U.s. Unions' Fake Chile

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The publicity surrounding the boycott of Chilean goods by the United States Trade Union federation the AFL-CIO is designed to cover up its real political objectives.

First, we should make it clear that the Workers Socialist League has consistently called upon the trade union leaders in imperialist countries to organise the blacking of trade and other economic links with the murderous dictatorship •in Chile and with other similarly repressive regimes.

The recently instituted Chile boycott however has little more than a superficial resemblance to such a policy of blacking.

It is largely an imperialist manoeuvre.

It started life last May when the AFL-CIO sent a "solidarity team" to Chile in response to a request by the "Group of Ten" a self appointed group of mainly Christian Democratic "trade unionists"

The bureaucrats who led the team campaigned after their return for the US unions to impose a boycott on Chilean goods as a way of putting pressure on Pinochet's junta to restore the rights to organise "free trade unions"

CIA agents

The boycott was taken up by AFL-CIO and proposed the to ORIT (Interamerican Regional Organisation of Workers) which is officially the Latin American section of the Europe-based anti-Communist trade union federation, the ICFTU.

The ICFTU comprises the British TUC and most of the European social democratic unions.

Though in theory the AFL-CIO is not affiliated to the ICFTU it dominates ORIT through its own Latin American agency the AIFLD (American Agency for Free Labour Development).

Neither the AIFLD nor the ORIT which it dominates, are workers' organisations-not even bureaucratically deformed ones.

They are direct agencies of imperialism.

The AIFLD has, since its formation in 1962, undertaken a vast programme of pro-imperialist subversion throughout Latin America.

Many AIFLD functionaries are, as Philip Agee revealed in his book on the CIA, CIA agents.

Extensive interests

The AIFLD is jointly Carter form such fake unions, these imperialist agents cannot carry out their counter-revolutionary task.

That task aiso requires that AFL-CIO, AIFLD and ORIT should urgently do something to offset the damage done to their false pretensions as a labour bureaucracy by the increasing body of published information exposing their criminal counterrole in Latin America.

The objectives of the present boycott are, therefore, the reactionary ones of trying to persuade the Pinochet dictatorship to allow pro-imperialist "unions' to operate.

Reactionary

The reactionary nature of the ORIT/AFL-CIO boycott is also shown by the fact that it is supposed to apply equally, not only to the reactionary Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua (added at the insistence of some Latin American unions) but also to Cuba, included at the insistence of the pro-imperialist AFL-CIO leaders.

The present boycott, therefore, must be replaced by a blacking of supplies to the reactionary Latin American dictatorships based on clear demands for the restoration of full democratic rights and not just rights for fake pro-imperialist "unions"

Workers should also refuse to implement any instructions from their reactionary leaders to impose a boycott on trade with the degenerated Cuban workers' state.

The policy of an embargo on Cuban trade is one which was used from 1960 by the imperialists in an attempt to destroy the revolution in Cuba.

*Expose AFL-CIO *Black supplies to the Pinochet and Somoza dictatorships!

*Defend the tion!

The Chilean Junta in 1973 AFL-CIO chief George Meany Their cheeks glowing with expectation, the capitalists of West Germany are looking ahead to 1979 coloured with rosy tints of healthy profits.

But the New Year has opened for them under a very large and very black cloud obstinately refusing