Article description:

Major US and European corporations collaborated intimately with Latin American military dictatorships in the 1960s and 1970s, fingering militant workers for arrest, torture and often death, according to an article that appeared this week in the Brazilian daily O Globo. Based on newly released secret police documents as well as the work of Brazilian historians, the article, written by Brazilian journalist Jose Casado, establishes that auto companies, including General Motors, Chrysler and Volkswagen, the Firestone tire company and other corporations routinely handed over lists of suspected union activists to the secret police and clandestine death squads. This state-corporate repression was so effective in Brazil that none of the major companies registered a single strike in nine years—1969 to 1978. The ...