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LaborTalk for March 17, 2004
Is AFL-CIO's Solidarity Center Serving as a Channel For Bush's Plan for Regime Change in Venezuela?
By Harry Kelber
Hardly any union member knows anything about the AFL-CIO's American Center for International Labor Solidarity, because it operates largely as a clandestine organization. It was established in 1997 to replace the four regional organizations under former AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, whose staffs had worked with CIA agents to destabilize democratically-elected governments in the Dominican Republic, Guyana and Chile and to undermine governments that were either friendly to the then Soviet Union or hostile to American business interests.
Solidarity Center was going to be decidedly different, we were told. Its mission statement said: "The Center provides workers and their unions with information about internationally-recognized worker rights and basic union skills training in education and organizing. We're raising public awareness of the abuses and exploitation of the world's most vulnerable workers. We're promoting democracy and freedom and respect for workers' rights in global trade, investment and development policies and in the lending practices of international financial institutions. Above all, we're giving the world's workers a chance for a voice in the global economy and in the future." (Well, anyway, if you're curious, or possibly skeptical, to know how the Center does what it says it does, they're not about to tell you.)
Solidarity Center gets three-quarters of its budget from government sources, with annual grants from the State Department, the Agency for International Development, the Labor Department and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The AFL-CIO also donates a significant amount to the Center. Repeated attempts to get a complete list of donors and the amount of their contributions have been rebuffed. The Center's director is Harry Kamberis, a former State Department employee, who had also been a staff member of Kirkland's American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) during the period of AFL-CIO's covert operations abroad.
Like Kirkland's "world empire," Solidarity Center maintains offices and staffs in at least 26 countries. They include Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Croatia, Paraguay, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. It's not clear how Solidarity Center's operations in these countries have any relevance to the problems of American workers and their unions. But they do have importance for the U.S. State Department and President Bush's foreign policy advisers by providing them with channels to U.S.-financed labor movements in countries around the world.
Solidarity Center was thrust into an embarrassing limelight by an article that appeared in the New York Times on April 25, 2002 under the headline, "U.S. Bankrolling Is Under Scrutiny for Ties to Chavez Ouster." The article by Times writer Christopher Marquis listed numerous grants by the National Endowment for Democracy to various pro-coup groups in Venezuela, prior to the April 11 coup against the democratically-elected president, Hugo Chavez.
Marquis wrote: "Of particular concern is $154,377 given by the endowment to the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, the international arm of the AFL-CIO, to assist the main Venezuelan labor union in advancing labor rights."
The article noted: "The Venezuelan union, the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV) led the work stoppages that galvanized the opposition to Mr. Chavez. The union's leader, Carlos Ortega, worked closely with Pedro Carmona Estanga, the businessman who briefly took over from Mr. Chavez in challenging the government."
How the Center's $154,333 to the CTV was spent is still unclear. Stan Gacek, assistant director for the AFL-CIO's International Affairs Department, says it was for internal union elections, but CTV's Institute director, Jesus Urbieta, says the money was used for conducting training courses.
Prior to the coup, the Solidarity Center invited CTV's Ortega to Washington, knowing that he was one of the principal opposition leaders to Chavez. The AFL-CIO arranged for Ortega to visit with U.S. government officials, including representatives of the State Department, where opposition leaders met to discuss strategy against Chavez.
A series of work stoppages by the CTV, followed by prolonged, widespread strikes, paved the way for the "democratic revolution" on April 11, 2002, with Pedro Carmona, a pro-U.S. businessman, selected to run the country. Carmona's first act was to dissolve the National Assembly. But two days later, Chavez was swept back into power by the military and a tidal wave of support by working people and the poor, much to the chagrin of the. State Department and the White House.
The opposition to Chavez hasn't given up and neither has the Endowment, which is still handing out grants totaling more than one million dollars to organizations it feels can be of use in the anti-Chavez movement. Available records show that NED contributed $116,000 to the Solidarity Center every three months, from September 2002 to March 2004. In return, the Center had to submit five quarterly reports, whose contents were obviously designed to please its benefactor.
If this is how Solidarity Center is operating in Venezuela, we can well wonder what it is doing in countries around the world. And we'd like to ask one question of Director Kamberis: How is the Center promoting the cause of international labor solidarity if it keeps American workers in the dark about its operations?