US FINGERS IN THE SOUTH AMERICAN PIE

Tory premier Edward Heath, who starts his talks with US President Nixon today, should be able to swap a few ideas with him on subjects other than destroying the unions and cutting wages. Both men face growing allegations of attempting to manipulate the news media.

Heath is the centre of a storm over his House of Commons denial that the government secretary briefed selected journalists on Friday, January 19, about the government's Phase Three pay-control plans, while Nixon has been accused of 'wholesale intimidation' against the media in the US. • Senator Sam Ervin, a North Carolina Democrat who chairs the judiciary sub-committee on constitutional rights, is to hold hearings on Press freedom.

It is he who has charged Nixon with intimidation. Recent actions by the Administration 'appear to go beyond simple reactions to allegedly irresponsible or biased reporting', he said last week.

He pointed to the recent decision by the government-controlled public broadcasting corporation to withhold funds from commentary programmes by public broadcasting services and to the attempts in some court cases to subpoena journalists to testify before government bodies. VISITS BAN Three Glasgow Labour councillors have been hauled before the Glasgow Labour Party executive for signing a motion asking the Labour administration to ban overseas visits by corporation members and to end the serving of free drinks at corporation functions.

ClIrs James Wray and John Lavelle and Bailie Albert Long were questioned on comments in newspaper reports attributed to them.

Before the executive meeting Cllr Lavelle and Bailie Long, together with Cllr Thomas Muir, voted at a housing committee meeting against a proposal that a deputation should represent the corporation at a conference-study in Amsterdam.

After the meeting Labour leader, Cllr Richard Dynes, said no decision had been reached by the executive and the matter would be considered again at a further meeting.

Propaganda for the corporate state is now being churned out so fast that woolly-headed liberals and social democrats are already failing to see the wood for the trees.

The BBC television programme 'Midweek' had a good example on January 24 with a discussion between ex-liberal candidate Ludovic Kennedy, union bureaucrat David Bassnet (G&MWU), Pat Lowry of British-Leyland, and ex-Labour Minister Lord Wilfred Brown (no relation).

They were examining Brown's new brainchild-the National Council of Regulating Differential Wages, an anti-working class scheme being peddled by 'The Times', the BBC and other media.

The Council's basic purpose would be the abolition of free collective bargaining exactly as proposed under the Tory laws, but carried out under the guise of a 'community of interest' body with the trade unions taking part.

Bassnet, the trendy Lowry and Kennedy all fell for it hook, line, and sinker, and proceeded to debate in learned fashion what would be the snags such an innovation would run into on points of detail.

They thought it would still be difficult to control prices sufficiently to persuade the unions to accept the basic idea — a government-decided percentage increase on the national wage bill which the unions themselves would then have to decide how to split up amongst them.

Not one word of criticism was raised throughout against the notion itself, which reeks of corporatism.

David Bassnet, newly-elected general secretary of Britain's third biggest union, sat silent while a plan was trotted out which would deprive the working class of all its rights to fight the employers for the proceeds of its labour.

And the plan, appropriately enough, originated with a big business representative whom Harold Wilson made a life peer and put in the last Labour government. BOOK REVIEW 'Civil Strife In Latin America'. By William Everett Kane. Johns Hopkins University Press. 240 pages.

From the beginning of the Pan-American movement during the Wilson administration right through to the establishment of the Organization of American States in 1948, the US government has been loudly proclaiming a policy of non-intervention in the affairs of its southern neighbours.

Indeed, article 15 of the OAS Charter specifically states: 'No state or group of states has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason, whatever, in the internal affairs of any other state.' But in 1965, when President Johnson sent 15,000 US troops into the Dominican Republic, the Department of State declared: 'We recognize that, regardless of any fundamentalist view of international law, the situation existing in the Dominican Republic required us to take action to remove the threat' And Johnson himself, in a speech at Baylor University, said: "The old distinction between civil war and international war has lost much of its In other words, revolutionary movements in the Latin American continent would be met by full-scale war.

The aim of this book-published under the auspices of the American Society of International Law-is to trace the development of US intervenThe way was paved by a number of agreements which perpetuated American military and political influence in the area after World War II.

The 1945 Act of Chapultepac declared that an attack on any American state by any state would be an attack on all of them. Following this, the Inter-American Defence Board American troops in the Dominican Republic, sent by Johnson in 1965.

Even then, the control of military supplies was enough to give the US control of governments.

Its policy was spelled out as 'destroy the unfavoured, reward the favoured and manipulate the friendly.

In early 1960, for example, President Goulart of Brazil sought economic aid from eastern Europe. The US organized his overthrow by the Brazilian military, led by General Humberto Branco.

The government, schools, unions and Press were purged and 7,000 people thrown into jails—to paeons of praise from US ambassador Lincoln Gordon.

It was after the Cuban revolution of 1960 that the main emphasis in the American aid programme shifted to counterinsurgency and civic actions projects. Over 70 per cent of all US aid to Latin America is specifically earmarked for those purposes.

And, of course, aid allegedly for other purposes is channelled in this direction as well.

Military officers from • all over Latin America go for training and political indoctrination at the US Army Forces Southern Command at Fort Gulick in Panama.

One of the main instruments of American political domination is the Central Intelligence Agency. Some of this organization's activities came to light in 1968 when the Bolivian Minister of the Interior — Antonio Arguedas — fled to Chile after forwarding a copy of Che Guevara's diary to Cuba.

Arguedas revealed that he had been a CIA agent for three years. In 1965 he had been forced to resign his government post because the CIA accused him of being a 'communist infiltrator' and threatened to stop all US aid to Bolivia. He underwent four days' interrogation, drugging and lie-detector tests at the hands of the CIA.

On his release he was paid to corrupt politicians, union officials and Press men on behalf of the CIA. Arguedas named two officials of the American embassy who directed CIA activity in Bolivia.

US intervention, of course, goes beyond the manipulation of military regimes and CIA activities.

Three times since the Organization of American States was set up, the United States has intervened with ANKEES armed force - in Guatemala, Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

A look at one of these will show how the US operated.

In 1950, 2 per cent of the owners of farmland in Guatemala held 78 per cent of the arable land.

Behind this lay an even more important factor - the United Fruit Company of the USA. This held more than 400,000 acres of uncultivated land, had long been powerful in the internal politics of Guatemala and was tirelessly represented by the US Department of State.

The original contracts between the company and the government in 1930 and 1936 had been drawn up by John Foster Dulles. Allen Dulles, his brother, then head of the CIA, was a one-time president the_company, and Henry Cabot Lodge was one of its largest stockholders..

In March 1963 the Arbenz administration made its first expropriation of United Fruit lands. It took over 219,160 acres of uncultivated land and offered to pay twice the company's costs and exactly the sum at which United Fruit had valued the land for taxation purposes.

The US declared that Guatemala was 'playing the communists' game' In February , 1954, Arbenz accused the US government of planning an invasion, in collaboration with the governments of El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela.

The US called an OAS conference and railroaded through a resolution calling for action against 'the domination or control of any American state by the international communist conspiracy.

An invasion force trained in Honduras and Nicaragua and crossed from Honduras on June 18 with aircover provided by the CIA.

The Arbenz government was brought down and replaced by the dictatorship of Castillo Armas.

The author concludes his book with 'the faint hope that the US may understand that Latin American instability is not communism in disguise'.

But despite his inability to understand the revolutionary implications of developments in Latin America, William Kane has presented a lucid exposure of the workings of American imperialism and its agencies in the area.