Building the Cold War Together: The AFL and the U.S. Government in Latin America, 1944–51

How was the Cold War built in Latin America?  Ostensibly a conflict between superpowers, many historians now understand the Cold War as a kind of global civil war created by both national and international actors.  Labor was one of the most important such non-state actors, and this paper will argue that the international labor movement helped to build the Cold War social and political environment in Latin America.

World War II created a second “Popular Front” era, in which pro- and anti-Soviet groups were temporarily united in opposition to Nazi Germany.  But groups like the AFL did not really suspend their anti-Soviet activities, and reactivated such political networks before the end of World War II.  The labor umbrella group known as the Confederación de Trabajadores de América Latina (CTAL) had supported the war effort but was headed by the Mexican Marxist Vicente Lombardo Toledano, whose pro-Soviet views were disliked by the AFL’s international activists.  This paper uses newly available materials from the Jay Lovestone and George Meany archives to show how the AFL both pushed the U.S. government and cooperated with it to try to reduce the influence of the CTAL, eventually leading to the formation of the anti-Soviet union central known as the Confederación Interamericana de Trabajadores/Organización Regional Interamericana de Trabajadores (CIT/ORIT).  Thought the paper provides evidence of AFL and U.S. government collaboration, it questions how we should read the significance of that data.  By drawing comparisons with the AFL’s European activities in the early Cold War, it suggests that the splitting of Popular Fronts had relatively little to do with covert financial assistance.  Rather, AFL actions were read as a commitment of support to anti-Communists that was taken up by workers and union leadership around the world who wanted to split union centrals for their own purposes.