Unionists reject Cold War campaign

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The top leadership of the AFL-CIO, in close collaboration with the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), has launched a campaign aimed at countering the deep opposition within the labor movement to U.S. interventionist policies in Central America.

The campaign includes labor seminars on Central America in nine states, tours by high labor officials to state AFL-CIO conventions, and the distribution of hundreds of pages of newly released "fact sheets" about the "horrors" of the Sandinista government of Nicaragua and the "virtues" of the "democratic" government of Jose Napoleon Duarte of El Salvador.

The campaign is scheduled to wind up in late October at a meeting in Anaheim, Calif., which will be held two days before the biennial AFL-CIO national convention.

The International Affairs Department of the AFL-CIO and AIFLD are thus hoping to line up as many delegates as possible at the convention behind their policies in support of the U.S. war against the people of Central America.

Isolate and overthrow Nicaragua The official kickoff of this campaign, described by one labor leader as "Kirkland's dog-and-pony show, occurred in New York on Sept. 13-14. There, Irving Brown, head of the AFL CIO's International Affairs Department, and William Doherty, head of AIFLD, told 100 carefully selected labor officials that "communism" must and typical CIA disinformation tactics (AIFLD's ties to the CIA are widely known and have been fully documented), alleges that "the Sandinistas in collusion with the government-created unions were and are determined to destroy the two democratic centers in Nicaragua, the Confederation of Trade Union Unity (CUS) and the Nicaraguan Workers Confederation (CTN)."

These "truths,, however, are not substantiated. In fact, various U.S. tradeunion delegations to Nicaragua have (continued on page 17)