Active Engagement: The Legacy of Central America Solidarity
Gosse, Van
On the evening of March 19, 1994, just hours before the beginning of El Salvador's national election day, a grand diplomatic party was held to honor all of the international observers at...
...Next to the UN, this was by far the largest group of international observers...
...A construction brigade builds a community center in Nicaragua in the mid- 1980s...
...It hoped to change U.S...
...Their most important national connection was through the Quest for Peace campaign of the dissident Catholic organization, the Quixote Center...
...government, while great public attention was excited by federal trials of organizers in the movement's Southwest borderlands homebase...
...hegemony in Latin America...
...However, the nine years separating the various protests named in this paragraph is one indication of the movement's most important and, in contemporary terms, most distinctive feature-its sheer staying power...
...The Quest stimulated a massive delivery of goods and services, most visibly the constant loading of trucks and cargo containers by local sister-cities, as well as discounted medicines and donated medical equipment...
...Also Ann Crittenden, Sanctuary (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988) for the Tucson story...
...politics...
...1 " Founded in October, 1980, in the same week that the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front (FMLN) was created by five guerrilla organizations-and with the support of adherents to one particNAC2NA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS o f 26REPORT ON SOLIDARITY ular tendency-CISPES was from its inception the biggest presence in the Central America solidarity movement...
...Other critics charge that the solidarity movement has had no meaningful effect upon U.S...
...On the one hand, the sheer starkness of slaughter in the indigenous highlands gave the Guatemalan guerrillero a genuine moral force...
...This movement neither "failed" to challenge and overturn the less visible political-economic structures of oppression and inequality in the South, nor "failed" to create a multiracial left...
...It is unlikely, however, that more than 20,000 people were Central America activists at any one time...
...Simply put, this was never a movement with any deep concern for whether or not it would or could change the United States...
...Other national El Salvador groups also serviced the great mass of local Central America and peace committees that had no strong organizational affiliations...
...The discovery of Central America as "the most important place in the world" (in Jeane Kirkpatrick's words) was the catalyst in forming the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala (NISGUA) in 1980 as a national solidarity group...
...The usual crowd was there-highranking UN personnel, foreign diplomats and bigwigs like former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, leading Salvadoran politicians, and three members of Congress representing President Bill Clinton...
...For a powerful first-hand account of this radicalization process in Guatemala, see Thomas and Marjorie Melville, Whose Heaven...
...More recently, it has extended its programs to many other parts of the Third World, and is a major example of solidarity's long-term strength...
...After 1955 a powerful and tenacious mass movement grew up dedicated to overturning the legal apparatus of segregation and disenfranchisement of African Americans in the U.S...
...By 1994, with a Democratic Administration, a different tune was being played...
...ground war in ty...
...NW Chicago, IL 60607 Washington, DC 20037 (312) 262-6502 (202) 797-1160 Active Engagement 1. The largest solidarity organization, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), was an avowedly partisan group supporting the electoral efforts of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN...
...Some on the U.S...
...Much of this early faith-based ed it, Central America solidarity did not proceed activism was low-key reflection and debate among directly out of the antiwar movement...
...However abstract or tokenistic to some leftists outside the solidarity movement, its effects were considerably more than symbolic to the union leader saved from death or the human rights group able to open an office...
...By inviting them to the party, the Embassy was simply recognizing that fact...
...It was also an excellent antidote to the kind of sectarianism that on occasion plagued the antiwar movement and earlier solidarity efforts with Latin America...
...Everyone demonstrations in Washington, D.C...
...3 Yet despite its small size, this was a movement of bewildering diversity, an oddly workable cacophony of individual and institutional histories, and highly developed organizational practices...
...In addition, the Guatemalan revolutionaries, never as strong as their comrades in El Salvador or Nicaragua, did not prioritize U.S...
...Efforts then turned, with considerable success, to promoting U.S...
...These ex-missionaries and their numerous friends and associates seem to me the true internationalists: they were called and they went...
...It was precisely their nitpicking, procedural, often hypocritical resistance that led first to the unprecedented creation of the Office of Public Diplomacy in the White House basement, and finally to the Iran-Contra Affair...
...First, to state the obvious, this was always a very small movement, trying to mobilize on the left when it seemed that the country had embraced the right...
...2. If one defines an "activist" as someone who participates in at least one activity every month (a meeting, vigil, letter-writing session or phonebank), the figure would probably be more like 10,000...
...activists postured for and efforts of the Brigade as a national network helped attacked each other (and each others' foreign allies), spur a revival of Cuba solidarity in the early 1970s was the context for the different, much broader and involving the Center for Cuban Studies and other more unified solidarity movement that grew up just groups...
...The Guatemala movement had several particular advantages and disadvantages...
...See the articles by Diane Green, Julie Meyer, Margie Swedish, Aquiles Magana, Kathleen Kenney, Philip E. Wheaton, Dave Dyson, Mike Zielinski and Van Gosse in the special "El Salvador iPresente...
...What were they doing there at the Embassy, sipping wine and munching hors d'oeuvres...
...Some Marxist critics of the solidarity movement often speak as if the movement's primary task is to expose the global machinations of imperial capital by focusing on one particular Third World conflict presumably whichever one will most heighten the contradictions at home...
...a "sector" in the United States (nuns, architects, teachers, farmers, veterans, students and so on...
...Following that body blow, Nicaragua solidarity contracted in scope and scale, which was virtually inevitable, though in the early 1990s many sister-cities and some national organizations maintained themselves and appear likely to continue...
...issue of Crossroads (April, 1994), edited by Michael S. Wyman...
...In addition to CISPES, the national and local efforts of its close allies like the SHARE and NEST Foundations (well-organized material-aid groups with networks of sister-cities and sister-parishes), Medical Aid for El Salvador, the Central American Refugee Centers (CARECEN) and their predecessor organizations of Salvadoran exiles, and the National Agenda for Peace in El Salvador (a legislative network with over 600 local contacts in 1989-1992) gave this wing of the El Salvador solidarity movement considerable weight...
...At the local level, the most significant development was the rapid organizing of over 100 "sistercities," along with sector-based material-aid projects such as TecNica, which sent large numbers of computer professionals and other technicians for short and long-term stays...
...While the campaign for a Nuclear Freeze may have pulled a million people onto the streets of New York City in June, 1982, within two years it was largely a spent force...
...Based at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, the CGE is an educational exchange institution responsible for bringing thousands of people to El Salvador and Nicaragua from 1982 on...
...5 before and after the victory of the Sandinista National _z NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 24REPORT ON SOLIDARITY The Nicaragua solidarity movement arose in response to ugent needs, and since the Contra war was a prolonged one, it put down deep roots...
...economic aid and tolerance for the provisional government...
...3. I emphasize here the Central America movement's inability to mobilize large numbers in the streets, in comparison to the hundreds of thousands who rallied for various peace, anti-nuclear, pro-choice, civil rights and gay/lesbian causes during the 1980s...
...Add to this the steadily growing fame and charisma of Rigoberta Menchu, culminating in her 1992 Nobel Peace Prize, and there were certainly ingredients for a powerful solidarity appeal...
...Others regard the fact that so much suffering continues in the region as evidence of the movement's limited achievements and short-term perspective...
...Indeed the movement retained its vigor up until VOL XXVIII...
...Embassy reception as a member of USCEOM, representing the Center for Democracy in the Americas...
...While they were rolling over in innumerable other areas of policy, the Democrats never stopped fighting with Reagan over Central America...
...For an authoritative treatment of the practical politics of this issue, see Cynthia Arnson, Crossroads: Congress, the President and CentralAmerica, 1976-1993 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993...
...aid, and agitate for the release of however exaggerated, dumped this history down the political prisoners...
...4. See Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left (New York: Verso, 1993...
...Such an assumption grossly distorts the essential social character of the movement...
...NA2NA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Van Gosse is the director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas in Washington, D.C...
...In 1980, organizing work around Nicaragua was largely shunted to the sidelines with the eruption of yet another revolutionary crisis, this time in El Salvador...
...policy and to offer a meaningful (not symbolic) level of material aid on the ground in the various countries...
...Witness for Peace has maintained itself since the end of the Cold and Contra wars, extending into Guatemala and Haiti...
...From April 1960 through the Bay of Pigs It was not until the September 1973 coup in Chile invasion one year later, the Fair Play for Cuba Com- that all of these impulses coalesced into a national mittee (FPCC) briefly flourished as a proto-solidarity movement...
...There was little or no space for bitter maneuvering over the grand strateVOL XXVIII, No 5 MARCH APRIL 1995 23 The sha est indica23 VOL XXVIII, NO 5 MARCH /APRIL 1995REPORT ON SOLIDARITY gy of "the movement," since the regionalized war required several simultaneous strategies...
...9 During Sandinismo's first hopeful glow, there were no large national campaigns to promote solidarity...
...They argue that the pervasive and all-consuming urgency of Central America solidarity work was a diversion, while the greater dirty business of Reaganism went on...
...First and foremost, the Central America movement comes out of and epitomizes the Christian left of the United States...
...A special role was played by the Religious Task Force on Central America, which since 1980 has centered on the largely invisible but crucial networks of activists in the Catholic womens' orders...
...intervention in Latin America since the l950s, and Central America in the 1980s...
...left...
...4 there was considerable success, but as with the By the late 1960s, the rising tide of antiwar mili- decade's other major experience of solidarity, the tance had bred a millenarian style of anti-imperialism, pro-independence Puerto Rico Solidarity Committee, which again looked to Cuba and Latin America...
...6. Three of these missionaries promptly became part of the Catonsville Nine, a group of Catholics who destroyed draft records and, led by the Berrigan brothers, stimulated a wave of militant, nonviolent Catholic action against the apparatus of the war in Indochina...
...Nonetheless, its achievements were significant...
...This pluralism was the source of a remarkable enthusiasm and tolerance, since people generally went where their instincts and talents led them and found their natural bedfellows...
...One answer to this question is provided by Guatemala...
...In .re, but few, even hindsight, most of pporters, knew these marches were at best holding actions...
...New York: Knopf, 1971...
...The Sanctuary phenomenon had key activists in Tucson and at the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America, who disseminated the methodology and theology of Sanctuary and built up the underground railroad of Central American refugees (mainly Salvadorans plus some Guatemalans).' 2 However, both legal considerations and a highly personalist and anti-organizational ethos, derived in part from the Quaker traditions motivating some participants, militated against the creation of any permanent organization or network linking up these local churches...
...It has persevered into the present under the most difficult conditions: while local activists swung back and forth between El Salvador and Nicaragua, few ever switched over to Guatemala...
...By the late 1980s, it had a large national staff (54 paid in 1990, plus an equal number of "fulltime volunteers"), a stable base of chapters in most major cities and college towns, numerous conventions, conferences and training sessions, and a demanding program encompassing everything from material aid to congressional lobbying...
...As this anecdote illustrates, while the Central American proxy wars of the 1980s may have receded into history, the U.S...
...To deny that centrality is to deny the character of solidarity, as defined by the peoples themselves in struggle, and to substitute a utopian vision of transnational struggle lacking any kind of temporal and spatial parameters...
...This had less to do with organizational failings than with the success of the nationwide campaign to rein in the Immigration and Nationalization Service (INS) and to extend a form of temporary asylum to all undocumented Salvadoran refugees...
...My own estmate of perhaps 2,000 local groups nationally, averaging five to ten members each, attempts to balance the bigger urban committees with the stray religious and peace groups spread across the hinterland, which often consisted of only a handful of people...
...Critics of where il the movement see its relative contraction after 1990 or how as evidence of its urosands more on coffee-picking brigades or solidarity tours...
...Movements such as Central America solidarity, of intense conjunctural response, are not-nor should they be-substitutes for broader struggles for social change...
...solidarity work...
...governmental propaganda and negative press coverage...
...government policymakers, and it learned to operate overseas, directly confronting and paralleling the official policy with its own mechanisms of aid and "accompaniment...
...In 1983-84, when the Contra War revved up, Nicaragua again became the focus for U.S...
...See Renny Golden and Michael McConnell, Sanctuary: The New Underground Railroad (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986), for an account by leaders of the Chicago Religious Task Force...
...After 1985, these efforts were augmented by an important new national organization, Neighbor to Neighbor, created explicitly to carry out intensive local congressional pressure campaigns against U.S...
...Venceremos Brigade gained considerable fame in In both cases, the cause of this sectarianism is clear: 1969-70 by violating the U.S...
...denounce the 1989 murder of the six Jesuit priests that way even to participants...
...277-383...
...a given that the Central America movement of the 1980s has an organic relation to the Less visibly, though with great effect, various tenvast antiwar upsurge of 1965-72...
...In addition, a "human rights community" had established itself in Washington, D.C...
...society...
...Guatemala solidarity work has been the poor relation of the Central America movement, never receiving its due though sometimes benefiting from the association...
...Not so long before, this same Embassy had distributed detailed guides to linkages between several of the above organizations and the guerrillas of the FMLN...
...It developed as activists returned in large numbers, wanting to maintain a link with the Nicaragua they had seen up close-an urban barrio, rural town or cooperative...
...came from Only twice could orga- nizers claim they had operated...
...The real center of Nicaragua solidarity, however, was the seemingly unending congressional battle over funding the Contras, which involved most of the national solidarity groups...
...I attended the U.S...
...In all these programmatic areas, memory hole...
...9. Here and below I am essentially summarizing Gosse, "'The North American Front': Central American Solidarity in the Reagan Era," in Michael Sprinker and Mike Davis, eds., Reshaping the U.S...
...At the door, U.S...
...8 In February, 1979, many of the national organizations in the CNFMP/HRWG came together with the local solidarity committees to found the National Network in Solidarity with the Nicaraguan People (NNSNP...
...My answer is that a solidarity movement is, and must be, concerned first and foremost with the revolutionary crisis in the country in question...
...as the respectable face of solidarity...
...No 5 MARCH /APRIL 1995 25REPORT ON SOLIDARITY the Sandinistas' February 1990 electoral defeat, which was "observed" by several thousand North American activists...
...a consciously low profile because of the strong presence of exiled Central Americans...
...left argue that the long-running resistance to President Reagan's support of his pet Nicaraguan "freedom fighters" amounted to little in the end, given the FSLN's electoral defeat in 1990...
...the number of activists oscillated somewhere between 200 and 500, depending on other political crises...
...the national It is already evident that the history of the Central knew it was th America solidarity move- among its sL ment will be seen in very different ways...
...Everyone knew it was there, but few, even among its supporters, knew where it came from or how it operated...
...But however much the "Vietnam nently seared by their experiences in Latin America Syndrome" of popular anti-interventionism undergird- since the 1950s...
...The continuing resulting infighting, as U.S...
...a type of solidarity (material aid, civil disobedience, "accompaniment," lobbying...
...Because of the consistent attention these groups paid to the task of building organization, even when the overwhelming emphasis turned to opposing Contra aid, El Salvador solidarity never disappeared...
...This network grew out of the powerful lobbying coalition of church denominations and peace organizations of the late Vietnam War years, and included new Latin Americafocused groups such as the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), founded in 1974...
...They forget that the Sandinistas took on and defeated the Contras and their U.S...
...These guests were organizers of the U.S...
...Let me illustrate this point by example...
...Fol- a debilitating sectarianism undermined the movelowing publicized trips by prominent New Leftists, the ment's effectiveness...
...solidarity movement that supported the region's revolutionaries retained much of its vigor well into the 1990s, confounding various premature claims of its demise...
...Finally, several high-powered lobbying projects, such as the "Countdown '87" coalition, were formed to shore up the Democratic Party's equivocal opposition to the Contra war...
...Thus very few in the Central America movement know anything about the four organizations that make up the URNG, their leaders, or their political program...
...But as Guatemala activists discovered, it is difficult to mobilize large numbers of people and build a publicly visible movement in the United States solely around this kind of grinding day-to-day work...
...Liberation Front (FSLN) on July 19, 1979.7 umerous local Chile or Latin America committees reoriented themselves towards Nicaragua in 1978-79...
...The main reason, however, was the movement's widely dispersed physical structure, which made it hard to see as a unified body...
...The solidarity movement effectively engaged with the world-as-it-is and forced open a political space...
...But to make sense of this debate, one must first have some idea of the history...
...Between 1983 and 1987, this unique derivative of faith-based activism flourished as the purest "grassroots" expression of solidarity...
...imperialism a semi-legitimate posi- thousands of North American ex-missionaries permation in U.S...
...The latter brought together a small but hardy handful of Guatemala committees with churchpeople and academics...
...Citizens Elections Observer Mission (USCEOM), which had brought 700 official observers-North Americans who paid their own way and by that evening were already deployed in towns all over El Salvador...
...At its peak around 1985, 400 local congregations had declared themselves in open defiance of the U.S...
...The movement succeeded in making itself a force to be acknowledged and accommodated by U.S...
...That sense of civic duty is the very real legacy they have left in place for our future, along with a host of organizations and relationships that seem likely to endure...
...Ambassador Alan Flanigan welcomed a rather different set of guests: Central America solidarity movement leaders from the SHARE Foundation, CRISPAZ, the National Agenda for Peace in El Salvador, Witness for Peace, Voices on the Border and the Center for Global Education, along with various prominent church and academic figures, and four allied members of Congress...
...8. For a detailed account of the anti-intervention lobby's founding, see Charles DeBenedetti with Charles Chatfield, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), pp...
...George Bush" leads "Contras" through the streets of Manhattan in a demonstration against Contra aid in November, 1990...
...It thus operated outside of the nonpartisan USCEOM coalition, sending its own group of 150 election observers...
...For the next five years, the self-named organization, attracting thousands of disaffected liber- Chile Solidarity Movement mobilized dozens of local als, newly leftist youth and African Americans...
...That the Central America solidarity movement did not end U.S...
...While broadly unified in its general goals and responsive to the Sandinistas (through interactions in Nicaragua, rather than through a strong presence of Nicaraguans in the United States), this was a movement without any organizational center other than the groups' cooperative relationship in lobbying Congress...
...In 1982, the HRWG spawned the Central America Working Group (CAWG), which is still going strong in 1995 with 49 member organizations...
...The Sanctuary Movement dwindled rather quickly in the later 1980s...
...the habitual modesty of Christian activists...
...In the suburban Garden State, with roughly 1/30th the country's population, NJCAN had 60 groups on its mailing list at peak, though far fewer came to its meetings and maintained a high level of activism...
...No movement spontaneously generates itself, however much it may appear Solidarity activists in Washington, D.C...
...7. See Gosse, "'El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam': The Politics of Solidarity and the New immigrant Left," in Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas, eds., The Immigrant Left (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) for a detailed treatment of solidarity in the 1970s, and the general question of exile influence and leadership in solidarity movements since the 1950s...
...left...
...n contrast to Guatemala, El Salvador was in the news throughout the 1980s...
...policy in Central America...
...In the long run, the Central America solidarity movement's tenacity proved at least as important as its ability to organize mass demonstrations-and an effective response to the strategy of "low intensity warfare" that was intended, among other things, to avoid stimulating mass visible protests in the United States...
...2 The largest national organizations like the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), Witness for Peace and Neighbor to Neighbor each had tens of thousands of contributors, but this pales besides the millions supporting other progressive groups like Greenpeace, the Nuclear Freeze or the National Abortion Rights Action League...
...They lament what they consider to be the movement's short-term impact, and its inability to provoke a long-lasting rupture in the tradition of U.S...
...Only occasionally did it break out into the open, as Vietnam...
...Memories of the lization for a "ten million ton" harvest...
...Without a legislative vehicle and with Guatemala out of the news, NISGUA emphasized "people-to-people" solidarity, meaning delegations, tours of speakers through the United States, material aid, and human rights pressure via rapid-response telex/phone/fax networks...
...left threw itself into Central America solidarity for a decade or more, recognizing correctly that we can make our own history, but hardly ever under conditions that we control...
...It arose in response to urgent needs, and since the Contra war was a prolonged one, it put down deep roots...
...The shampest indica2e e it t it found failure...
...Back in the late 1950s, Fidel Castro's not- when a group of Maryknoll missionaries were yet-socialist revolution was popular with many North expelled from Guatemala at the end of 1967 for aiding Americans during its phase of anti-dictatorial guerrilla the guerrilla movement...
...More than that did not prove possible, and no amount of voluntarism would have changed the result...
...Up to 80,000 people signed the "Pledge of Resistance," promising to commit civil disobedience if the United States invaded Nicaragua, and another 4,000 visited Nicaragua with Witness for Peace (along with thoution of the movenerica solidarity ment's limited reach nt was like came when it attempted to mount national debt...
...Whose Earth...
...They hardly seemed necessary, since thousands of North Americans were visiting on their own and drawing inspiration from the popular enthusiasm for the revolution's early successes...
...In addition to the CISPES-led bloc and these other organizations, a key actor in El Salvador solidarity was the Sanctuary Movement...
...6 struggle...
...Left: Popular Struggles in the 1980's, Volume Ill of The Year Left (New York: Verso, 1988), pp...
...This connection which reflects a sense of both complicity and comradeship stems from the very specific character of U.S...
...Though sister-city activists shared ideas and met with each other at conferences, their efforts essentially reflected individual initiative and personal experience...
...or even just a single village (as in the sister-city movement, the backbone of local Nicaragua solidarity after 1985...
...domination in the hemisphere is a given...
...11-50...
...the secular left's bemused attitude towards the vanguard of religious people...
...22REPORT ON SOLIDARITY The scene at the Embassy illustrates the character of the solidarity movement's achievements...
...Such criticism demonstrates a serious misunderstanding of (1) the role that social movements play, and (2) the character of the U.S...
...In 1987 they listed 900 groups, but my personal experience, in CISPES' National Office and then in New Jersey's Central America Network (NJCAN) from 1985 on, suggests there were many more groups attached to the solidarity movement...
...5. See Carol Brightman and Sandra Levinson, eds., Venceremos Brigade: Young Americans Sharing the Life and Work of Revolutionary Cuba (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), a collective memoir and oral history of the first two brigades, for an illuminating and often painful tableau of the late New Left...
...The Central America solidarity movement was like the national debt...
...The latter made drils of religious solidarity began to sprout among the opposition to U.S...
...political QsrCtOm anr that rf a narticular country with its own political culture- The Central A and to accept the rules and terms of each [See "In Whose Interest?," p. 27...
...Center for Global Education INTERCONNECT Religious Task Force on Augsburg College Peter and Gail Mott Central America 2211 Riverside Avenue 57 South Main Street 1747 Connecticut Avenue NW Minneapolis, MN 55454 Pittsford, NY 14534 Third Floor (612) 330-1159 (716) 381-5606 Washington, DC 20009 Central America Working Group Medical Aid for El Salvador (202) 387-8621 110 Maryland Avenue NE, Box 15 6030 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 400 SHARE Foundation Washington, DC 20002 Los Angles, CA 90036 P0 Box 192825 (202) 546-7010 (213) 937-3596 San Francisco, CA 94119 Christians for Peace of Nicaragua Network (415) 882-1 530 El Salvador (CRISPAZ) 1247 E Street SE Voices on the Border 1135 Mission Road Washington, DC 20003 P0 Box 53081 San Antonio, TX 78210 (202) 544-9355 Temple Heights Station (210) 534-6996 NISGUA Washington, DC 20009 CISPES 1500 Massachusetts Ave.NW #241 (202) 529-2912 19 West 21st Street, Room 502 Washington, DC 20005 Washington Office on Latin New York, NY 10010 (202) 223-6474 America (WOLA) (202) 229-1290 Quest for Peace 400 C Street NE U.SiGuatemala Labor do Quixote Center Washington, DC 20002 Education Project (GLEP) P0 Box 5206 (202) 5 -80 5 do ACTWU-Chicago Joint Board Hyatt, MD 20782 Witness for Peace 333 5. Ashland (301) 699-0042 2201 P St...
...Embassy in San Salvador's suburbs...
...These included Christians for Peace in El Salvador (CRISPAZ) and material-aid organizations like Voices on the Border, Voices with the Voiceless, and Companion Communities, all of which supported particular areas in rebel "zones of control...
...On a considerably smaller, but still consequential stage, a large part of the U.S...
...On the evening of March 19, 1994, just hours before the beginning of El Salvador's national election day, a grand diplomatic party was held to honor all of the international observers at the cavernous, now-redundant U.S...
...With the public endorsement of prominent congressional liberals and the United Auto Workers (UAW), the NNSNP successfully coordinated a surge of protest, outrage and finally excitement over Latin America's first revolution in 20 years, helping to stymie Carter Administration efforts to preserve Somocismo without Somoza...
...and in contrast to the decentralized nature of Nicaragua solidarity movement, the main body of El Salvador solidarity work always had an organizational center in CISPES and related organizations...
...Two important solidarity organizations were founded at that time: the faith-based Pledge of Resistance (POR) network, which reached into nearly every congressional district, and the more long-lasting Witness for Peace (WfP), the paradigm of an organized Christian solidarity with its distinctive practice of keeping "witnesses" continually in place in war zones.10 In addition to these two key organizations, the Nicaragua Network-the renamed NNSNP-promoted material aid and harvest brigades, helping to send thousands of brigadistas who became a new activist core...
...It focused on the necessary and primary stage of struggle and made an historic breakthrough, however incomplete that Second Reconstruction remains...
...Chief among them was the fact that congressional Democrats in the 1980s were forced to respond to their base on Central America...
...backers on the battlefield, while the Contra War nearly provoked an impeachment crisis at home...
...Not incidentally, this success required an unblinking willingness to play on two separate terrains-that of policymaking within the U.S...
...For these activists, there really is no question of "linking struggles" or "exposing imperialism" these things follow organically, as a result of practice, and in no other way...
...The sister-city movement is emblematic of the decentralized character of Nicaragua solidarity work...
...But groups to denounce the Pinochet government, press the group's association with Lee Harvey Oswald, for a cut-off of U.S...
...South...
...Because of its special role, the Center for Global Education (CGE) is not covered elsewhere in this article, though it certainly merits mentioning as a major vehicle for contact between North and Central Americans in the 1980s...
...He is the author of Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left (Verso, 1993...
...After 1975, the main venue for policy advocacy became the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy (CNFMP) and the associated Human Rights Working Group (HRWG...
...Here as elsewhere in post-revolutionary and post-intervention situations, the question is this: how much does a U.S.-based solidarity movement depend upon the existence of a direct, high-profile confrontation between the United States and a revolutionary movement, regardless of the latter's actual needs...
...This "direct" solidarity built a deep commitment among core activists...
...travel ban en masse, the lack of unity in the countries, or movements, to sending 1,400 youthful volunteers to join the mobi- which solidarity was extended...
...From my perspective, the Boland Amendment of 1984, which summarily banned all military aid to overthrow the government of Nicaragua, stands among the great victories for the left in recent history...
...On the other hand, the struggle in Guatemala did not become a war between the United States and the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), remaining throughout a war between Guatemala's left and right...
...It is and their housekeeper in El Salvador...
...See Edward Griffin-Nolan, Witness for Peace: A Story of Resistance (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991) for a fine, insider account of this key organization...
...friends and colleagues, intended to move existing For one thing, the earliest forerunner of the Central church institutions away from anti-Communist rigidiAmerica movement predates the U.S...
...Others argue that the solidarity movement's willingness to seek accommodation with the powers-that-be resulted in co-optation of, and collaboration by the left...
...The Central America Resource Center in Austin, Texas published several directories of local committees...
...That USCEOM had brought a larger congressional delegation than the State Department didn't hurt either...
...These activists and the more secular ones in groups like CISPES, whose motives have been quite similar, if expressed in a different style operate on the basis of a deep sense of connection with Central American popular movements...
...Under these circumstances, it is to NISGUA's considerable credit that it achieved as much as it did in generating support for the slow regeneration of Guatemala's popular movement, after the mass bloodletting of 1980-83 that seriously weakened the URNG...
...ome outside observers criticize the solidarity movement for failing to generate a new and stronger U.S...
...When the country resurfaced in the news with a vengeance, the main forces of El Salvador solidarity geared up to support a long-awaited FMLN offensive which finally came in November, 1989, leading to the peace accords of January, 1992...
...broken (barely) into six figures-in May, 1981, when El Salvador was the focus of an anti-Reagan mobilization initiated by the Workers World Party, and in April, 1987, in a labor-backed Central America-South Africa protest that was the solidarity movement's high point...
...Less impressive were demonstrations on March 27, 1982 (60,000 claimed), November 12, 1983 (35,000, according to the Guardian), and the March 24, 1990 march commemorating the tenth anniversary of Archbishop Oscar Romero's assassination, which drew only 10,000 people...
...There are plenty of explanations for this lack of self-awareness: the movement's rejection of 1960s-style publicity-seeking (or maybe just the absence of media attention...
...Most significantly, over the 15 years of its existence, the Central America movement nearly always acted on the basis of needs defined by Central Americans themselves...
...Most of the Central America movement's many separate strands were sharply focused: on a country (Nicaragua, Guatemala or El Salvador...
Vol. 28 • March 1995 • No. 5
