Agrarian Unionism

In the late 1960s, the AIFLD’s Agrarian Union Development Department used training programs and small-scale community development projects in El Salvador’s countryside to begin organizing campesino associations called “communal unions.” Under the direction of AIFLD staffer Michael Hammer, these associations were in 1969 combined into a politically moderate national campesino organization called UCS (Salvadoran Communal Union).

From the start, UCS was meant to steer rural workers away from radicalism by helping them form cooperatives and advocating for modest reforms to improve their standard of living. But any type of campesino organizing was a highly sensitive issue in El Salvador, which was still scarred by a failed 1932 rural uprising that resulted in the systematic state murder of between ten thousand and thirty thousand campesinos.

In 1973, large landholders complained UCS was becoming “overly enthusiastic” in trying to empower campesinos. In response, Salvadoran president Arturo Molina kicked AIFLD out of the country. Despite the institute’s departure, UCS continued to exist with protection from the US Embassy, and AIFLD continued influencing the campesino organization from outside the country over the next several years. UCS membership increased to as much as 100,000, and the organization remained on friendly terms with the Salvadoran government, which established an “agrarian transformation” agency meant to eventually implement some kind of land reform.

In the late 1970s, José Rodolfo Viera, himself a campesino, became the head of UCS. Though his formal education only went up to the fourth grade, Viera was a shrewd and competent leader trusted by the UCS rank and file. In mid-1979, facing growing left-wing protests and watching in horror as the Sandinistas took over neighboring Nicaragua, the Salvadoran regime welcomed AIFLD back into the country, with Hammer serving as the institute’s lead representative.

Reform and Repression

Only months later, reformist military officers seized control of the government and, after a power struggle among them, a new ruling junta embraced a counterinsurgency strategy that adopted a combination of repression and reform. UCS leader Viera was tapped to serve as head of the government’s agrarian transformation agency.

In March 1980, with technical support from AIFLD’s Hammer and UCS’s Viera, the junta implemented the first phase of agrarian reform, which involved expropriating large estates comprising about 15 to 17 percent of El Salvador’s arable land and handing them over to newly formed cooperatives. But this was accompanied with declaration of a state of siege, which imposed severe restrictions on travel, press freedom, and freedom of association, while also granting state security forces virtually unlimited power to arrest and detain “subversives.”

Soldiers were deployed to the countryside as part of the siege, primarily in areas affected by the agrarian reform. Ostensibly there to enforce the reform by ensuring that landlords peacefully gave up their estates, the military actually hunted down suspected guerrillas and their sympathizers. In the first year of the agrarian reform, state security forces murdered an estimated five hundred campesino leaders and hundreds more cooperative members. Though initially scheduled to last thirty days, the state of siege would be continuously extended over the next seven years.

Implementation of the agrarian reform’s second phase, which would have transferred ownership of 70 percent of the country’s most fertile and productive land from a tiny elite to poor campesinos, was perpetually blocked by right-wingers in the oligarchy and military, meaning that the reform could never live up to its promise of genuine social and economic change.

Getting Away With Murder

In the meantime, in the face of escalating repression, the country’s mass left-wing organizations, guerrilla armies, and Communist Party united in late 1980 to form the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). Named in honor of one of the organizers of the 1932 campesino uprising, the FMLN dedicated itself to overthrowing the oligarchy and military regime through armed struggle.

Though they had effectively defeated agrarian reform and used its accompanying state of siege to terrorize campesinos, the Salvadoran right was nevertheless outraged that such a reform had ever been conceived of in the first place and swore revenge. On the night of January 3, 1981, Hammer, Viera, and Mark David Pearlman — a young agrarian reform expert who had recently begun working for AIFLD — were fatally shot in the coffee shop of San Salvador’s Sheraton Hotel. It was the first time in AIFLD’s nineteen-year history that any of its staff had been murdered.

The audacious attack, carried out by two plainclothes national guardsmen, was later determined to have been ordered by right-wing military officers with ties to notorious death squad leader Roberto D’Aubuisson, who had engineered the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero the year before. Nevertheless, AIFLD director Bill Doherty openly speculated that maybe leftists were responsible. “We don’t know who did the killing,” he said in his first public remarks after the incident. “It could have been people either from the extreme right or extreme left.”

Coming one month after a death squad raped and killed four US churchwomen near El Salvador’s international airport, the Sheraton murders shocked Washington. The incoming Reagan administration — eager to increase military assistance to El Salvador to defeat the FMLN — pleaded with the junta to bring the killers to justice to avoid jeopardizing the flow of US aid. Doherty and the AFL-CIO helped convince Congress to require President Ronald Reagan to “certify” that the Salvadoran government was making progress toward the prosecution of all those involved in the murders of the churchwomen and AIFLD staffers as a condition of future military assistance.

Between 1982 and 1985, a succession of Salvadoran courts, stacked with judges from the country’s elite, threw out all charges against the officers who had masterminded the AIFLD murders on the basis of “insufficient evidence.” These decisions were upheld by El Salvador’s Supreme Court. Only the two gunmen were ever tried. They were convicted in February 1986, but released in December 1987 as part of a peace plan granting amnesty to those imprisoned for political crimes.

Running Interference

All the while, Reagan continued certifying to Congress that progress was being made in bringing the death squads to heel so military aid would continue. For their part, AFL-CIO officials went back and forth on their support for ongoing US military assistance depending on the latest developments in the Sheraton case. AIFLD’s program in El Salvador became its most expensive of that in any country in the 1980s, receiving between $2 million and $4 million per year from USAID.

Besides backing the failed agrarian reform, AIFLD devoted most of its resources in El Salvador to supporting the nation’s center-right Christian Democratic Party and its leader, José Napoleón Duarte. In late 1980, the institute helped form a coalition of six nonradical unions and campesino organizations called the UPD (Democratic Popular Unity), which claimed to represent three hundred thousand workers and peasants. In addition to being moderate, all the organizations within the UPD relied on funding from USAID via the AIFLD.

During El Salvador’s high-stakes 1984 presidential election, the institute gave up to $800,000 to Duarte’s campaign through the UPD, while the CIA also gave an estimated $200,000. In exchange for the UPD’s support, Duarte and the Christian Democrats promised to enact genuine social and economic reforms, rein in the death squads, cease the repression, and sue for peace with the FMLN guerrillas — promises that would quickly be broken.

Much to the delight of AIFLD and the State Department, the Christian Democrats were victorious in the 1984 election, and Duarte became El Salvador’s new president. But soon afterward, some in the UPD began publicly criticizing Duarte for brushing off their pleas to work on finding a negotiated settlement with the guerrillas.

Such criticisms dismayed AIFLD leaders because, along with the Reagan administration and Duarte himself, they still believed the guerrillas would be defeated outright and were therefore unserious about resolving the civil war through peace talks. Fearing the UPD might be becoming too sympathetic with the FMLN, in December 1984, the institute created a new Salvadoran labor confederation over which it could maintain more direct control.

Disillusioned with both Duarte and AIFLD, in early 1986 the remaining UPD affiliates joined forces with El Salvador’s more radical, leftist unions to form the National Union of Salvadoran Workers. By the late 1980s, then, the Salvadoran labor movement was divided into two major factions, one tied to the FMLN revolutionaries and the other almost totally a creation of the AIFLD and the US Embassy.

The National Labor Committee

The AIFLD’s many intrigues in El Salvador did not escape the notice of US labor leaders and union members. Like much of the public, US trade unionists feared that Reagan’s aggressive interventionism in Central America might escalate into another Vietnam-style quagmire. Many US labor activists questioned why the AFL-CIO was working so closely with the blatantly anti-union Reagan on foreign policy issues, especially in El Salvador.

Moreover, left-leaning US unionists were still wounded from the AFL-CIO’s staunch support for the Vietnam War and did not want to see that mistake repeated. After the AIFLD murders in January 1981, several cross-union committees were formed in cities like New York, Boston, San Jose, and Seattle with the goal of getting the wider labor movement to oppose Reagan’s Central America policy. By July, over one hundred union locals had passed resolutions opposing further US military aid to El Salvador.

The launching of the National Labor Committee in Support of Democracy and Human Rights in El Salvador (NLC) in 1981 would prove to be one of the most significant developments for US labor internationalism since the start of the Cold War. By 1983, twelve national unions belonged to the NLC through their top officials. In June 1983, the NLC sent a delegation of seven union leaders to El Salvador on a factfinding mission.

After meeting with US Embassy officials who mistakenly assumed they were there on behalf of AIFLD, visiting imprisoned Salvadoran trade unionists whom the AFL-CIO had abandoned due to their left-wing politics, and getting a grim picture of the overall violence and repression facing union activists in the country, the NLC delegation published their findings in a report widely circulated within US labor circles.

The report charged that there was “no trade union freedom in El Salvador” and that Salvadoran unionists were “workers who have organized to fight for dignity and decency,” which made them supposed “subversives” according to “the twisted logic of politics in El Salvador.” The report further asserted that the AIFLD-supported agrarian reform was “not working” and was even “structured not to work” because rightists in the Salvadoran government were blocking its full implementation.

Overall, the NLC delegation argued that by supplying the Salvadoran government with military aid, Washington was complicit in severe labor and human rights abuses — a message that directly went against the AFL-CIO’s official line that thanks to US assistance, progress was being made toward turning El Salvador into a beacon of democracy. As a result of the factfinding mission, the NLC developed friendly relationships with several leftist Salvadoran unions whose leaders and members routinely faced violent repression at the hands of death squads and state security forces.

For the next several years, the NLC and its network of US labor activists would rapidly jump into action whenever reports emerged of Salvadoran unionists getting arrested or being “disappeared.” Pressuring both the US and Salvadoran governments, the NLC helped as many as forty unionists get out of jail or avoid torture or murder during the civil war.

Showdown

By the mid-1980s, the AFL-CIO’s anti-communist leaders were beginning to fear the National Labor Committee’s growing influence within the US union movement. The simmering tensions between the NLC and AFL-CIO leadership eventually exploded into outright conflict.

Just as the federation, AIFLD, and Reagan administration waged an all-out public relations effort to paint the Christian Democrats as El Salvador’s great centrist hope — attempting to convince Congress and the American public that a turning point had been achieved with Duarte’s election — the NLC undermined these claims through a second factfinding delegation in early 1985. The delegation reported that the anti-labor repression was only continuing under Duarte, and that no progress was being made in bringing the murderers of Hammer, Viera, and Pearlman to justice.

Eight months after the NLC’s second factfinding mission, the AFL-CIO held its biennial convention in Anaheim, California. There, a resolution on Central America ignited the first truly open debate on foreign policy in the federation’s history. Drafted by the International Affairs Department, the resolution offered a simple condemnation of the Sandinistas — without mentioning the atrocities of the Contras — and praised Duarte while ignoring the ongoing repression in El Salvador.

As the back-and-forth on the convention floor unfolded, transforming from a discussion on a single resolution on Central America into a debate on labor’s support for US imperialism, it was television star Ed Asner who delivered the most poignant remarks. President of the Screen Actors Guild (the same union Ronald Reagan had once led), Asner was best known for playing the curmudgeonly news producer Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. His spin-off series, Lou Grant, was cancelled by CBS in 1982 after Asner publicly protested US policy in Central America and used his celebrity platform to raise funds for a leftist medical relief committee in El Salvador.

On the convention floor, Asner noted the hypocrisy of the AFL-CIO condemning alleged rights violations of the Sandinistas while remaining silent about the United States illegally mining Nicaragua’s harbors and the murder of left-wing unionists and journalists in El Salvador under Duarte, saying that “support of the Nicaraguan Contras is unforgivable” and “labor support of brutally repressive regimes is unforgivable.” Asner pointed out that under Duarte, AIFLD and the AFL-CIO were “no closer to justice in the murder of our two representatives, Hammer and Pearlman.”

He concluded by expressing his pride at being part of the labor movement, but added:

It does not make me proud to see us bolstering the foreign policies of those whose stated goals include the destruction of our own labor movement like Orrin Hatch and Ronald Reagan. I do know which side I’m on, and it’s not theirs.

I don’t want the labor movement to do the dirty work of President Reagan or our large multinational corporations. And I don’t want any of Orrin Hatch’s National Endowment for Democracy money to do it either.

When Senator Hatch is ready to endow true democracy and trade unionism here at home, then maybe I’ll talk to him about Central America. . . . I love the labor movement and the things it stands for. It makes me more of a human being. That’s why I’m here. It is because I love the labor movement that I don’t want to see it sullied by any foreign policy that belies our highest ideals.