Under New Management

When the last regional International Labor Organization (I.L.O.) conference of American states was held in Mexico City three years ago, most workers' delegates were Communist or Communist-led. Vicente Lombardo Toledano, Mexico's Communist-line labor boss, ran the show.

Last week a new and very different regional I.L.O. convened in Montevideo. In the three years since Mexico City, Latin American labor movements have pretty well repudiated Communist leaders. Of the 280 delegates and advisers at the meeting (from all countries except Peru, Venezuela, Honduras and Paraguay), Communists numbered so few that they even had trouble making much noise. Lombardo Toledano was absent.

This time the man who supplied the leadership was a plump little Italian-born U.S. labor leader named Serafino Romualdi. As the American Federation of Labor's walking delegate in Latin America, he had tirelessly gone up & down the continent lining up pro-democratic trade unionists. He knew intimately the leader of every I.L.O. worker delegation, and though his role at the conference was only an adviser's, he was unquestionably the most influential man present. Even the Argentines, who had bustled in 37-strong, handing out Peronista tracts, wisely decided to string along with him.

With the Communists silenced and Peronistas taking it easy, Romualdi attacked hemispheric military dictatorships. He brought out letters, documents, underground newspapers and lists of prisoners as evidence that military regimes in both Peru and Venezuela had jailed workers and smashed unions. Under pressure of U.S. Government delegates, headed by Ambassador to Uruguay Ellis O. Briggs, he withheld a resolution of condemnation, but got through a statement demanding I.L.O. investigations in Peru and Venezuela.

Beefy Philip P. Hannah, secretary-treasurer of the Ohio A.F.L., followed through with a strong speech for withholding U.S. technical and financial aid from countries which limited political and industrial freedom. "We do not care," said Hannah, "whether a sister country's regime is conservative, liberal, democratic, socialistic, oligarchic, libertarian or collectivism We only ask that it grant . . . that wide range of freedom which is associated with true civilization itself."

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