I know that the CIA and the AFL-CIO worked close together in order to destabilize the Guyanese government in the 1960s. Were similar tactics used in other Cold War conflicts in Central and South America? Did the CIA and the AFL-CIO both work together to spy on American citizens as well?

by cordis_melum
freedmenspatrol

I don't know about other nations, but Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA mentions that the Kennedy Administration had CIA cash funneled through the American Institute for Free Labor Development for use in Brazil. Weiner characterizes the Institute as

an arm of the AFL-CIO (British diplomats in the know called it the AFL-CIA.)

It wasn't the only channel for financing the Brazilian Right (Kennedy is on the tapes as describing the effort explicitly "against the Left".) but it was one of them. The plan was for $8 million to swing the elections and/or throw a coup, the latter of which happened in 1964, two years after Kennedy talked about it on his new (literally installed the prior weekend) taping system.

Weiner describes the CIA as backing regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru, and Venezuela in addition to Guyana as of the late Sixties. He doesn't, so far as I can tell from his index and hunting around just now, implicate the union in efforts outside Guyana and Brazil or in domestic affairs.