Labor, Housewives, and the CIA: The 1963 Hostage Crisis at Bolivia's Siglo XX Mining Camp

In the early 1960s, the John F. Kennedy administration approved overt and covert subsidies to Jay Lovestone’s international affairs committee of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), for the purpose of setting up an institute for training Latin American labor leaders in the benefits of “free trade unionism.”  The resulting organization, known as the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), became an ardent supporter of US foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere.  By subverting leftist unions, undermining the support of local communists within Latin American labor, and organizing parallel, anticommunist labor federations, AIFLD played an important and under-appreciated role in the Latin American Cold War. By looking at the case of Bolivia, this paper explores how AIFLD served as a conduit for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was charged with carrying out Kennedy’s foreign policy of anticommunist development in the Third World.  Bolivian laborers' response, narrated in this paper's final section, was as violent as it was rapid: Communist miners kidnapped three US officials, holding them under the tutelage of the Siglo XX mining camp's militant housewives committee for eleven tense days.  Employing US labor records, government documents, and first-hand Bolivian accounts, this paper demonstrates the central role played by US liberal concepts of Third World modernization in justifying an anticommunist intervention in Bolivia, which reached its culmination in the CIA/AFL-CIO nexus and the violent response by one group of Bolivian women.