Reforming latin american labor: The AFL-CIO and latin America’s cold war

Abstract

In January 1947, Serafino Romualdi led an American Federation of Labor (AFL) delegation to Buenos Aires. Assigned to Latin America as the AFL’s regional representative that year, Romualdi sought to foster an ideology of liberal labor internationalism that called for the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively for labor independence from the state, and for the defense of private property rights. An Italian immigrant who had fled Mussolini’s Italy, he fiercely opposed both Fascism and communism, but found the specter of such "totalitarian" ideologies lurking under the surface of existing international labor organizations (most notably the World Federation of Trade Unions, WFTU). Furthermore, he believed that freedom was synonymous with liberalism and that formal ties between labor and the state served to erode freedom. Romualdi spoke fluent Spanish, traveled frequently throughout Latin America, and enjoyed substantial high-level contacts with the region’s political and trade union leaders. He was, in other words, uniquely suited to the job. Through Romualdi’s efforts, the AFL-and after 1955 the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations)-became active in efforts to liberalize Latin America’s trade union movements even before the US government provided a systemic commitment to such efforts.1.