AIFLD

The American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) was established in 1962 as the AFL-CIO's Latin American arm, jointly funded by the US government (through USAID), major US corporations, and the CIA. Its stated mission was to build democratic trade unions throughout Latin America as a counterweight to communist labor organizing. In practice, AIFLD played a documented role in the destabilization campaigns that preceded the 1964 Brazilian coup deposing President Joao Goulart, the 1963 general strike that toppled Cheddi Jagan's elected government in British Guiana, and the 1973 Chilean coup against President Salvador Allende.¹

AIFLD was shut down in 1997 and reorganized along with three sister institutes into the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (the Solidarity Center), under AFL-CIO president John Sweeney.²

Founding and Structure

AIFLD was incorporated as a nonprofit in 1962, eighteen months after the 1959 Cuban Revolution prompted the Kennedy administration and the AFL-CIO to seek a more aggressive labor-organizing instrument in Latin America. In May 1961, AFL-CIO president George Meany had approached private foundations and government agencies seeking financing for the planned institute. AIFLD formally went into operation with its first training course in Washington in June 1962.³

George Meany served as president of AIFLD while simultaneously serving as president of the AFL-CIO. J. Peter Grace, chairman of W.R. Grace & Co. (a major chemical and shipping conglomerate with extensive Latin American operations), chaired AIFLD's board of trustees. Serafino Romualdi, the AFL-CIO's veteran Inter-American representative and a figure whose CIA cryptonym was ZRSIGN, served as AIFLD's executive director through 1966. William C. Doherty Jr. succeeded Romualdi as executive director and held the position for approximately thirty years.⁴

Funding Structure and CIA Connection

AIFLD's funding was almost entirely governmental. USAID provided approximately 93 percent of AIFLD's budget from 1962 to 1974, totaling at least $15 million annually by the organization's peak years. The AFL-CIO's own contribution varied between 2.5 and 4.5 percent of the total budget. The corporate board's financial contribution was modest but its membership was strategically significant.⁵

Corporate members of AIFLD's board included W.R. Grace & Co., Pan American Airways, Anaconda Copper (the Anaconda Company), Standard Oil affiliates (including Exxon and Shell), Chase Manhattan Bank, IBM, Koppers, Gillette, and Johnson & Johnson. These corporations shared a common interest in stable, anticommunist labor conditions across Latin America, where their investments were concentrated. Berent Friele, the Norwegian-born coffee dealer who served as Nelson Rockefeller's personal representative on Latin American affairs and was on Rockefeller's payroll at Rockefeller Center, also sat on the board, providing a direct link between AIFLD's governance and the Rockefeller network.⁶

The CIA's role was channeled through USAID and through a series of pass-through foundations. The Andrew Hamilton Foundation was identified as a CIA conduit at an August 31, 1964 hearing of a House Select Small Business Subcommittee chaired by Representative Wright Patman (D-TX). The Foundation channeled $25,000 per month to the International Federation of Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers for use in Latin America in cooperation with AIFLD. A February 24, 1967, Drew Pearson column estimated CIA money flowing to labor organizations at approximately $100 million per year across all programs.⁷

Philip Agee, the CIA case officer who served in Ecuador and Uruguay during the early 1960s before becoming the agency's most prominent defector, identified Romualdi as "the principal CIA agent for labor operations in Latin America" and described AIFLD as "a CIA controlled labor center financed through AID." Agee identified Doherty as a CIA agent in labor operations. In CIA records, Romualdi's operational pseudonym was "Charles Guymers."⁸

The CIA's International Organizations Division, which ran relationships with international labor, student, and cultural organizations throughout the Cold War period, exercised operational control over AIFLD's activities through the local CIA station in each country where AIFLD operated, while nominal administrative control remained with AIFLD's Washington headquarters.⁹

Training Operations

AIFLD's Washington training school opened in June 1962 and provided three-month residential courses to Latin American trade union leaders. The curriculum included instruction on anticommunist union organizing, collective bargaining, and what were described internally as techniques for countering Communist influence within unions. Trainees received monthly stipends and per diem payments that typically exceeded their normal wages, creating material incentives for continued cooperation with AIFLD after their return home.

AIFLD also operated a residential training facility in Front Royal, Virginia, which was used for more intensive courses for selected Latin American labor leaders. By 1972, AIFLD claimed to have trained 133,755 trade unionists across its programs.¹⁰

After completing their coursework, selected graduates received nine-month internship stipends to continue organizing work in their home countries. AIFLD also ran a network of in-country programs across eleven Latin American nations and conducted development projects, including the construction of affordable worker housing in cities where ORIT-affiliated (Inter-American Regional Labor Organization) unions operated. Prospective residents of the AIFLD housing projects were required to complete detailed questionnaires about their union affiliations and activities.¹¹

British Guiana: 1962-1964

AIFLD's operations in British Guiana were among the earliest and most extensively documented instances of US labor-CIA coordination to destabilize an elected leftist government. Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan, whose People's Progressive Party had won the 1961 election, was the target of a sustained CIA program to force his removal before British Guiana achieved independence.

Eight Guyanese trade union leaders participated in AIFLD's inaugural Washington training course in June 1962 and six returned to British Guiana in September 1962 on AIFLD internship stipends. When the British Guiana Trades Union Council (BGTUC) called a general strike in April 1963 against Jagan's labor relations bill, AIFLD interns were placed at the disposal of the strike committee and their stipends were extended. The 1963 general strike, which lasted approximately eighty days, has been described as one of the longest general strikes in modern history.

Financial support for the strike, coordinated through CIA channels, reached approximately $800,000 (equivalent to roughly $6.7 million in 2019 dollars), averaging around $10,000 per day. The funds were channeled through the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Retail Clerks International Union, the American Newspaper Guild, and AIFLD. The CIA operative Howard McCabe worked directly with the strike committee; Sidney Lens documented that at least six AFL-CIO representatives were sent to Guyana carrying approximately $1 million in CIA funds. Richard Ishmael, leader of the BGTUC, was an AIFLD-trained operative. Jagan's government ultimately fell in 1964 when electoral rules were changed under British pressure coordinated with Washington.¹²

Brazil: Andrew McLellan and the 1964 Coup

AIFLD's Brazil representative was Andrew McLellan, the AFL-CIO's Inter-American representative. McLellan operated in Brazil from the early 1960s, cultivating relationships with Brazilian labor leaders willing to organize against Goulart's proposed structural reforms, which included land redistribution and nationalization of foreign-owned enterprises.

In early 1963, AIFLD convened a special all-Brazilian training class of thirty-three unionists at its Washington facility. The course included approximately fifty hours of instruction on techniques for fighting Communist influence within unions, taught by Romualdi and Jay Lovestone (the AFL-CIO's international affairs director, himself a former Communist Party USA leader who became a CIA asset). The class then traveled to Western Europe and Israel with Romualdi before returning to Brazil.¹³

These thirty-three graduates returned to Brazil and participated in organizing employer lockouts, street demonstrations, and worker actions that destabilized the Goulart government in the months before the coup. On the night of March 31 - April 1, 1964, when the military moved against Goulart, AIFLD-trained union officials worked to ensure that calls for a general strike went unanswered. In the coup's immediate aftermath, the new military regime placed leftist-led unions into government trusteeships, with some AIFLD graduates installed as "intervenors" to purge these unions of Goulart sympathizers.¹⁴

At an AFL-CIO Labor News Conference in July 1964, three months after the coup, Doherty stated publicly that the Brazilian trainees "were very active in organizing workers" and that "some of them were so active that they became intimately involved in some of the clandestine operations of the revolution before it took place on April 1." This statement was notable for its candor. Doherty subsequently acknowledged that AIFLD's Brazilian program "was planned, and planned months in advance."¹⁵

McLellan acknowledged in statements to NACLA (the North American Congress on Latin America) that AIFLD had been active in Brazil's labor politics during the coup period, while disputing characterizations of AIFLD as a CIA instrument.¹⁶

After the coup, the AFL-CIO encouraged Brazilian workers to accept a military-imposed wage freeze. AIFLD-trained officials who had been installed as union intervenors cooperated with the regime's labor policies. NACLA documented AIFLD's subsequent role in Argentina in its 1975 report "AIFLD Losing Its Grip," tracking the pattern across the southern cone.¹⁷

The AFL-CIO's own archives on Brazil for the period following the 1964 coup are notably sparse. An investigation of the AFL-CIO archives found the Chile file for 1973 and the Brazil file for 1964 both remarkably thin compared to surrounding years, with the archive director acknowledging "it sounds like there was a pattern of people looking through and pulling things."¹⁸

Chile: 1971-1973

From 1971 to 1973, AIFLD channeled millions of dollars to right-wing unions and business associations opposing President Salvador Allende's Unidad Popular government. AIFLD's Chile program was closely coordinated with the US Embassy in Santiago and dovetailed with the CIA's objective of splitting the Chilean labor movement, where workers overwhelmingly supported Allende.

AIFLD supported the gremios (associations of right-wing middle-class professionals) and the country's conservative maritime workers union. In 1972 and 1973, with CIA financial support, truck owners and merchants staged a series of strikes aimed at creating economic chaos and undermining Allende's government. AIFLD contributed to gathering information on Chilean unionists and their political affiliations. After the September 11, 1973 coup, hundreds of trade unionists were rounded up, some of whom had worked with AIFLD.¹⁹

Following revelations of AIFLD's role in the Chilean coup, rank-and-file union members across the United States began demanding transparency about AIFLD's operations in the mid-1970s, with several union locals and labor councils calling on the AFL-CIO to fund its foreign programs independently rather than through USAID.²⁰

Operational Pattern

AIFLD's activities followed a pattern of parallel unionism: using the AFL-CIO's institutional credibility and labor movement relationships to organize anticommunist "parallel" unions in Latin American countries where US corporate and government interests faced nationalist labor movements. This pattern repeated in British Guiana (1962-1964), Brazil (1964), the Dominican Republic, and Chile (1973).

George Meany described AIFLD publicly as "a working agency of the United States government," a characterization that aligned with J. Peter Grace's description of AIFLD as a joint government-business-labor venture whose purpose was, in Grace's words, to make "the investment climate more attractive and inviting" for US corporate interests and to teach "workers to increase their company's business." Doherty echoed this framing in his own public statements: "Our collaboration [with business] takes the form of trying to make the investment climate more attractive and inviting."²¹

AIFLD's training programs went beyond labor organizing to include civic and political organization techniques. Graduates moved into business associations, political parties, and government positions in the military governments that followed coups in which AIFLD had been active.²²

Congressional Scrutiny

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on AIFLD on August 1, 1969, examining its structure, funding, and activities. The Church Committee (the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 1975-1976) examined the CIA's use of private organizational structures, including labor institutions, as pass-throughs for covert operations funding. Victor Reuther, a senior official of the United Auto Workers, told reporters in 1966 that Jay Lovestone and the AFL-CIO were "involved" with the CIA, criticizing AIFLD's role in the Brazilian coup; journalistic exposés the following year substantiated his claims by revealing the CIA's ties to the labor federation.²³