In December 1980, I spent several hours talking with Mike Hammer, a field representative in El Salvador of the American Institute for Free Labor Development. AIFLD, an overseas development affiliate of the AFL-CIO, was trying to bring some sense into the polarized politics of El Salvador, a country coming apart at the seams. A few weeks after we met, that violent polarization cost Mike Hammer his life.
When Hammer and two of his AIFLD colleagues were murdered in El Salvador in January 1981, I wrote a memorial essay in the Seattle Weekly, praising these martyrs for decency and democracy. Such were the politics of the time that this tribute to three good men got me into the hottest of hot water with the Seattle-area Left, represented by the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. (Thirty years later, when the Mitrokhin Archive, a huge cache of KGB documents, was published, it was revealed that CISPES was a front created by the KGB, the Soviet secret intelligence service, to advance communist interests in Latin America.) The memory of those debates is not what I cherish, however, in thinking back on this episode. What I remember is that my memorial essay was reprinted in AIFLD’s newsletter and became the occasion for meeting William Charles Doherty Jr., who died this past Aug. 28.
Bill Doherty was one of the great Catholic laymen of twentieth-century America. A bear of a man who had been a defensive lineman at Catholic University during his student days, Bill dedicated his professional life to trade unionism as an instrument of democracy-building (and hence peace-making) in Latin America. Free trade unions, he believed, were crucial components of the civil society that made democracy possible. By helping build those kinds of worker associations, Bill and his AIFLD colleagues were not only giving the poor the tools by which to pull themselves and their families out of poverty; they were giving democracy a chance in places where it had never taken root.
When I brought Bill Doherty to Seattle to speak, some of the salient aspects of his singular personality became evident. The first question he asked me, on arrival, was, “Where can I go to Mass tomorrow morning?” A daily communicant, Bill prepared for political combat by prayer and the sacraments, his deep faith nourished intellectually by his fidelity to Catholic social doctrine.
Then there was his contempt for the juvenile leftism of CISPES and its fellow-travelers, on whom he heaped scorn and ridicule with relish. Having fought communists for the control of trade unions throughout the western hemisphere, Bill Doherty wasn’t about to take any guff from the pre-grunge, pre-Starbucks radicals of the Puget Sound area. They tried to call him a tool of the propertied class. “How dare you call me an oligarch?” he roared back.
Bill Doherty was an equal opportunity opponent of tyranny, whether it was the communist tyranny threatening El Salvador and Nicaragua or the rightist tyranny entrenched in Chile, Argentina and Paraguay. He fought them all and he enjoyed the battle. He never hated markets; he wanted them to work fairly, for everyone. He didn’t believe in class warfare; he believed in building the infrastructure of freedom. He cheered John Paul II’s assault on communism in central and eastern Europe, just as he worked to help give organizational expression to the democratic revolution that John Paul encouraged in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile.
Like others of his generation of lay Catholic leaders, Bill Doherty was a political liberal who believed in the widest possible participation in government, an economic pragmatist who wanted to open networks of productivity and exchange to everyone, and a Christian radical who believed that the Gospel was the truth of the world. The stupidities (and worse) of many Catholic activists and journalists in Central America in the 1980s grieved him. But he never lost faith, and he was always willing to welcome converts to the pro-democracy movement. He was a big man in every sense of the word; the biggest thing about him was his big heart.
He now lives in the embrace of the divine solidarity.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
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Comments:
If your friend Mike Hammer was a labor organizer in South or Central America in the 1980's? Most likely he was killed by right-wing government elements.
It sounds as if your friends often rightly saw errors in both right- and left wing extremism. But indeed, as "Labor" or "Workers" organizers? No doubt they would have been quickly identified as potential revolutionaries... and would quickly have been murdered. Murdered not by Leftists, but by right-wing, pro-capitalist ... conservatives.
The murder of leftists and labor organizers, by pro-capitalist conservatives, military assassination squads, was common in Central and South America. Where the "New Conservatives," in the Reagan era, were supporting right-wing militarist governments, against any and all "left"ist organizations; including labor unions.
Bill was indeed a good man and a good Catholic. Whenever he was in San Salvador he would raise early in the morning and be the first in attendance in the 7 o’clock mass in a church near the hotel he would normally stay.
His second devotion was democracy and he would have gladly given his right arm to foster democracy and the democratic process as he did in El Salvador.
During the 80’s in El Salvador, if you were not a sympathizer member of the ARENA party, you were a communist. As such, many thought of Bill and his AIFLD as instruments of the left and that explains the sacrifice of Hammer and Pearlman. But Bill fought on until he saw a democratic government installed in the country, presided by your friend and his, José Napoleón Duarte.
I would say that the most salient accomplishment by Bill and his staff was to make El Salvador’s labor movement a stronghold of democracy that was instrumental in Duarte’s election as president in 1984.
I will always remember Bill Dougherty with a smile on my face. His enthusiastic demeanor was characteristic of his and with it he was able to make things work for the better wherever he went.
It’s good to read you again, George.
Though I hardly ever recommend Christopher Hitchens, he has a devastating account of one episode in the Duarte regime of that time from a December 5, 1987 article in The Nation (p. 674), which ends this way: "The armed forces have annexed the Christian Democrats without the trouble or awkwardness
of a seizure of the Presidential Palace."
That about sums up what one needs to know regarding the complicity of Salvador's "civilian" , "moderate" rulers with the deaths of thousands of Salvadorans during that horrible period.
In the US, most people think of conservative vs. liberal conflicts, as fairly benign. But overseas, in Salvador, it was a bloody war. And what shocked and scandalized many people in the US about the Mike Hammer murder, was this: that after all, the conservative/right wing in Salvador, was supported by American conservatives in the Reagan administration. American conservatives (cf. LTC Oliver North) supplied the right wing conservatives in Salvaor, with arms, military intelligence, and military training. And perhaps even direct military assistance.
So that? When conservatives in Salvador killed "leftist" - or merely liberal - Catholics like Mike Hammer?
Good but liberal Catholics, like Mike Hammer, were in effect being killed with conservative American/Republican assistance.
Mr. Doherty and AIFLD were also actively dedicated to opposing right wing military dictatorships in the region, also lending a helping hand to those promoting a program of agrarian reform, democratic elections and unions free of employer or government control. And it was, because of such actuivities on behalf of AIFLD, that Mike Hammer and Mike Pearlman, along with the leader of the El Salvador campesino movement, were brutally assasinated in broad daylight while seating in the bar of the Hilton Hotel in El Salvador. Their brutal murder had nothing to do with their religion, but everything to do with their union and pro-democracy agenda, as well as with a fair distribution of the land among El Savador campesinos. Tough the actual trigger men [all thre Salvadorean Army officers] who killed Hammer and the others were eventually aprehended and sent to prison, the intellectual authors of the murders were never identified or punished. It is a testament to the corruption existing in El Salvador in those days, that the triggermen were released shortly after their imprisonment.
I was witness to all these activities during my tenure first, as Regional Director for Latin American Affairs, and subsequently as Member of the Word Executive Board, of the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) during the period of 1961-1993.
Mr. Doherty's many detractors did not succeed in their sordid agenda. They tried to discret Mr. Doherty, as well as yours truly and all other trade unionists engaged in similar pro-democracy activities. They used smear tactics, lies and deception to undermine the constructive work done by AIFLD and other international labor organizations. But to no avail. Today, democracy and free and democratic unions, with the exception of some countries, are alive and well throughout the Latin American Region.
Jack Otero
From the 1980's on, the "Neo Cons" like George Weigel consistently and explicitly supported a very authoritarian church along with Ayn Rand-ite"capitalism" - "Greed is good" they said. Over labor and workers' issues.
And unfortunately, this war of words became a real war, in Central and South America. A war that might be said to continue to this very day. In say, Colombia.
We should just be sure of one thing however: in El Salvador during the 1970's, 1980's and into the 1990's trade union members were brutally repressed and "eliminated" by successive right-wing governments which were actively and intentionally supported by the United States government. Many innocent men and women were murdered in that long campaign to thwart democracy and genuine human rights. Throwing around the word communist too loosely obscures the historical truth of that brutality, which includes, of course, the slaying of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the four American nuns at the height of that country's civil war.
As for that Seattle-based solidarity group, again I find the mention of Soviet ties, however serious that might have been, does distort the overall picture. I myself was a member of a west coast-based solidarity group and visited Nicaragua in 1985. Our members were all committed Christians of one sort or another. This also seemed to be the case with other Canadians and Americans we met in Nicaragua during our stay.
We knew of certain groups in Canada and the U.S. that were known to fundraise for the Salvadoran FMLN rebels. But such groups were small and clearly partisan. And the Soviets must have found us to be pretty lousy communists, since we were evidently independent minded.
I just wish the Christians who were snookered into providing support for Reagan's policies toward Central America - and the Salvadoran government and the Nicaraguan contra rebels at that time - had been as independent as we were.