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DESCRIPTION:11/12/25  LEPAIO Panel On Venezuela, AFL-CIO and US Imperialist Threat Of 
 Invasion\nLEPAIO Educational Panel: The AFL-CIO &  Venezuela A History Of 
 Subversion & Counter-Revolution\nNovember 11, 2025 8PM EST/7PM CST/5PM 
 PST\n\nSpeakers:\nSteve Ellner, Historian & Professor Emeritus Universidad 
 Oriente, Puerto La Cruz\nJames Jordan, Alliance For Global Justice 
 \nRicardo Ortiz, Labor Researcher Puerto Rican Internationalist\n\nThe 
 Trump government has threatened to invade Venezuela and overthrow the 
 Maduro government. The role of the AFL-CIO leadership and the US government 
 funded "Solidarity Center" has a long record of supporting the overthrow of 
 governments in Venezuela. This panel\n will look at this history and what 
 workers can do now to change this policy and also build real international 
 labor worker links with the workers and people of Venezuela.\n\nThis is 
 sponsored by the Labor Education Project On AFL-CIO International 
 Operations\nhttps://groups.google.com/g/lepaio\n\nNovember 11, 2025 8PM 
 EST/7PM CST/5PM PST\nTo Join Zoom 
 Meeting\nhttps://us02web.zoom.us/j/85040415266?pwd=UzpmsgnxaUAFo6nYWifkKBDrohw7y9.1\nMeeting 
 ID: 850 4041 5266\n\nNewly Revealed Documents Show How the AFL-CIO Aided US 
 Interference in 
 Venezuela\n\nhttps://jacobin.com/2020/08/venezuela-hugo-chavez-afl-cio-united-states\nhttps://jacobin.com/2020/08/venezuela-hugo-chavez-afl-cio-united-states\n\nNewly 
 Revealed Documents Show How the AFL-CIO Aided US Interference in 
 Venezuela\nBY\nTIM GILL\nThe AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center has a long 
 history of working hand in glove with the US government in undermining 
 democracy and left labor movements throughout the world. The center 
 emphasizes it has shifted away from these Cold War tactics in recent years. 
 But newly obtained documents show that the Solidarity Center has worked 
 closely with the US to undermine the Venezuelan government in the recent 
 past.\n\nPresident Hugo Chávez addresses his supporters during a massive 
 rally called as a show of strength to counter an opposition-led strike that 
 has battered the nation's oil industry, on December 7, 2002 in Caracas, 
 Venezuela. The strike follows the opposition's failed coup attempt against 
 President Chávez earlier that year, in which the US played many angles. 
 (Miraflores / Getty Images)\nJacobin‘s fall issue, “Borders,” is out 
 now. Follow this link to get a discounted subscription to our beautiful 
 print quarterly.\nThis piece has been updated with a response from the 
 AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center.\n\nDuring the Cold War, the United States 
 sought to defeat communism. Key to that effort was the United States’ 
 attempt to match and defeat the Soviet Union’s influence around the 
 world. In many locations, though, communist and socialist movements 
 developed not as puppet movements of Moscow, but organically — 
 particularly student, labor, and peasant organizations.\n\n\nAs a result, 
 the United States worked on multiple fronts, usually clandestinely, to stop 
 the rise of leftist movements, often with zero concern for democracy or 
 basic human rights. A key part of that effort included confronting and 
 marginalizing leftist labor groups.\n\nAcross much of the world, the 
 American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations 
 (AFL-CIO) acted as an international arm of US foreign policy, both before 
 and during the Cold War. In doing so, the AFL-CIO sought to 
 undermineleft-leaning and communist groups, labor unions, and governments 
 — with little concern for democracy and often with no compunction about 
 using or supporting brutal violence — in Italy and France in the 1940s, 
 Guatemala in the 1950s, Brazil in the 1960s, Chile in the 1970s, and many 
 other countries.\n\nThe union federation also aligned with repressive 
 right-wing dictatorships supportive of US anticommunist foreign policy 
 efforts by working with and funding groups aligned with such regimes. Kim 
 Scipes and William Robinson, for example, have each offered a thorough 
 account of how the AFL-CIO aligned with labor groups affiliated with the 
 Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a 
 regime which regularly repressed, murdered, and disappeared trade unionists 
 and activists.\n\nWith the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy 
 (NED) in 1983, the AFL-CIO began to work in tandem with this newfound 
 quasi-governmental agency on advancing US foreign policy interests abroad 
 under the auspices of “democracy promotion.” Into the present, the 
 AFL-CIO has retained this partnership and “promoted democracy” through 
 the Solidarity Center (SC), formerly named the American Center for 
 International Labor Solidarity.\n\nOn its website, the SC describes itself 
 as “[e]mpowering workers to raise their voice for dignity on the job, 
 justice in their communities and greater equality in the global economy.” 
 In recent years, the AFL-CIO has explicitly sought to shed its Cold Warrior 
 image and portray itself as solely interested in the nonpartisan promotion 
 of workers’ rights. In particular, former president John Sweeney, who was 
 elected AFL-CIO leader in 1995 as part of a new progressive slate in the 
 federation, “forcedseveral of the AFL-CIO’s most notorious cold 
 warriors into retirement,” and at the outset of his presidency, “saw 
 unimpeded neo-liberalism a greater threat to American workers than 
 ‘communism.’”\n\nBut despite such invocations, the AFL-CIO through 
 the SC has continued to confront leftist governments abroad, particularly 
 in South America, by funding and supporting groups opposed to Hugo Chávez 
 and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and their United Socialist Party of 
 Venezuela (PSUV) allies.\n\nThe AFL-CIO argues that it operates 
 independently of the US foreign policy establishment. But documents on the 
 federation’s recent activities in Venezuela I obtained through Freedom of 
 Information Act (FOIA) requests indicate otherwise. These documents suggest 
 that whatever changes have taken place in the AFL-CIO since the end of the 
 Cold War, in recent years, the federation did not entirely give up on 
 attempting to undermine those same governments that US state leadership has 
 also opposed — regardless of whether or not those governments truly 
 respect workers’ rights.\n\nWorking Alongside the Golpistas\n\nMany 
 scholars have detailed how the SC provided considerable support for the 
 Confederación de Trabajadores de Venezuela (CTV), a labor confederation 
 historically affiliated with the opposition party Acción Democrática and 
 opposed to the Chávez government. In 2001 and 2002, the SC provided 
 funding for CTV as it planned protests against the Chávez government, 
 designed to induce a military coup d’état. Indeed, in April 2002, CTV 
 leadership marched alongside the business community leadership, headed by 
 the Venezuelan Federation of Chambers of Commerce (Fedecámaras), and 
 opposition politicians and activists to call for the end of the Chávez 
 government.\n\nAlthough a group of military members detained Chávez for 
 nearly two days, mass counterprotests by poor and working-class Venezuelans 
 and internal disunity among the coup plotters overturned these efforts. For 
 nearly the duration of the interim government, CTV leadership demanded the 
 removal of Chávez. In the immediate years following the coup, the AFL-CIO 
 continued to work with CTV — all with funding from the NED, the same 
 group that largely funded the AFL-CIO’s Cold War meddling in the 1980s. 
 Eva Golinger has detailed these relations in her work on how the coup 
 against Chávez unfolded with plotting and assistance from CTV leader 
 Carlos Ortega.\n\n\nFollowing the failed coup, CTV — once again alongside 
 Fedecámaras — engaged in a lockout in the petroleum industry. This 
 effectively paralyzed the country, which is entirely reliant on energy to 
 maintain its economy and garner foreign currency for imports. Workers 
 opposed to these efforts and the broader anti-Chávez sentiment being 
 stoked in the country formed a new confederation of unions with government 
 support: Unión Nacional de Trabajadores de Venezuela (“National 
 Workers’ Union of Venezuela”). To a large extent, these efforts 
 neutralized CTV’s capacity to undermine the Chávez government, 
 particularly within the formal labor sector.\n\nStill, the AFL-CIO 
 continued to support CTV efforts to confront the Venezuelan government. In 
 recently released documents garnered from a FOIA request, it is clear that 
 the SC continued its challenge to the Chávez government and actively 
 sought to undermine labor efforts pursued by the socialists — as recently 
 as 2014.\n\n\n\nIn these documents, the SC portrays the Chávez government 
 as a brutally authoritarian regime that limited freedom of expression and 
 cracked down on opposition activities. In many of its program descriptions, 
 the SC asserts that the Chávez “government has increased measures to 
 limit political opposition activities, curb freedom of expression, and 
 increase control over popular organization and participation.” Still, the 
 SC seemed to recognize the reality that Chávez did indeed retain much 
 support, writing that he had “come to command such control over the 
 institutions of the country precisely because his message keys into the 
 deep resentment of many of the poor and marginalized working people of the 
 country.”\n\nUnder the Chávez government, opposition members routinely 
 decried and condemned him and his view of socialism within multiple media 
 outlets, and they continually participated in elections and won electoral 
 contests (that is, when they actually decided to participate in elections 
 rather than boycott them).\n\nFor instance, though the opposition pulled 
 out of the 2005 legislative elections in an attempt to demonstrate how 
 authoritarian the Chávez government was — a move even discouraged by 
 many US state functionaries — elections went forward with international 
 monitors guaranteeing that the elections were free and 
 fair.\n\nNonetheless, the SC in its reporting during this period depicts 
 the Chávez government as rigging the vote and as systematically destroying 
 any opposition movement, writing that “the presence of opposition parties 
 was completely eliminated from the National Assembly,” and then claiming 
 in a footnote that “opposition parties pulled out of the parliamentary 
 elections . . . due to unfair elections conditions.” In later 
 legislative elections in 2010, though, when the opposition chose to 
 participate, they won 65 out of 165 seats. In response to questions about 
 these documents, the Solidarity Center said the following:\n\nWe are 
 disappointed that, to fit your predisposed assumptions, you ignored 
 explicit program information regarding our work with a broad coalition of 
 politically diverse unions, academics, human rights organizations and other 
 civil society groups who convened to address egregious worker rights 
 violations in the country. That is the fundamental work of the global labor 
 movement and central to our work everywhere.\nClearly Wrong 
 Justifications\n\nHow has the AFL-CIO specifically confronted Venezuelan 
 socialists in recent years?\n\nThroughout the period 2006–2014, for which 
 I received documents from the NED detailing SC activities in Venezuela, the 
 SC generally sought to combat two efforts pursued by the Chávez 
 government: the building of workplace cooperatives and the move toward 
 workers’ councils.\n\nFrom the SC perspective, these moves were designed 
 to displace the power of traditional unions, such as CTV, and to exercise 
 control over labor in a top-down manner. For instance, the SC claims that 
 while councils were “meant to ‘empower’ . . . they are actually 
 tied to the government and political parties.” Councils often were tied 
 to the PSUV, but it’s hard to understand why the SC decided that meant it 
 should support efforts to oppose them.\n\n\n\nMuch of this information 
 presented within SC program descriptions remains replete with inaccuracies. 
 In particular, their rationale for their involvement in the country in the 
 first place is justified with plainly false information.\n\nThe group, for 
 instance, references legislation titled the “Law of Popular 
 Participation” that allegedly mandates that only PSUV party members or 
 socialist supporters may participate in and found community councils 
 throughout the country. Throughout several years, SC documents report that 
 as “defined in the Law of Popular Participation, community councils 
 cannot be formed by or include general assembly participants that are not 
 members of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, or who are not ‘known 
 members’ of ‘Twentieth Century Socialism.’” It also alleges that 
 the labor legislation was also modeled after this piece of legislation — 
 allowing only PSUV members to form workers’ councils.\n\nThere are a 
 couple of problems with this. First, Venezuela never saw the introduction 
 of any legislation titled the “Law of Popular 
 Participation.”\n\n\nIt’s possible the group is making reference to the 
 Law of Community Councils, which formalized the existence of neighborhood 
 community councils. Indeed, Chávez viewed the councils as the engine of 
 Venezuelan democracy, wherein community members could propose projects, 
 discuss community efforts, and request funding from the state.\n\nHowever, 
 and second, the SC alleges that only PSUV members or known supporters of 
 socialism can participate in the community councils. This is absolutely 
 false.\n\nAs Gabriel Hetland’s work has shown, opposition supporters 
 routinely formed community councils within areas wherein the opposition 
 retained support, and they, like chavistas, recognized the importance of 
 these groups. Should Maduro leave office in Venezuela any time soon, few 
 expects that community councils will evaporate.\n\nSC reports reveal that 
 their efforts were primarily directed at hosting conferences and workshops 
 wherein they might train individuals to directly challenge the Chávez 
 government’s proposed activities. Indeed, in their 2012–13 report, for 
 instance, the SC describes how the group “will support industrial 
 unions’ efforts to resist the imposition of undemocratic workplace 
 organizations.” Within their training workshops, they pledged to help 
 individuals confront “the imposition of ‘worker councils’ charged 
 with usurping representation functions and subjugating workers to 
 politicized, undemocratic organizational 
 structures.”\n\n\n\nSpecifically, the group describes how their workshops 
 would help to “coordinat[e] concerted resistance actions” to the 
 government’s move toward workers’ councils and cooperatives, as well as 
 helping raise “basic awareness of these issues among rank and file 
 membership, mounting legal defense strategies . . . building coalitions 
 among unions and broader civil society where possible, advocating policies 
 [to] political leaders in government and National Assembly, and developing 
 broader community support.”\n\n\n\nIn their development and hosting of 
 workshops and conferences, the SC bused in Venezuelan 
 oppositionists-in-training from throughout the country for events funded, 
 catered, and rented with US taxpayer funding. They also funded legal and 
 technical advisors who, in some cases, helped their allies in their 
 confrontations with the Chavez government\n\nIn particular, their programs 
 focused on workers within the formal sector, including the petroleum 
 industry and mining and metals manufacturing, as well as support for 
 journalists. They also funded the “maintenance and improvement” of a 
 website for Venezuelans interested in pushing back against Chávez 
 government efforts and “to allow ongoing discussion and dissemination of 
 information on how to defend basic labor rights and labor code 
 reform.”\n\nIn coordination with their allies in the country, the SC 
 sought to provide the infrastructure to bring local allies from across 
 Venezuela together in order to devise and implement strategies to combat 
 Chávez’s move toward workers’ councils and cooperatives. With taxpayer 
 funding, the SC “cover[ed] catering, venue rental, training supplies and 
 transportation for participants from Caracas and immediate surrounding 
 areas, as well as travel costs and per diem for participants from other 
 parts of Venezuela.”\n\n\n\nWhile it appears that the SC continued to 
 work with CTV, they also began to work with the Movimiento Solidaridad 
 Laboral (MSL), which formed in 2009 as a seemingly nonpartisan labor group 
 opposed to Chávez’s labor policies and devoid of any of the former 
 anti-Chavista baggage associated with CTV and Fedecámaras. While the SC 
 redacted most of the areas where its recipients were listed in the 
 documents they released, they failed to redact in all locations, confirming 
 its work with MSL in one area where it failed to redact their name.\n\nIn 
 its 2010 program description, the SC bluntly states that it helped form the 
 coordinating body, which was “launched in an [SC]-supported national 
 conference in July 2009,” and that it would continue to help the group in 
 the “development of . . . its labor rights platform.”\n\n\n\nStill, 
 while setting out to appear nonpartisan, many of its main figures, 
 including Rodrigo Penso and Froilán Barrios, formerly held positions 
 within CTV and/or remained formally affiliated with them. Its national 
 leader and spokesperson, Orlando Chirino, had been recently fired from his 
 position within Venezuela’s state oil company and had become a vocal 
 opponent of former president Chávez from the left, even running against 
 him in the 2012 presidential election.\n\nAfter its formation, the SC 
 appears to have continually funded MSL meetings and training sessions, as 
 well as conferences in which they devised their approaches to combating 
 Chávez’s labor policies. The group’s largest effort included a march 
 with CTV against the Chávez government in 2011. Was such a strategy 
 discussed, devised, and planned at one of the SC’s conferences that it 
 put together on behalf of these groups? The explicit purpose of SC events 
 was to assist these organizations to “coordinat[e] concerted resistance 
 actions” against the Chávez government.\n\n\nYet while the SC remained 
 exuberant about the group in its infancy, the organization seems to have 
 fizzled out within a few years of its formation and shortly after its 2011 
 march alongside CTV, with little public presence to speak of thereafter. 
 This is not surprising given that the organization’s leader, Orlando 
 Chirino, sought to run against Chávez in the 2012 presidential elections 
 under the Partido Socialismo y Libertad.\n\nWith the seeming dissolution of 
 MSL, it appears that the international arm of the AFL-CIO has continued its 
 work with CTV and sections of the labor movement expressly opposed to 
 Chávez and now Maduro. As documents from the years beyond 2011 show, the 
 SC continues to condemn Venezuelan government policies and notes its 
 efforts with a large anti-Chávez labor group.\n\nThe Solidarity Center 
 responded for comment saying that they “work with a broad coalition of 
 politically diverse unions, academics, human rights organizations, and 
 other civil society groups who convened to address egregious worker rights 
 violations in the country.” However, they did not directly respond to the 
 content of any of the released documents.\nSame Old\n\nIn the end, while 
 the AFL-CIO has sought to reinvent itself in the post–Cold War world, it 
 appears that much of its work remains similar to its efforts during the 
 Cold War. Since the inception of the Chávez government and into the recent 
 past, the group worked with actors clearly in opposition to it. For its 
 part, CTV continually worked to democratically and undemocratically unseat 
 Chávez — both by supporting a coup d’état and, after that failed, 
 working with opposition politicians to defeat Chávez, such as presidential 
 candidate Manuel Rosales in 2006.\n\nThe US state has played many angles in 
 its two-decades-long attempt to topple the Chávez and now Maduro 
 governments. This has included support for opposition politicians, support 
 for opposition NGOs, support for anti-Chávez rock bands, support for 
 pro-business groups, support for labor groups opposed to Chávez — even a 
 zany Keystone Cops–esque caper involving private mercenaries.\n\nDespite 
 this multipronged approach, though, the United States has yet to overthrow 
 Venezuela’s leadership. Amid economic hardship and increased US 
 aggression under the Trump administration, the Maduro government has 
 undoubtedly grown more authoritarian. But long before Maduro reached office 
 and as Chávez repeatedly won elections, US state functionaries under both 
 Republic and Democratic administrations aimed to unseat the democratically 
 elected government of Hugo Chávez — further confirmation that US 
 interest in democracy in Venezuela has long remained subordinate to the 
 United States’ geopolitical interests above all else.\n\nThe SC remains 
 the foreign policy arm of the AFL-CIO, and it has historically played a 
 regressive role in many countries throughout the world, siding with US 
 foreign policy against democratic politics and labor movements. The group 
 remains conscious of its Cold War image, though, and many of its recent 
 leaders have claimed that such nefarious meddling ended with the Cold War. 
 Barbara Shailor, the AFL-CIO’s director of international affairs, for 
 instance, told the Nation in 2003, “We won’t ignore questions about the 
 past, but we’re really going to focus on what we’re doing 
 now.”\n\nThe documents I obtained indicate this is far from the case. The 
 SC has continued to intervene in countries in order to impede, for example, 
 Venezuelan socialist measures, including the use of worker cooperatives and 
 workers’ councils, within the last decade. Just as US state leaders have 
 worked to undermine leftist leaders in Honduras and Bolivia, we can be sure 
 that the SC has additionally worked with actors who, too, have sought to 
 displace their governments\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2025/11/06/18881281.php
SUMMARY:LEPAIO Panel on Venezuela, AFL-CIO and US Imperialist Threat of Invasion
LOCATION:Zoom Meeting 
 At\nhttps://us02web.zoom.us/j/85040415266?pwd=UzpmsgnxaUAFo6nYWifkKBDrohw7y9.1
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2025/11/06/18881281.php
DTSTART:20251113T010000Z
DTEND:20251113T030000Z
END:VEVENT
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