Throughout the 20th century, trade unions proved to be another area of Caribbean and Latin American life where U.S. interests saw opportunities, where pro- and anti-Communist organizations maneuvered for position, and where the church exerted considerable influence-all while indigenous organizations worked to establish their own region-wide identity.

The first scholarly work to focus exclusively on the roles of pan-regional and worldwide labor organizations in the labor movements across the nations of the Caribbean, Central America, and South America.

With a career that covers over a half century, Robert J. Alexander is perhaps our foremost authority on Latin American history and politics. In International Labor Organizations and Organized Labor in Latin America and the Caribbean: A History, Alexander explores one of the most fascinating and often overlooked aspects of the Latin American labor scene he has so meticulously chronicled: the relationships between labor unions within specific nations, region wide organizations, and organized labor around the world.

Alexander has written many of the cornerstone works on labor movements within the nations of Latin America, and this is his first volume to focus on the impact of international unions on Latin American labor issues. Coverage includes the AFL-offshoot Pan American Federation of Labor and the CIA-backed AIFLD; the role of the Russian Union, Profintern; European-based unions like the anti-Communist/anti-Fascist Postal Telegraph and Telephone International; and intraregional organizations like the Confederacion de Trabajadores de America Latina (CTAL)—the first attempt to form a multinational labor organization exclusively for the region.

• Numerous original documents from the various organizations covered in the book
• Wide-ranging bibliographic materials, including original interviews by the author with numerous people who participated in the various institutions that are written about in this volume