> Whether people like Chavez or not, the fact is undisputed that he led a
> massive assault on trade union rights in Venezuala and, as the AFL noted,
> was condemned by not only US unions but by the ICFTU and the ILO (and
> apparently even the World Federation of Trade Unions, which I had not
> known). Chavez tried to engineer a state takeover of the labor unions in
> that country and was outvoted by the rank-and-file of the CTV. He lost and
> then tried to create government-run unions as an alternative.
The AFL-CIO statement noted that union elections conducted by secret ballot weren't held until 2001, so it's clear that there's more to the story than this. The union old guard were most likely as corrupt and elitist as the rest of Venezuela's deeply polarized society, so I suspect a messy, complicated factional struggle ensued, rather than a heroic resistance project by Pure Noble Unionistas against the evil Castro-loving Chavez (this is what I gather from Katherine Hoyt's article at http://www.labornotes.org/archives/2002/05/b.html).
We still don't know what happened during the coup, and whether agents provocateurs incited the violence. Given the ghastly history of US involvement in the region -- the CIA-administered physical extermination of Leftists from Chile to Guatemala, and the neoliberalization of the entire continent -- and given the shady background of the oiligarchy's Regency, which has put lots of recycled covert ops people into positions of power, the AFL-CIO should've condemned the violence on *all* sides, called for an impartial investigation, including any links coup supporters may have had with the US, etc.
The AFL-CIO *must* be better than its Cold War past, or it will not have a future.
-- Dennis