuela, designed, with the help of the monopoly media, to smear the Bolivarian Revolution and undermine the work of the robust, new National Workers’ Union (UNT). It is one more step to destabilize and stunt the growth of the power of the workers and people, and to isolate PresidentChavez, the UNT, and the nation from friends and allies.

The FEDECAMARAS-CTV Complaint was aired at the ILO in March and was postponed to its Administrative Council in November. According to people with the UNT, Stan Gacek, AFL-CIO International Affairs representative, lobbied for a deal to support a long sought Commission of Inquiry to Colombia, where trade unionists are murdered with impunity, in return for support of a Commission of Inquiry to Venezuela. We are told that, smelling a cynical CIA move, the UNT folks would not meet with Gacek. Faust couldn't have beenoffered a better bargain. Gacek, by the way told me and fifty others that ACILS spent only $20,000 on CTV activities in the period prior to the coup - to support CTV democratization. He has never said where the rest of the money went. $20,000???? The NED reports that over $700,000 went to the Solidarity Center for work with CTV alone!

The issue came to the floor at the ILO Commission on Norms on June 10. There, at the urging of the U.S. Employers’ Representative, Edward E. Potter, the Chair shut down Marcela Maspero, spokesperson for the UNT while she described the absolute freedom of workers in Venezuela to organize and bargain collectively. Potter went into a long argument defending the FEDECAMARAS/CTV complaint for supposed violation of labor rights. Central to their complaint is the fact that Carlos Ortega of the CTV along with Albis Munoz and Carlos Fernandez of FEDECAMARAS are under restrictions and review by the Venezuelan legal system, not for anything to do with labor rights or ILO norms, but for actions taken against the Constitution during the coup d'etat in April 2002. Their problems stem from matters of treason involving the deaths of 18 people.

Edward E.Potter’s defense of trade union rights is glaring hypocrisy. Potter speaks, not only for the U.S. Council for International Business, he is Director of Global Labor Relations for Coca-Cola, a company accused of conspiring with Colombian death squads in the murder of nine union leaders in Coca-Cola plants. Do you find this hard to believe? You should!

The AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center, through Stan Gacek, finds unity and common ground in a common effort with Corporate America’s top international spokesman, Coca Cola’s global anti-union henchman, in scheming against the majority unions and the people of Venezuela. The multiple union victims of Coca-Cola in Colombia suffer death squad labor relations. Is there something wrong with this picture? You damnbetcha there is!

We mean to get the AFL-CIO off the government dole. We have a resolution, passed unanimously last July by the California Labor Federation which could do the job. The resolution titled “Build Unity and Trust Among Workers Worldwide” demands that the Federation comes clean, country by country, about all facets of its past and present operations. The resolution also demands that the AFL-CIO accept government funds only with “extreme caution” and “only to pursue the goals of honest international labor solidarity...and renounce any ...tie that would make us paid agents of the United States government or the forces of of corporate economic globalization”

The movement for solidarity with the people of Venezuela is part of an ongoing, long term struggle. It won’t be won tomorrow, but it will never be won if it is not continually fought.

As workers and union people, we do our damndest to stop AFL-CIO intervention abroad, not just in Venezuela, but wherever it serves corporate American Imperialism. This is our responsibility - our fight for as long as it takes. The struggle must go on!

Hands off Venezuela!
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