The AFL-CIO and ORIT in latin America’s andean region, from the 1950s to the 1960s

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the relationship between US organized labor, Andean trade unions, and the Organizatión Regional Interamericana de Trabajadores (ORIT), the Inter-American regional organization of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).2 Scholarly literature on the so-called free trade union movement in the Americas tends to portray ORIT as an organization strongly dominated by its US affiliate, the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), after the merging of the AFL and CIO in 1955.3 Particularly during the first two decades of the Cold War, ORIT was viewed-by opponent Left-wing and Christian unionists, as well as by many ICFTU leaders-as a US instrument for anti-Communist propaganda. A thorough study of the ICFTU/ORIT and the AFL-CIO archives-in particular, the correspondence between US and Latin American labor leaders-indicates that a more nuanced analysis of the dynamics within the free trade union movement in the Americas is required. I argue that ORIT’s actions reached further than pure anticommunism and that if ORIT became a Cold War tool for anti-Communist campaign in some countries, it was not in the first place due to US pressure but rather to Latin America’s own concern with Communist dissemination and other political, economic, and trade union matters.