AIFLD'S SALVADORAN LABOR WARS: A PAINFUL RECORD OF POLITICAL ARM-TWISTING
Luhan, J. Michael
In September 1985 Reader's Digest published an article that paid glowing tribute to the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), the AFL–CIO's labor arm in Latin America, and to...
...The commission requested by the UPD never materialized, but the UPD did not press its demands for the expulsion of AIFLD, either...
...But the plan suffered from several deficiencies...
...In a letter to AIFLD/Washington dated February 25, 1985 the UPD stated: The Political Commission comes to you again and in the most energetic fashion manifests its protest of these agents [Packer and Castro] whose actions we hope are not endorsed by the AFL–CIO...
...The AID control officer in El Salvador for AIFLD at the time, Tom King, said he talked with AIFLD only once or twice a year, that all auditing procedures were conducted out of Washington, where AIFLD monies are dispensed through a special funding mechanism, and that he knew nothing about the $160,000 AIFLD offer...
...UPD leaders felt the project involved them in an undesirable circle of control and lacked common sense...
...AIFLD, he said, was ready to consider renewing its support for Esquino's organization with vehicles, salaries, the works...
...AIFLD chief Doherty wrote an angry letter to the Post rebutting the charges...
...Even more discomfiting to the UPD were the backgrounds of some of the entrepreneurs present, particularly Alfonso Salaverria...
...When asked to explain the contradiction between Embassy policy and AIFLD's aborted election fund offer, a senior Embassy official replied, "AIFLD has a lot less control over what they do with their money here—less than even the CIA...
...Packer then informed him that AIFLD (meaning Castro) would now handle the CTD funds directly and instructed CTD organizations to pay their dues directly to AIFLD...
...Embassy—with right-wing political and business personalities associated in the recent past with violence against the labor sector...
...He said we were the people who had made him look good in Washington and that he would never abandon us...
...He [Baez] said these were progressive types who accepted the reforms and wanted to work with them," the colleague said...
...Carazo himself admitted his role to the Christian Science Monitor...
...The offer was turned down flat...
...His company on the list is instructive: Ricardo Sol Meza, implicated in the murders of two AIFLD advisers in the Hotel Sheraton in January 1981 but released...
...AIFLD spokesman Heberle gloated over the UPD's disintegration in a letter to the New York Times on March 18, 1986...
...Carazo was told that the mysterious man from the U.S...
...and Chico Guirola, arrested in a small Texas airport in February 1985 for attempting to smuggle $6 million in cash out of the U.S...
...How is it that after being in El Salvador for a few months this Packer thinks he can make such decisions for Salvadorans...
...Duarte thus unwittingly found himself in the crossfire...
...was not intent on "supporting or opposing any party in any way" in the elections...
...AIFLD's deputy director in El Salvador, Donald Kessler, repeatedly denied to me that Castro was in any way connected with AIFLD...
...9 Letter from SETISTA's board of directors to President Duarte, June 12, 1985...
...Mendoza's expulsion, coming on the heels of the Carazo scandal, so enraged the UPD that it demanded that AIFLD remove both Packer and Castro from El Salvador...
...Since mid-1984, AIFLD has rigged union elections, intimidated labor leaders and used hamhanded methods to destroy a special pact El Salvador's largest democratic workers movement signed with the Christian Democratic party of President Jose Napoleon Duarte, under which Duarte pledged among other things to pursue dialogue with the country's leftist guerrillas...
...He paid in full the suspended AID monies owed to one UPD organization that had been cut off in April—a move that had earlier been nixed by Doherty—and proposed a merger of the CTD and the UPD which UPD leaders, after initial suspicion, gradually accepted as plausible...
...THE ALLIANCE OF ECONOMIC INTERESTS pursued in the meetings hosted by Baez seemed to find its political expression in the alleged relationship between Hugo Barrera's new party and AIFLD's newly created CTD...
...And El Salvador's militant left looks on with undoubted satisfaction...
...Packer's predecessor as director in El Salvador, Rupert Scofield, said Packer was already working with Castro before Scofield even left the country in February 1984...
...Indeed, privatization of the land reform cooperatives—the proposal that grew out of the Embassy meetings— was a centerpiece of the new party's platform...
...The Salaverrias were one of the families most associated with right-wing, really rough stuff in El Salvador," said Robert White, the U.S...
...We are sending you two documents that...
...The UPD was still smarting from those actions when Packer announced a major policy change in early September 1984—AIFLD's decision to form a new labor confederation...
...Congressional Record—is a list of assassination paraphernalia such as pistols, silencers, machine guns, starlight scopes, etc...
...Without a Christian Democratic majority, Duarte's reform agenda faced collapse...
...AIFLD did beat something of a retreat...
...5 A Doherty aide, Roberto Casares, then made an enticing offer to end the dispute...
...policy in El Salvador and to the policies of the Duarte government...
...After months of unsuccessful post-election meetings with Duarte urging him to meet with guerrilla leaders, UPD leaders appeared on Salvadoran television on August 30, 1984 and published a newspaper ad the following day criticizing him for stalling on his dialogue pledge under the Pacto Social and for overseeing a new military buildup...
...It also enabled the Reagan administration to successfully lobby Congress for huge increases in economic and military aid to El Salvador that headed off, for the moment at least, what appeared to be an impending guerrilla victory...
...SETISTA complained in the same letter that Maldonado and Castro had swamped the Agrarian Reform Institute's payroll with hundreds of cronies since their taking office in June 1984, driving the institute more deeply into the red...
...AIFLD's status in El Salvador began to deteriorate at the moment of Duarte's victory...
...THAT FIASCO WAS QUICKLY FOLLOWED by several others that strained relations to the breaking point...
...Four of the six UPD organizations have been split by AIFLD-induced dissidence...
...According to one of his close colleagues, Baez, the U.S...
...AIFLD denied giving the money, but a topranking U.S...
...One of the most incriminating pieces of evidence was a notebook containing the names and phone numbers of members of D'Aubuisson's inner circle...
...He also provided critical mediation in the UPD's incessant inner squabbling...
...The audit that found Castro culpable was commissioned by the Foundation and conducted by University of Wisconsin Professor John Strasma...
...Press reports were consistently predicting a decisive win by a new ARENA-led coalition in the all-important March 1985 elections...
...The four were thoroughly confused because to that point, neither former director Scofield in El Salvador nor AIFLD/ Washington had ever tried so overtly to intervene in internal UPD politics...
...Why do we need another organization when we've struggled for three long years to build the UPD and have finally attained unity...
...Throughout this 1982-84 period, AIFLD strengthened the UPD with literacy and leadership training programs, logistical resources, and vital political protection...
...The latter gesture was somewhat quixotic, since neither Doherty nor AFL–CIO President Lane Kirkland had responded to more than a dozen such UPD requests made in private correspondence during the previous four months...
...On one page of the notebook— which is entered in the U.S...
...Embassy...
...He told us, 'If the UPD dies, I die,' " said Esquino Lisco, echoing the recollection of several other UPD leaders in the meeting...
...In the resulting conflict, in fact, all sides have lost—except the armed left, which traditionally benefits from instability and captures the flag of anti-Yankee sentiment...
...The AIFLD campaign is all the more shocking because it follows several years of successfully organizing the Salvadoran labor movement behind U.S.-supported economic reforms and elections—an effort in which two AIFLD advisers, Mark David Pearlman and Michael Hammer, gave their lives...
...Embassy report on Salvadoran labor in August 1984, when the idea for a new confederation was still in the discussion stage...
...The simmering conflict suddenly exploded into Salvadoran public life as well...
...No one ever saw the money...
...In late February 1986 the new Committee staged the largest demonstration in El Salvador in five years, a protest against tough austerity measures imposed by Duarte several weeks earlier...
...AIFLD defended Castro in the Foundation scandal but agreed to transfer him out of the country...
...Farther back in the handbook is Mario Sol Bang, identified by the former head of Salvadoran state intelligence, Roberto Santivanez, as having been a trainer for ARENA paramilitaries in neighboring Guatemala...
...Duarte told the UPD his response to Carazo was that these were autonomous decisions of his labor minister and the internal affairs of the unions in which he could not get involved...
...In a final note of irony, the "independent" and "non-political" CTD promised by Bernie Packer staged a counter-march of its own.' Contrary to AIFLD's professed goal of creating a strong and united centrist labor movement in El Salvador, it has succeeded only in splintering it and radicalizing its politics...
...The CTD vigorously denied the meeting, as did AIFLD, while Barrera simultaneously boasted to reporters of the "very good relations" his new group enjoyed with the AIFLD organization.° Months later, when AIFLD officials in El Salvador were still making strong denials about any AIFLD-Barrera relationship in El Salvador, Barrera was received by Heberle in AIFLD's Washington offices in November while on a tour of the U.S...
...Embassy officials felt that there could never be reinvestment or economic reactivation in El Salvador until the owners disenfranchised by the sweeping reforms in 1980 were given some role in managing their lost assets...
...That contention is undercut, however, by numerous interviews with people inside and outside of AIFLD...
...Yet when the UPD published its attack on Duarte—a patent demonstration of its independence—Packer called its leaders on the carpet, attacking its communique as "an insult" to AIFLD and ordering them to repudiate it in a letter to his superiors in Washington...
...Wall Street Journal reporter Clifford Krausse later related how Kessler tried to exact his revenge on the labor leader who chaired the CTD assembly and walked out...
...labor attache, developed social relations with a number of right-wing figures suspected of involvement in violence against the labor sector, including Salaverria...
...Virtually alone among their workingclass peers, UPD leaders publicly endorsed the 340 controversial March 1982 elections for a constitutional assembly as the "beginning of a possible solution for the problems of the working class," but refrained from supporting any political party...
...The purpose, as Baez explained to a colleague, was to "try to bring back together the forces that had clashed in 1980 over the reforms...
...When the latter was arrested in May 1980 for plotting a coup against the governing junta, security forces nabbed documents that were blueprints for what became ARENA paramilitary death squads, according to a ten-month investigative report by journalists Craig Pyes and Laurie Becklund in which numerous party members went on record as having participated directly in death squad activities...
...As an alternative solution, it called upon the AFL–CIO to appoint a special investigative commission within thirty days to look into its allegations against AIFLD...
...In late January 1985 another major scandal erupted during the elections of El Salvador's largest single union, the SUTC, 343 which represented construction tradesmen and was a key UPD affiliate...
...This was also the rationale in a U.S...
...The Carazo scandal added to the UPD resentment over the whole course of the CTD's development and prompted its leaders to write a letter to AIFLD Executive Director Doherty on January 21, 1985: The direction of the Institute in the formation of the CTD has been absolutely shameful in promoting its creation from the top down, with manipulation, causing the organization to lose its representativeness...
...Duarte pleaded with the UPD during a meeting in the first week of March to keep the confrontation private and promised to resolve it after the elections...
...Participation was mandatory...
...At this point AIFLD's real motives in the CTD project also became clearer, and clearly contradictory to AIFLD's original statements...
...Within a week, Doherty jetted in to El Salvador and held a meeting with the squabbling UPD and CTD leaders...
...At about the same time, AIFLD made a move against Adrian Esquino Lisco and his cooperative organization...
...2) prosecution of human rights violators, particularly in several flagrant and welldocumented cases involving army officers and right-wing figures, such as the killings of Pearlman, Hammer, and a major Salvadoran peasant leader in the Hotel Sheraton in early 1981...
...It was, in fact, AIFLD which had moved to the right—the UPD was merely following through on what it had consistently stated all along...
...to promote his new party...
...Resentment at the change turned to outrage at the flirtation by leaders of the new organization— through the matchmaking efforts of AIFLD and the U.S...
...AIFLD operated on a hefty $2 million annual budget—nearly all U.S...
...Boston Globe, August 19, 1985...
...The UPD grew more sympathetic to the activities of other union groups with direct and indirect ties to the guerrillas and more openly hostile to the U.S...
...Ambassador to El Salvador under the Carter administration...
...It also requested another urgent meeting with Doherty to discuss the deteriorating situation...
...The UPD representatives told Doherty they were particularly concerned that the inclusion in the CTD by Packer of tiny right-wing unions such as the gastronomicos (waiters) and the musicians' guild was a veiled attempt to derechizar (move politically rightward) their labor movement...
...The formation of the front was the most direct and united challenge yet by the centrist labor sector to U.S...
...Their testimony moved the U.S...
...Soon Baez became more assertive in his complaints to the Embassy and AIFLD...
...Carazo's re-election in the SUTC was vital to securing its participation in the new CTD and preserving his power base as CTD president...
...These incidents caused the UPD to conclude that there could be no honest rapprochement with AIFLD...
...The UPD published full-page newspaper spreads accusing AIFLD of attempting to undermine the Pacto Social by "tele-directing" the union movement through "corrupt and feeble pseudoleaders"—and also hinted that the Christian Democrats tolerated these actions in order to weaken the UPD's ability to demand Duarte's compliance with the Pacto...
...AIFLD complied and on March 11 transferred Packer to Guatemala...
...Doherty told us that someone from the U.S...
...After Doherty's trip to El Salvador in late January 1985, however, all action thereafter was deferred to AIFLD's people in El Salvador, " Since my departure from El Salvador in February 1986, AIFLD has in fact succeeded in splitting ANIS into two groups, one affiliated with AIFLD's labor faction and the other remaining loyal to Esquino Lisco, who was forced to vacate the ANIS office by the government...
...said an embittered Adrian Esquino Lisco, a UPD leader...
...Indeed, AIFLD virtually designed and implemented a portion of the land reforms, the land-to-thetiller program, with the contracted aid of Roy Prosterman, a land reform expert who had provided similar services in Vietnam...
...The Salvadoran prisons are filled with hundreds of individuals jailed on the basis of far less evidence linking them to the violent activities of the guerrillas, yet Salaverria not only remained free but was invited into the Embassysponsored talks as a "progressive" to be dealt into the management of UPD cooperatives...
...to El Salvador...
...The diversion of the AID money was conducted by Tito Castro and another AIFLDlinked labor leader, Samuel Maldonado...
...Bill Doherty's Blue-Collar Freedom Fighters" described a heroic struggle AIFLD has waged over the past twenty-three years throughout the continent against phantom elections and communist penetration in unions and for the right of labor unionists to decide their own destiny democratically...
...Embassy...
...350...
...The UPD had seen enough...
...The Institute has since squandered much of its goodwill with its Salvadoran colleagues...
...Guatemalan unionists, however, who had been receiving reports on the labor situation in El Salvador through internal sources, said they refused to work with Packer...
...Alfonso certainly kept the Salaverria tradition alive...
...The situation grew so bad that Pickering finally took the unprecedented step of requesting Packer's removal from El Salvador...
...Sources inside and outside the UPD independently reported an April 28 meeting between Tito Castro and other CTD leaders with Hugo Barrera, D'Aubuisson's former vice-presidential running mate who had left ARENA earlier in the year...
...This episode shocked UPD leaders and sparked what quickly became a heated issue between them and Packer—the freedom to call their own political shots...
...Doherty's pledge to the UPD was quoted to me independently and in the exact same words by four UPD leaders...
...Additionally, the CIA channeled an estimated $200,000 to the UPD for its campaign efforts, part of some $2 million of CIA money given to the Christian Democrats and other, smaller parties on the right to offset the immense financial advantage of ARENA.' Duarte's victory, then, seemingly was AIFLD's as well...
...Several days before, he said, Salvador Carazo and the AIFLD-aligned figure who replaced Ramon Mendoza as the deputy chief of the UCS peasant union had come to him with an offer...
...To worsen things, with the election less than five weeks away, Duarte's main labor base, the UPD, was now riven with divisions...
...Packer had the confidence of few UPD leaders, most of whom considered him insensitive and dictatorial—a view shared in the political section of the U.S...
...taxpayers' dollars in these activities...
...In September 1985 Reader's Digest published an article that paid glowing tribute to the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), the AFL–CIO's labor arm in Latin America, and to its executive director, William Doherty...
...THIS ROLE WAS CARVED OUT prior to his election in what was dubbed the Pacto Social, or Social Pact, with the Christian Democratic party...
...He contended that AIFLD's relationship with Castro was limited to their interaction with him via his position on the board of directors of AIFLD's major Salvadoran organization, the Union Comunal Salvadorena (UCS...
...He described it as "a hollow shell run by a handful of self-appointed leaders, many of whom lost elections in their own organizations...
...His links with D'Aubuisson were particularly close...
...We respond to only one voice in making our decisions, and that is the voice of our bases...
...This account appears in an unpublished Monitor 349 dispatch by Chris Norton...
...Putting two and two together, the new AIFLD representative, Clemente Hernandez, who had developed an exemplary record for labor organizing in Guatemala over the past two years, made increasing overtures to woo the UPD back to AIFLD's fold...
...He did so, the colleague said, to dissuade these figures from their belief that UPD leaders were "subversives" and hence to give the UPD a veneer of protection from right-wing retaliation...
...Kessler wanted to talk with the lieutenant alone, sans Esquino or any other of the association's directors...
...When the right-wing ARENA party led a rollback of the reforms after the 1982 elections and stepped up violence against peasant and labor leaders, AIFLD took UPD representatives to Washington to denounce the ARENA campaign...
...Miami Herald, April 20, 1985...
...What was a potent, progressive and unified democratic labor movement in early 1984 is now in complete disarray, torn by feuds over principles and personalities that may never be mended...
...Such are the Salvadoran grapes of wrath harvested by Bill Doherty's anticommunist freedom fighters...
...If the two groups agreed to bury the hatchet until after the upcoming elections for a new National Assembly and 262 town mayors in March 1985, AIFLD pledged to give them $160,000 for their own election campaign...
...The new president promised to consolidate the reforms and give labor a direct role in shaping the political future of the country...
...The negotiations over the pact were highly conflictual, as Duarte's party did not want to have its hands tied by written treaties...
...In the 1960s the family supported the ultraright FUDI party of General Jose Alberto "Chele" Medrano, who earned for himself the sobriquet "godfather of the death squads" for having established the country's first paramilitary forces...
...As of my time of departure from El Salvador in March 1986, it appeared Hernandez had remained true to his word...
...The UPD, along with several other large labor groups, subsequently formed in February 1986 the Workers' Permanent Defense Committee, a broad front whose stated goal was to "combat the politics of war promoted by the Duarte government under pressure from the United States...
...Yet one of Packer's first moves upon taking over from Scofield (who had determinedly kept Castro out of El Salvador) was to sign Castro to a year's contract to work as his chief Salvadoran agent...
...Whatever the exact substance of the CTD–Barrera relationship, the reports drew sharper attention to what had been a longstanding project of both AIFLD and the U.S...
...AIFLD's director in El Salvador at the time, Rupert Scofield—a former Peace Corps volunteer who had worked with peasants in Guatemala— helped the UPD during the negotiations over the Pacto Social...
...A week later, however, Duarte called the UPD into his office to discuss the crisis and a new dilemma he faced...
...He was then shuffled to Colombia.' 0 n March 20, 1985 the Washington Post reported that Christian Democratic party activists "complained that [AIFLD's] shift was undermining Duarte's declared goals of achieving a negotiated settlement of this nation's fiveyear civil war, prosecuting past human rights violators, and carrying out social and economic changes," and was strengthening the chances of a conservative victory in the elections...
...q Notes 1 Various UPD leaders confirmed to me that the UPD received a substantial amount to campaign for Duarte, and named the individuals charged with disbursing the funds—Tito Castro, Samuel Maldonado, Salvador Carazo, and Cristobal Aleman...
...tax dollars channeled through the Agency for International Development (AID...
...The same offer had earlier been mentioned by Packer but then dropped when Esquino Lisco won the CTD treasurer's slot...
...Ambassador Thomas Pickering told reporters that the U.S...
...The money for their activities was funneled to them through a Salvadoran labor federation, FESINCONSTRANS, funded by AIFLD...
...Despite the 345 weakened backing of the UPD, the Christian Democrats staged an electrifying electoral upset a week later by winning a commanding majority in the National Assembly and 75 percent of the mayoralties...
...But the UPD feared a handshake agreement would soon be forgotten by Duarte and therefore insisted that his electoral promises be put into black and white...
...Although two UPD affiliates already had this status, the UPD as a whole was independent...
...And despite Castro's dismal track record in such matters, Packer entrusted him with the disbursement of AIFLD's funds to the CTD and its affiliated groups.' The CTD elections on December 8, 1984 were so blatantly stage-managed by Packer that the Salvadoran unionist chosen by the participating organizations to chair the assembly left the auditorium, leaving Packer to swear in the new officers, thereby depriving the whole affair of any legality under Salvadoran labor law.' Adrian Esquino Lisco, meanwhile, had switched candidacies and won the treasurer's slot...
...Packer's departure did little to resolve differences, as AIFLD took an even tougher line in pursuing the CTD project...
...Castro was said to have pledged to deliver thousands of CTD signatures for the legal inscription of Patria Libre, a new party Barrera was forming...
...The dissidents' complaint was upheld by the Labor Ministry and Carazo's recognition suspended until new elections were held...
...By early April AIFLD cut off all funding to the UPD organizations, monies which over the past several months it had been gradually rerouting to new CTD groups...
...The practice became so blatant that the Reform Institute's own labor union complained in an angry letter to the government on June 12 in which it demanded the removal of Castro and Maldonado.9 Both were dismissed in July—after AIFLD provided Castro and Maldonado money to stage a demonstration for themselves that fizzled...
...AIFLD had, in fact, recruited Castro in the early 1970s fresh out of jail, charged with having misdirected foodstuffs while working for the Catholic Church but later cleared...
...Kessler had warned Krausse against using his name or the quote...
...3) appointment of UPD candidates to key positions in government institutions dealing with the land reforms...
...This could not mean, however, a repeal of the reforms, which were still politically very popular...
...The U.S...
...The UPD would remain as the "political arm" of labor, said Packer, while the new organization would concentrate on "breadandbutter issues" such as contract negotiations and technical training...
...Four UPD leaders told me in separate interviews that AIFLD had made it clear to them who it wanted elected in the new CTD...
...Krausse quoted Kessler in a front page Journal piece on December 31, 1985 as having boasted about the loan offer...
...The offer was accepted and the UPD and CTD signed a "unity pact...
...Carazo himself later explained the episode with surprising candor to a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor: Carazo said that Doherty told him "I will insist that the money will come...
...The Union War came to a head in late April 1985 when word began circulating of a developing alliance between the CTD and rightwing political figures...
...Embassy labor attache, Eduardo Baez, began hosting regular meetings in his home between prominent local businessmen, big agriculturalists, and peasant leaders, including both Tito Castro and Ramon Mendoza...
...The popular Scofield had been replaced in February 1984 by Bernard Packer, an old-line AIFLD hand...
...The UPD, composed of six organizations loosely representing some 300,000 peasants and workers (see box), had from its founding in September 1980 been a supporter of U.S.promoted elections and a bulwark against domination of the labor movement by the militant left...
...AIFLD's loss of face has resulted from its decision to transfer its support for the broadbased workers' movement, the Unidad Popular Democratica (UPD), to a new organization created by AIFLD in December 1984...
...Barrera made the statement in different interviews with James LeMoyne of the New York Times and with Robert Block of Reuters, the same week that AIFLD deputy director Donald Kessler told me that he didn't even know who Hugo Barrera and Patria Libre were...
...Embassy— to link labor with landowners who had lost assets as a result of the land reforms...
...Dissident members complained that the incumbent for secretarygeneral— Salvador Carazo, Packer's handpicked president of the CTD—trucked in crowds of peasants to vote for him who were not union members, allegedly with money provided by Tito Castro...
...Embassy, Salvadoran government officials, and some of its own people for heavy-handedness that undercut support for President Duarte at a critical time in his fledgling administration...
...346 Out of the meetings grew a proposal advocating the privatization of the agricultural cooperatives to facilitate joint investment ventures and shared management between the coops and former landowners—part of a broader Embassy effort to give the Salvadoran right wing a stake in the democratic process the U.S...
...Hernandez explained to one reporter that "the situation was so chaotic that [he] wanted to avoid a confrontation" by shielding the AFL–CIO group from the UPD...
...relate the utilization of AIFLD funds to "arrange" the last elections of the directors of 344 the SUTC...
...Why fix something that isn't broken...
...Congress to slash $100 million from the 1983 Reagan arms budget for El Salvador, a sanction that persuaded the military to put peasants back on lands from which they had been dislodged and to keep the modest reform program intact...
...Its timing could not have been worse for him...
...if the UPD did not go along, its member groups would have their AID support money cut off by the Institute, despite having signed covenants that guaranteed funding through June 1985...
...Suspicions increased when Packer, threatening to reduce or cut off their funding altogether, leaned on UPD leaders like Esquino Lisco and Arevalo to vote for his own handpicked slate of officers to run the new organization, christened the Central de Trabajadores Democraticos (CTD...
...Less than four months after Doherty's visit, AIFLD spokesman Jack Heberle admitted to both the Miami Herald and the Los Angeles Times that AIFLD was, in fact, phasing out the UPD because it had already served "a useful role" and was now "off to the left of Duarte...
...Carazo said he had control of $160,000 for the Christian Democrats' uphill campaign, but that it would be dispensed only on condition that he, Duarte, authorize Carazo's election and the replacement of Ramon Mendoza...
...He was finally removed from office in a subsequent election ordered by the Labor Ministry months later to clear up the lingering dispute...
...When we signed the Pacto, we didn't sacrifice our right to confront the Christian Democrats— to the contrary, we signed it to make them live up to their promises," said Jose Orlando Arevalo, a top UPD spokesman at the time...
...Doherty dismissed the UPD concerns as groundless...
...Later, in July, Heberle told the Los Angeles Times in response to the same question, "one could say that by pressuring for negotiations, they [the UPD] were pushing Duarte to the left...
...The Salaverrias, one of the wealthiest of El Salvador's coffee clans, had long been associated with violent right-wing politics in El Salvador...
...and 4) broadening of participation in the democratic electoral process to all political tendencies, which meant including the left...
...In return for their indispensable support in Duarte's campaign, UPD leaders signed an agreement with the party guaranteeing the inclusion of a four-point UPD program in Duarte's "government plan for 1984-89": 1) 341 dialogue to seek a political solution to the civil war...
...Embassy official told me the Embassy "knew all about it...
...Said one confused AID official on the matter to a Boston Globe reporter (August 19, 1985): "I can't conceive of how we end up giving assistance to two different sides...
...However, a key invited UPD figure who had previously worked as a paid AIFLD adviser refused to participate upon hearing of the role given to Salaverria, saying "They [AIFLD and the Embassy] are asking us to embrace the men who murdered our brothers in the past...
...And the new party's secretary for international relations...
...AIFLD's REACTION WAS EVEN SWIFTER...
...On the opposite page is a short list of names, including that of Alfonso Salaverria...
...When Esquino Lisco defied Packer's wishes and ran for president of the CTD, Packer reduced Lisco's organization's take by 25 percent.' The most controversial of Packer's agents was Tito Castro, a longtime AIFLD loyalist...
...the two defectors then offered to pay the same top aide who turned down Kessler's 348 approach if he would turn his position over to one of AIFLD's people...
...was promoting...
...Carazo said "Mr...
...AIFLD Deputy Director Donald Kessler contacted Esquino's top aide with an attractive offer...
...In 1977 he had been found solely responsible for the bankruptcy of a large rotating fund for agricultural production cooperatives run by the Inter-American Foundation, a scandal that shattered the unity of a budding peasant movement that AIFLD itself had built...
...UPD leaders were unenthusiastic about the plan because, again, they saw it as undercutting the UPD's relationship with the Christian Democrats (who controlled the vast patronage structure servicing UPD agrarian cooperatives) in favor of a pact with its avowed enemies...
...Robert McCartney, who also sat in on the Carazo interview, used his admissions in a front-page story on the money offer for the Washington Post on March 20, 1985...
...If to this we add that [Packer] has promoted the participation of suspicious persons and mini-organizations which have attempted to destroy the unity of the UPD and obstruct its activities, one sees a very serious situation that damages the democratic process of El Salvador...
...He then sent armed AIFLD security agents to the office of Miguel Angel Vasquez—the most vocal UPD leader on the dialogue issue and head of a large organization of public sector unions—to repossess at gunpoint a vehicle and radio unit loaned to Vasquez's organization by AIFLD in 1983...
...AIFLD later cut its aid to the UPD and tried to destroy it on the grounds that it was "too left" for pushing Duarte on the issue of dialogue...
...Carazo said that in the last elections, funds were channeled directly to the Christian Democrats, which disbursed them to the unions but that "this time they (AIFLD) promised that the money wouldn't be channeled to the party, that the [unions] would manage it directly...
...LA Times, July 11, 1985...
...Less than a week later, however, Ramon Mendoza, a popular UPD figure who had grown increasingly critical of Packer and Castro, was suddenly notified by his large peasant organization, the UCS, that he had been removed from his position as deputy chief for "misrepresentation...
...The CTD is largely a collection of leaders handsomely paid by AIFLD who now have few followers with whom to share their riches...
...As top-ranking officers of the Salvadoran Agrarian Reform Institute, they used their posts there to divert AID funds provided to the Reform Institute in order to support the new CTD coop federations...
...And hence get their share of the AID money pie...
...As Packer explained it, the new project would entail reshaping all of the AIFLD's current 342 member organizations (minus oneVasquez's), together with several new groups, into a more formal, vertically-structured confederation that would be directly tied to the AFL–CIO...
...In one case, while AID pumped money into a federation of agricultural cooperatives linked to some UPD leaders and liberal Christian Democrats, AIFLD was simultaneously diverting many of these same AID funds to a new CTD-linked coop federation directly competing for members...
...The family later aligned itself with the official Party of National Conciliation but again switched allegiances in 1981 to the newer, more virile ARENA party of Roberto D'Aubuisson...
...8 That Pickering personally intervened in the matter to have Packer removed was confirmed to me by two highranking Embassy officials...
...Baez's colleague said Baez believed they were coming from Tito Castro, who was equipped by AIFLD with his own team of heavily armed bodyguards with which he had intimidated other UPD leaders on several occasions...
...BUT JUST WHEN THE UPD BEGAN to warm to these overtures, more bombshells fell...
...The catch...
...After several years of worthy work, AIFLD has permanently stained its image by forcing labor leaders to choose between survival by corruption or death with honor...
...The ouster was widely interpreted as enjoying at least the collusion of AIFLD, which had founded the UCS in 1968 and funded it ever since...
...The group met only with CTD leaders and were not even apprised of the seriousness of the problems with the UPD...
...The new leaders' platform was to reaffiliate the SUTC with the FESINCONSTRANS and hence with the CTD...
...would come—but not from the Institute, not with funds from the Institute...
...Packer had given these groups the same vote in the CTD founding congress as UPD groups hundreds of times their size, even though one of his earliest declarations in promoting the new scheme was that representation in the CTD would be determined by relative size, making it more "democratic" than the roundtable decision-making style of the UPD...
...Therefore, before this problem extends to our bases, other sister organizations, and to our government, we wish to speak with the true representatives of the workers of the AFL–CIO...
...And when we accepted AIFLD's money we didn't exchange our sovereignty...
...Embassy has at times acquiesced in AIFLD's activities but mainly remained a passive bystander, despite AIFLD's misuse of millions of U.S...
...Carazo himself told Chris Norton of the Christian Science Monitor and Robert McCartney of the Washington Post that AIFLD had promised the money but never delivered...
...Every single UPD organization, save Vasquez's, was now at least 80 percent dependent on AIFLD for equipment, vehicles and administrative expenses—even FESINCONSTRANS, for 30 years the country's largest and strongest labor federation...
...Details of the money offer were first provided to me by UPD leaders in March 1985 and subsequently verified by events...
...That the Pacto was a reiteration of the founding principles of the UPD is an important point to remember...
...But Baez, a strong supporter of the UPD, slowly began to sour on the Embassy's reconciliation plan because of the crude manipulation of the 347 CTD project by Packer and Castro...
...Responding to a query from a Miami Herald correspondent as to the reasons for the AIFLD shift away from the UPD, AIFLD spokesman Jack Heberle replied that the UPD had served "a useful role" but was now "off to the left of Duarte...
...The pair made the same offer to Duarte's top aide, Julio Adolfo Rey Prendes...
...The SUTC, the large construction trades union that had been placed firmly in the UPD camp with the defeat of Carazo, suddenly found its ranks split again in late November by a small group of leaders who broke away and called their own elections for another full slate of SUTC officers...
...AIFLD succeeded in buying away two other colleagues of Esquino, however...
...As the fraternal tone of the UPD's letter to Doherty on January 21, 1985 indicated, they all felt certain this interventionism was an aberration on the part of Bernie Packer rather than organization policy, and that it could be resolved by going through regular channels...
...Alfonso Salaverria...
...Second, Packer's replacement, Clemente Hernandez, admitted shortly after his arrival in El Salvador in June 1985 that there were "evidently some problems with corruption" and that Tito Castro henceforth "would have nothing to do with the Institute...
...This assessment is angrily contested by AIFLD officials and a group of faithful labor leaders in El Salvador who say the change was necessary to maintain labor's independence from the government...
...Behind those efforts was an apparent desire by AIFLD and the Embassy to forge a conservative alliance between labor and business against the more statist-oriented Christian Democrats, and to undermine UPD efforts to promote dialogue with the Salvadoran armed guerrillas...
...Duarte shortly thereafter flew to New York for his famous UN peace address and by mid-October was talking with rebel leaders in La Palma...
...The threatened aid cutoff was a strong inducement, since by now all of the UPD organizations had been weaned away from reliance on their internal dues structure in favor of handouts from AIFLD...
...The victory of a right-wing coalition headed by Roberto D'Aubuisson's ARENA party, however, convinced the UPD to openly support the more progressive—although from the UPD's viewpoint, less-thanperfect— ticket of Jose Napoleon Duarte in the presidential elections two years later...
...Kessler visited the leader's organization, a large textile workers' union, and offered a large lowinterest loan to buy a new motor for the union's bus if AIFLD's favored slate of opposition candidates was voted into office in an upcoming election...
...The celebration was short-lived...
...In El Salvador, however, AIFLD has resorted to dubious tactics in the past eighteen months to prevent Salvadoran workers from making their own democratic decisions...
...Ramon Mendoza, the second man in the UCS who was ousted by AIFLD, gave me copies of all correspondence the UCS and UPD had sent to AIFLD/Washington between January and June of 1985...
...and the same action in celebrating a false congress in the UCS to displace our companion and brother Ramon Mendoza...
...Be a good boy," he told Krausse, "and don't get involved in this...
...Salvadoran Labor Minister Julio Samayoa told me in May 1985 that he personally had not been approached by Carazo but that he "understood" that Carazo had made the offer to Duarte and to Rey Prendes and that it had been turned down...
...In addition, Clemente Hernandez, AIFLD's replacement for the departed Packer, prevented access for the UPD to a group of official AFL–CIO representatives who visited El Salvador just a month earlier in June 1985...
...We do not believe that this is the position of the...
...AIFLD denies ever having made the offer...
...would come March 5, but he never showed.' That same week, U.S...
...On July 10, 1985, following a national assembly convened days earlier to discuss the turmoil, UPD leaders announced at a conference for the foreign press corps that it intended to ask the government to expel AIFLD from El Salvador...
...In early February 1985, he was forced to leave El Salvador after receiving a string of death threats...
...But the Institute has been uniformly criticized by the U.S...
...In mid-1984 the U.S...
...The CTD project failed to attract any significant new unions and its leadership was tarnished by the allegations concerning Hugo Barrera, and also by the Mendoza scandal...
...ALFONSO SALAVERRIA, according to these documents, played a key role in these activities...
...Packer frequently expressed his opinion to colleagues that Scofield had been "too soft," and that the Pacto Social was a mistake because it tied the UPD too closely to the Christian Democrats...
...z I arrived in El Salvador and made my initial contacts with the UPD just two months after the CTD elections, before the split between the UPD and AIFLD came into the open...
...A senior Embassy official, when queried about his knowledge of Salaverria's background and the propriety of his participation in the Embassy meetings with labor, said he was "clean" and fully supported his role in the talks...
Vol. 33 • July 1986 • No. 3
