NACLA Supplement
With this issue we begin our eleventh year of publication and have chosen the occasion to launch a new feature in the Report: an eight-page supplement. While the main body of the Report will...
...In addition to economic oppression, the working class has suffered the effects of a political clampdown by the government, desperately attempting to maintain control...
...On November 19, Echeverria expropriated nearly 250,000 acres of land in the state of Sonora...
...When Johnson decided to replace McNamara, thinking he had become too much of a dove, he offered the job to Vance...
...Police Exports to the Third World (8 pp...
...Vance is vice-chairman of the CFR (under chairman David Rockefeller) and is one of the 60 U.S...
...By this fall the trade deficit and the massive borrowing had pushed Mexico's total foreign debt over $20 billion - eight times greater than its debt of six years ago, and one of the largest of any Third World country...
...DEVALUATION: INFLATING PROFITS The recent devaluation of the peso is the logical result of this pattern of development, which has made Mexico increasingly dependent on U.S...
...In a separate action related to the investigation, Olin Winchester "terminated three of its officers...
...became Secretary of State...
...The struggle intensified in July, when the Minister of Health fired two leaders of the Ambulance Drivers Union...
...law firms...
...Supplement) 7. (September) DEL MONTE: Bitter Fruits 8. (October) OIL IN THE CARIBBEAN: Focus on Trinidad 9. (November) CHILE: Recycling the Capitalist Crisis 10...
...The result was a larger profit margin for private industry...
...in economics and a law degree from Yale...
...Another of Vance's senior partners, Joel Dolkart, was fired by Simpson Thacher in 1974 for pocketing $1.5 million in legal fees from the firm's client, Gulf & Western Industries...
...He has a clear understanding of the interests he represents and of their objectives, and is flexible enough to change policies when necessary to cut losses...
...But it is clear that the land problem will continue to plague the new president...
...One foreign policy area where Vance bears close watching is in relation to the Dominican Republic...
...At least since 1974 the World Bank has been pressuring Mexico to hold down wages, and the Mexican press recently reported that a new billion dollar loan from the IMF was made dependent upon wage freezes and severe cutbacks in government spending...
...Among his friends at Yale were McGeorge Bundy, later President Kennedy's and Johnson's National Security advisor and now head of the Ford Foundation, and Sargent Shriver, whom Vance wodld later serve as foreign policy adviser during his unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination...
...A similar coalition was formed during the economic crisis of 19731974 and played an important role in spreading support for strikes and protesting inflation...
...What is significant about the CNUS is that it spans unions of different political tendencies and in a number of different sectors...
...By themselves, the strikes and labor militance would not be significant - particularly since organized labor in Guatemala is inherently weak...
...In addition to workers demands for higher wages, the new President will have to contend with pressures from peasant groups for more land, a middle class that is angry over the devaluation, and a ruling class that is divided over how to handle the crisis...
...Though the president of Mexico has great power, personal political inclinations have always taken second place to the imperatives arising from objective conditions...
...But, as reported in the New Republic (December 18), "Vance, as deputy secretary of defense presided enthusiastically over a lavish program of Pentagon arms sales promotion that has made the U.S...
...agribusiness companies...
...STATE OFFENSIVE These strikes are part of a larger confrontation between the organized sectors of the working class and the Guatemalan government...
...Cosmos was one of several Swiss banks suspected of laundering U.S...
...market...
...One of his responsibilities was approving the major bombing attacks in the Vietnam war...
...After the recent 100% devaluation, prices on many basic consumer items nearly doubled, while wage increases were held to only 22...
...A group of banks, including 18 European banks, are holding up delivery of an already-promised loan until the nature of the Lopez Portillo administration becomes clear...
...To mention only the most important: * Several hundred workers at the Embotelladora Guatemalteca, licensed to produce Coca Cola in Guatemala, have been struggling since August 1975 to organize an independent union...
...Even after the workers won recognition for their union last March (when they threatened to mobilize a general strike), the Company has sabotaged the pact and the union by subdividing into 8 branches...
...The labor leaders responded that in fact it was the workers who have suffered the most from the quake, and that the "violence" which they were being accused of provoking was nothing other than the exercise of their constitutional rights...
...Moreover, the workers and their leaders face continual harassment by police and by a "private guard service" of professional killers...
...From The Incredible Rocky comic by Joel Andreas (NACLA, 1975, p. 37) The selection of Cyrus Vance as Secretary of State introduced a variation on the above theme: this time it was the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation, rather than its president, who was chosen for the top foreign policy post...
...workers in the national railroad were particularly infuriated by the appointment of the former director of the national police as head of the railroad...
...Employers took advantage of the quake to arbitrarily fire hundreds of workers, to station police at workplaces and to step up other abuses...
...As Mexicans say, when the U.S...
...The EGP represents the organized expression of popular rebellion in all its forms...
...foreign policy in a state of crisis, President-elect Carter's selection of Cyrus Vance as Secretary of State seems particularly appropriate...
...We hope this feature adds to your ability to use and enjoy the Report...
...His mother, for example, is from a main-line Philadelphia family...
...With one third of all U.S...
...a reconciliation with the political opposition (mainly the Christian Democrats, who, for all their rhetoric, were more than willing to participate in legitimizing the government...
...Any attempt, however, to secondguess Lopez Portillo's moves based on his past actions or statements is futile...
...The devaluation was intended as a step towards reducing the country's balance of payments deficit, something Mexico's creditors have been pressuring for...
...His Wall Street law firm, Davis, Polk & Wardwell, known as "the Tiffany of law firms," represents the J. P. Morgan interests...
...But the current situation is becoming highly explosive...
...In other words, what goes into the making of a top custodian of the interests of the ruling class...
...Weisl had been a trusted counselor to Johnson ever since he advised the future president to buy TV stations in 1949 - acquisitions which later made Johnson a millionaire...
...In a letter to subscribers, the AFG explained that it lacked the material and human resources needed to sustain a publication covering only Central America and that it wanted to reach a wider audience by writing artlces for other publications - particularly the NACLA Report's new supplement...
...The continuing operation of a revolutionary guerrilla Left in Guatemala is evidence of the failure of more than ten years of bloody, U.S.-supported "pacification...
...they were beaten and tortured by police interrogators...
...Also in June, police occupied the office of the CNT (the Social Christian Union federation) and ar35 rested some of its leaders and a visiting Nicaraguan labor leader...
...In short, the CNUS is organizationally a very significant development...
...U.S...
...Once again, the MLN tried to send in scab workers...
...going beyond denunciation, it has taken armed actions to punish those responsible for the massive attack on workers' rights (right-wing military officials, large landowners and industrialists), and has urged the Guatemalan people to use all possible forms of organization to defend itself...
...Vance is known as a cool-headed strategist and negotiator...
...Since that Revolution - which was fought and won by peasant armies but soon came under control of a rising industrial class - the ruling party has based its power on the shaky balance of these two elements...
...hegemony over the major capitalist nations...
...Thus it has the power to generalize particular strikes...
...Both on May 1 and on Oct...
...3334 LAND CRISIS Shortly after the devaluation, a wave of land occupations by more than 35,000 angry peasants rocked Mexico's northwestern states of Sonora and Sinaloa...
...Recognizing a highly imperialist mind, Nelson Rockefeller hired Henry as his personal foreign affairs advisor...
...But the post-quake context has fused the labor struggles with other forms of class struggle, as part of a generalized political crisis...
...ment after the U.S...
...At the same time, Mexico's spending on social services has lagged far behind that of other large Latin American nations...
...Simpson Thacher has recently been shaken by more than its share of public scandals - scandals which raise questions about the caliber of men Vance chooses as his most intimate associates...
...In May, two strike leaders were run down by a pick-up truck, killing one of them...
...a reformist facade...
...Dolkart was subsequently indicted by a grand jury on 89 counts, including grand larceny, forgery and the filing of false income tax returns...
...The state's offensive has taken several forms: * Repression against leaders of organized labor: In June a militant leader of the teachers union was assassinated...
...Neither did South Africa appear as a country of destination on any of the arms export licenses obtained by NACLA...
...The CNUS, the strongest expression of organized labor opposition to the government, has organized the revival of working-class militance and has championed workers' rights...
...UNIONS IN PUERTO RICO 6. (July-August) HARVEST OF ANGER: Agro-Imperialism in Mexico's Northwest...
...relations With an important ally, such as Iran...
...Vance's family background certainly helps by tying him into powerful ruling sectors...
...Although Echeverria would like to be remembered as a populist who came to the rescue of Mexico's landless poor, the record shows a contradictory side to his policies...
...Since the Mexican devaluation is combined with wage freezes, the brunt of the economic burden will be borne by the working class, while private industry will be able to recoup the profits eroded by the international recession of recent years...
...The investigation reportedly got too hot and Nixon fired Morgenthau, a Republican, and replaced him with Whitney North Seymour, another of Vance's partners, who dropped the investigation...
...In theory, devaluation is supposed to reduce imports by making them more expensive in Mexican currency, and stimulate exports by making them cheaper on the international market...
...In northwest highland Quich6 province, where the guerrillas have been operating, official forces have not subdued them...
...Vance's next step up the government ladder came in 1961 when President Kennedy named him general counsel to the Department of Defense, where he became Defense Secretary McNamara's right-hand man in the reorganization of the Pentagon...
...We think the supplement will add variety, interest and timeliness to thk Report and will provide us with an outlet for material which went unpublished under the previous format...
...News & World Report (December 13) reassuringly informed its readers, Vance "is not expected to push the control of arms sales to the point that it jeopardizes U.S...
...The new labor code being proposed by the government contains provisions even more harmful to workers than the existing code...
...And foreign investors are skeptical as well...
...Then when it was Nixon's turn to pick a Secretary of State he turned to the regular place and asked George Harrar, president of the Rockefeller Foundation...
...foreign investment accounted for by oil, it makes sense to have the man in charge of foreign policy be someone who is trusted by the main oil-investing family - especially in the "energy crisis" era...
...The land seizures were only the latest incident in a conflict that has been brewing for decades, as Mexico's half-million landless peasants have pressured the government to break up the landholdings of Mexico's powerful rural oligarchy...
...NACLA'S GUATEMALA IN SPANISH NACLA's book, Guatemala, published in 1974, is now available in Spanish from Siglo XXI under the title Guatemala: Una Historia Inmediata...
...Vance's policies will reflect the interests of the owners of the most powerful U.S.-based multinational corporations and international banks, as articulated in the working papers of their top foreign policy formulating organizations: the Council on Foreign Relations (see November 1971 Report) and the Trilateral Commission...
...When Mexico's political stability was threatened by the massive anti-government, anti-U.S...
...its objective is to form a unified labor central...
...Both Carter and Mondale are also members...
...Briefly, before the quake, the Laugerud government seemed well on its way to achieving its goals: a recovery of the economy from its 1973-74 crisis...
...Both the devaluation and the land expropriation are elements of the delicate political juggling act which has come to characterize the PRI, which grew out of Mexico's 1910 Revolution...
...Vance, for example, was among the "wise men" who had originally backed the Vietnam war but who reassessed their support in light of the Tet offensive in early 1968 and the mounting resistance to the war at home...
...to cool out the Detroit riots in the summer of 1967...
...Under the leadership of Clark Clifford, they reversed their positions in March 1968 and urged President Johnson to de-escalate the war and seek a negotiated peace...
...Politically, however, it is limited unless seen as part of a broader strategy - and this link has been made not by the 36 CNUS itself but by the EGP...
...As the name implies, it brings together leaders from North America, Japan and Western Eirope to work out strategies for rebuilding a strong Western alliance...
...Davis, the unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate in 1924, was widely considered the ablest Supreme Court practitioner of his generation...
...policy strategists realize that the arms sales they once promoted are introducing a destabilizing factor into the world balance of power by giving client states the ability to start a major war on their own...
...THE NEW PRESIDENT'S DILEMMA The Lopez Portillo government will have to face similar problems in the labor sector, where militant rank-andfile movements exist in opposition to most of the major PRI-controlled unions...
...Order from Siglo XXI, Cerro del Agua 248, Mexico 20, DF, Mexico, 1976 BACK ISSUES of NACLA's REPORT (Vol...
...Heller had helped register Homestake's securities...
...What makes the recent actions more "dangerous" to the government and private capital is the coming together of much of organized labor - with the important exception of the AFL-CIO-affiliated union confederation, which openly supports the government - in a coalition called the National Committee of Labor Unity (CNUS...
...As the U.S...
...Up to now, the established political system has survived by responding flexibly to successive crises within a framework of party discipline...
...One of Vance's current themes is arms control - an issue which he has been pushing as vice-chairman of the United Nations Association's arms control panel...
...Though these sales are only a fraction of the billion-dollar military arms trade, which is dominated by high-cost missile and aircraft hardware, the lower-cost police weaponry often has a greater effect on the day-to-day lives of people in the Third World...
...Its clients include Manufacturers Hanover Trust (the fifth largest U.S...
...But in practice, imports cannot be significantly reduced without serious negative effects on the economy, since the bulk of imported items are essential for industry and food consumption...
...The expropriation may be calculated to regain lost support among peasants for the austere economic policies which lie ahead...
...South Africa has not been on the approved list since 1963, when the U.S...
...When Dulles died, Christian Herter, who married into the [Rockefeller-] Standard Oil gang...
...The escalating conflict between organized labor on the one hand, and the Guatemalan government, rulingclass, and foreign capital on the other, has exploded in a wave of strikes since the quake...
...About three-fourths of Mexico's trade is with the United States...
...However, Rogers knew nothing about foreign affairs, so Henry Kissinger moved in to take care of the job...
...market - and especially after President Nixon raised U.S...
...Since the expropriation, another 850,000 acres have been invaded by peasants in the north-central state of Durango, and a Mexican judge has ruled that Echeverria's expropriation was illegal...
...Politically, the CNUS represents an alliance between the Communist Party, traditionally the workers' stronghold, and the Christian Democrats, one of the main forces in the moderate political opposition to the government...
...20 (the anniversary of the 1944 Revolution) the CNUS staged sizeable demonstrations, demanding basic democratic rights for workers and peasants and the cessation of economic and political repression, but making no mention of armed struggle...
...When the huge electrical workers union struck this July, all strikers who refused to disavow support for a militant rank and file movement were fired...
...lawyer John Trotter, has stated that he would never permit a union in his factory, and that those who favored its formation were communists...
...The entire working class has had to pay higher prices for basic necessities such as bread and construction materials as inflation approaches 30...
...The article below follows up another angle of the arms export business...
...Faced with additional firings, arrests, and threats to apply the Penal Code to strikers, the workers paralyzed the entire hospital network in Guatemala City and planned to call a general strike of public employees...
...When he joined Simpson Thacher in 1947, Vance was taken under the wing of Edwin Weisl, the firm's chief businessgetter...
...troops were still occupying the island, is today the country's largest foreign investor, largest landholder, largest taxpayer, and largest exporter outside of the Dominican government itself...
...Nevertheless, Laugerud is faced with a serious challenge...
...Africa In our July-August 1976 issue we published data on U.S...
...Back copies of the nine issues of the Guatemala & Central America Report are still available from AFG, Box 2283, Station A, Berkeley, CA 94702 at 25 cents each plus postage: 15 cents for individual copies and 45 cents for all nine...
...As President, Echeverria also resorted to police and army intervention to break up a number of important strikes...
...Added to the trade deficit are the billions of dollars spent by the government to subsidize cheap oil, electricity, railroads and the like for private business...
...Nearly a year after the February 4 earthquake which left 23,000 Guatemalan workers and peasants dead, the government of Gen...
...In 1962 he was promoted to Secretary of the Army and for the next two years he supervised the buildup of U.S...
...An article in the New Haven Advocate (October 29) by a former secretary at the Olin Winchester offices revealed elaborate transshipment schemes developed by the arms manufacturers to channel their products to South Africa...
...Dbminican sugar sales account for a significant share of G & W's income...
...In order to justify official anti-labor policies, Laugerud in July publicly condemned labor leaders who "foment strikes to weaken the productive process of the country and create anarchy and violence" as "enemies of [earthquake] reconstruction...
...Gulf & Western Industries, which began investing in the Dominican sugar industry while U.S...
...December) TIME OF RECKONING: The U.S...
...In 1969, for example, U.S...
...and less visible repression...
...one of the largest Wall Street investment banking houses), and Gulf & Western Industries (one of the nation's fastest-growing conglomerates...
...In the past two years, the discontent has grown to crisis proportions as thousands of peasants have occupied the rich farm lands of Mexican growers, many of them partners of U.S...
...He was also investigating another Simpson Thacher client, Zurich-based Cosmos Bank, on whose board sat Vance's partner William Dillon...
...But then duty called and Henry went to Washington to supervise American foreign affairs and aefend the Rockefellers' property and oil around the world...
...arms manufacturers are engaged in illegal weapons sales to South Africa, in violation of the 1954 Mutual Security Act...
...POLITICAL CRISIS FOR GOVERNMENT What is the nature of the political crisis...
...bank), Lehman Bros...
...Well, Eisenhower's Secretary of State, Jqhn Foster Dulles, was a top Rockefeller lawyer and president of the Rockefeller Foundation...
...After NACLA published this info-rmation, which was based on export license records, the State Department's Office of Munitions Control changed its policy and now refuses to provide such data to the public...
...What is the response of the Left to this political crisis...
...Since Lopez Portillo's election on July 4, two major events have raised serious doubts about the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party's (PRI) ability to continue its traditional vacillation between populism and repression...
...imposed an embargo to express "official" disapproval of that country's racist apartheid policy...
...But Vance, claiming a painful back problem, resigned in 1967, to return to Simpson Thacher, whereupon Johnson pressured Clark Cliffold into taking the job.38 By the time Vance returned to his firm he was a very commanding public figure - the kind of figure whose political clout helps attract important clients to his firm...
...Mexico's ruling circles were bitterly divided over the expropriations, as one group of growers and industrialists attempted a nationwide shut-out in protest of the government action...
...In May, there was a strike against the margarine factory owned by the Kongs (a leading right-wing family) in protest of the firing of 232 workers who were attempting to organize a union...
...But the quake has forced the government to reveal its true class base and interests, and has sparked another round of Guatemala's perennial political violence...
...But Vance's appointment also follows several other patterns of the past...
...From the Left, the government is challenged by the revolutionary EGP (Guerrilla Army of the Poor), which represents a continuation of the guerrilla movements of the 1960's...
...to arrange a provisional govern...
...Jose Lopez Portillo, Mexico's new president, assumed office on December 1 in the midst of the most difficult crisis yet faced by the capitalist world's oldest single-party state...
...Vance's position as a director of Pan Am, whose investment banker is Lehman Bros., and of the One William Street Fund, an investment fund controlled by Lehman Bros., stems from relationships developed through Simpson Thacher...
...According to the article, in 1975 the Office of Munitions Control (responsible for approving export licenses) began an investigation into the U.S.-South Africa arms traffic...
...Within the government coalition, the right wing and the gangster Aranista sector (under the leadership of former president Carlos Arana) are reasserting themselves strongly, have maintained control of Congress, and are using their own apparatus of repression againat rival sectors of the bourgeoisie (kidnapings, shoot-outs, assassinations) - as well as against workers, peasants, and the political opposition (more than 100 killings since the quake...
...This new wave of violence reflects the government's decreasing ability to maintain control, and its failure to shake off the implacable right wing that brought it fraudulently into office in 1974...
...During his trial, the Colt employee, Walter Plowman, revealed that "other gun manufacturers commonly transshipped munitions to South Africa through other countries" and implied that the State Department overlooked these operations...
...POLICY IMPLICATIONS Commentators are unanimous in predicting that Vance's foreign policy will be substantially the same as Kissinger's - a reasonable prediction given that Kissinger himself said that Vance was his first choice for his successor...
...but the government has used counterinsurgency as an excuse to maintain a virtual state of war against the peasant population of Quich4 (including massive bombings)- a situation strongly denounced by church authorities and others concerned with human rights...
...Ace troubleshooter Vance went on so many special presidential missions to crisis spots in the 1960's that he became known as "chief of Lyndon Johnson's fire department...
...The following update was written by the NACLA-West Mexico Project in early December...
...Kjell Laugerud is unable to control the political and social aftershocks or to pacify the working class...
...after the assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968...
...invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965...
...The land is to be distributed to 9,000 peasant families, only a small fraction of those demanding land...
...Vance's partner Harry Heller and Simpson Thacher itself are both defendants in fraud suits brought by angry investors in 1974 who were swindled in a $100 million oil tax-shelter scheme - the Homestake Productions scandal...
...What has happened, according to one close observer, is that top U.S...
...The magnitude of the most recent land seizures, coupled with the general political discontent provoked by the devaluation, apparently forced the government to take action...
...According to the article, a Winchester inter-office memo revealed that the company's sales to South Africa in the first half of 1975 were valued at some $300,000, and indicated that "transshipment problems" in Greece and the development of sales to South Africa in 1976 were priority items for discussion...
...SIMPSON THACHER A further decisive factor in Vance's rise was his association with the powerful Wall Street law firm, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett...
...When the international recession of the early '70s began to restrict the U.S...
...Weisl placed him in strategic positions both in government and business circles...
...Last year Mexico's trade deficit was more than $3 billion...
...workers charge government complicity...
...WHERE DO SECRETARIES OF STATE COME FROM...
...to talk the South Koreans out of going to war with the North Koreans at the time of the Pueblo incident in January 1968...
...Green Berets...
...members of the Trilateral Commission...
...Among the firms investigated were Colt Industries and Olin Winchester, both based in Connecticut...
...The Company's president, U.S...
...Simpson Thacher is now one of the major U.S...
...The Rockefellers discovered Henry at Harvard and gave him a job at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund...
...The huge government deficits resulting from these subsidies have forced Mexico to borrow heavily from foreign banks and from international financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund...
...Arms sales may well be cut back under the Carter administration, but not significantly...
...forces in Vietnam...
...In July, another CNT-affiliated official disappeared in Mexico City, after having been picked up and questioned by police in Guatemala...
...The government's new Cabinet appointments in July reflected a sharp turn to the right and sparked protests in several public agencies...
...Immediately after the Revolution and then again in the '30s, extensive agrarian reform and progressive trade union legislation gained the support of workers and peasants...
...Attorney in New York, Robert Morgenthau, was investigating Manufacturers Hanover Trust for its alleged use as a conduit by black market operators in South Vietnam...
...While the main body of the Report will continue to provide in-depth analyses, we will use the supplement as an outlet for short articles, notices, reference guides, news updates, book reviews and critical commentary...
...The President dispatched him to defuse the Panama Canal Zone after the 1964 riots...
...to calm violence in Washington, D.C...
...In August, a peasant league leader and a factory union leader affiliated with the Communist union federation FASGUA were assassinated...
...tariffs on imports in 1972 - Mexico's trade balance went increasingly into the red...
...The ultra-right-wing party MLN has been recruiting "workers" who promised not to join the union to replace unionized workers and to function as a shock force in the factory...
...Among the countries mentioned during the investigation as transshipment points were Zambia, Botswana, Mozambique, Greece, the Canary Islands and West Germany...
...Thus, the various antagonistic political forces - which have long been kept in check by the PRI - are all waiting anxiously in the wings to judge the first actions of the new President...
...The daily survival struggle of Guatemalan workers has been intensified by the February 4 quake...
...Vance's wife, Grace Sloane, an heiress to the W & J Sloane furnishings chain, is related by marriage to the Vanderbilts and various other old-line families...
...The new administration will probably continue to restrict wages...
...to negotiate with the South Vietnamese in 1966...
...Vance's daughter Camilla, married the son of the president of the Mellon Bank...
...Thousands of workers and peasants were left without families, without homes, and without jobs...
...and Chile So...
...The NACLA Staff Mexico Our July-August 1976 "Harvest of Anger" issue explained the roots of the current landholding crisis in northwest Mexico...
...But their record against the guerrillas to date is very poor...
...And, on the other, it has pursued the growth of a free-enterprise economy based on unparalleled concessions and incentives to private, and especially foreign, capital...
...Training Programs for Foreign Military Personnel 2. (February) NICARAGUA: From Sandino to Somoza 3. (March) AMAZING GRACE: The W. R. Grace Corporation 4. (April) CHASE'S ROCKY ROAD: The Chase Manhattan Bank 5. (May-June) U.S...
...This investigation developed into an ongoing grand jury proceeding, and has led to the sentencing of a former Colt export manager for illegal gunrunning to South Africa-the first such sentencing under the Mutual Security Act...
...In 1974 alone, the government spent $1.3 billion to make up for losses in these industries - a. subsidy that particularly benefits the manufacturing sector, 40 percent of which is controlled by multinational corporations...
...and to assist Averell Harriman in ten months of peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese in Paris in 1968-69...
...However, objective conditions - inflation, recession, foreign debt, and general political unrest - are drawing the PRI's circle of maneuverability ever tighter...
...the world's leading weapons merchant...
...The government has attempted to control the EGP by more than doubling the police force and training a new counterinsurgency unit modeled on the U.S...
...By 1964 President Johnson appointed him Assistant Secretary of Defense...
...investments and the U.S...
...Next came Dean Rusk, another president of the Rockefeller Foundation...
...This act states that munitions may be exported only to countries on an approved list and that export licenses must indicate the ultimate destination of the arms...
...Moreover, the new Ministers generally represent hardline anti-labor, anti-nationalist, proprivate enterprise policies...
...Having lost his father at the age of five, Vance was greatly influenced by his cousin, "Uncle" John W. Davis, an attorney who "adopted" him and introduced him to law...
...arms manufacturers' exports of police equipment, which we had obtained through the Freedom of Information Act...
...In the public sector, workers at the General Hospital have been protesting since the quake against the unsafe and unhygienic conditions for both workers and patients, and went on strike in June...
...Cosmos was later investigated by the Watergate prosecutor as a possible conduit for illegal campaign contributions to Nixon...
...After "prepping" at Kent School in Connecticut, he went on to earn a B.A...
...student movement of 1988, it was then-Minister of the Interior Echeverria who ordered the army to move in...
...The Guatemalan working class has been weak and unorganized since the 1954 U.S.-sponsored counterrevolution overthrowing a progressive nationalist pro-labor government: the brutal and wholesale smashing of the labor movement in 1954 left less than 5% of the labor force unionized...
...to avert war between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus in November 1967...
...Moreover the workers, who most needed relief, ended up paying the costs of reconstruction through mandatory purchase of government reconstruction bonds...
...Others include Defense Secretary Harold Brown, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, Secretary of the Treasury Michael Blumenthal, and Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors Charles Schultze...
...The main difference will be a change in style - less international shuttling and fewer main stage performances by the Secretary of State...
...He asked Weisl, a trusted adviser, to be counsel for his committee and Weisl took Vance along as his assistant...
...The following article represents the first such contribution...
...a base of "popular support" (through government-supported peasant cooperatives) designed to contain class struggle...
...In our next issue we will offer a first-hand report by members of the project who are currently in Mexico...
...Henry Kissinger, world traueler, originated in the prestigious Rockefeller stables too...
...In September the courts authorized the firing of more than 200 workers at the factory...
...Guatemala As of December 1976, the American Friends of Guatemala discontinued publication of the Guatemala & Central America Report...
...This 346-page paperback contains most of the articles from the original...
...He later became President Johnson's key man in New York and was named head of the New York Democratic Party...
...But how did Vance get to be a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, or David Rockefeller's right hand man in the Council on Foreign Relations, or a member of Rockefeller's elite Trilateral Commission, or a Yale trustee, or President of the New York Bar, or a director of major corporations such as IBM, Pan Am and the New York Times...
...Vance is one of the remarkably large number of Trilateral Commission members who have been appointed top Carter aides...
...But since World War II, demands of the working class have been increasingly subordinated to the needs of foreign and national industrialists...
...He refused, however, to implicate any higher-ups at Colt or other firms...
...The Commission was founded in 1973 under the aegis of David Rockefeller in response to the weakening of the post-World War II U.S...
...September 1 the government announced the first of a two-step 100% devaluation of the peso, and then on November 19, out-going President Luis Echeverria expropriated nearly 250,000 acres of private farm land for distribution to angry peasants...
...Vance's elite education not only trained and groomed him in the ways of the powerful but also put him in contact with men who were to be his peers in the Establishment...
...But Harrar declined, so Nixon picked an old friend, William P. Rogers...
...To avert a general strike, at the last minute the government settled the conflict and met the strikers' demands...
...MERCHANTS OF REPRESSION: U.S...
...In addition to sales to overseas police forces, these firms also sell sporting and recreational weapons which, for example, white South African civilians are buying up by the thousands in response to recent uprisings by the majority black population.37 Cyrus Vance With U.S...
...Immediately after the Soviets announced their Sputnik triumph in 1957, then Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson cranked up his Armed Services Committee to hold special hearings aimed at boosting military and space programs...
...As Deputy Secretaryof Defense and President Johnson's special envoy, Vance helped plan the 1965 Dominican invasion and lay the groundwork for establishing the Balaguer government which still dominates the country...
...X) 1. (January) THE PENTAGON'S PROTEGES: U.S...
...It has sought, on the one hand, legitimacy in the eyes of workers and peasants by offering periodic social reforms...
...but it presents no demands which cannot be met within the existing system, and has limited itself generally to strikes and demonstrations...
...mob-linked money...
...economy catches cold, Mexico gets pneumonia...
...G & W paid over $1 million in fees to Vance's law firm in 1976 and Simpson Thacher's senior partner, Donald Oresman, sits on G & W's board of directors...
...Formed in April 1976, the CNUS includes eight major labor organizations (including Social Christian and Communist federations) and several important unions, such as teachers, bank, Guatemala City, electrical, communications, university and sugar workers...
...this capacity is what has forced the government and capital to negotiate...
Vol. 11 • January 1977 • No. 1
