"The Movement" Gives Birth To NACLA
The first issue of NACLA Newsletter, the maga- zine that was to become NACLA Report on the Americas, rolled off a mimeograph machine in New York in February 1967. The North American Congress on...
...We also want to explore ways of relating these groups to one another...
...If the selves communists, but at the moment of NACLA's New Left as a whole had an organizational presence founding, the goals New Leftists saw themselves on U.S...
...Meanwhile, a campus religious group called the University Christian Movement (UCM) had formed a Latin American Concerns Committee with a mandate to work for changes in U.S...
...foreign policy...
...After the American celebration of the early postwar era, this kind of information had the power to move and to radicalize...
...Later, the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende's elected government in Chile and the U.S...
...Writing in a 1973 issue of the pacificist WIN Magazine, SDS chronicler Kirkpatrick Sale cited a 1970 Playboy college poll that found "15% who assert the need for revolution in this country," and a Daniel Yankelovitch poll that found "between 11 and 15% of the college population consistently favoring revolutionary change...
...NACLA's key activity became empirical research...
...924, To the best of everyone's memory, it was at the Chicago meeting that the name "North American Con- NAOLA C gress on Latin America" first Background emerged...
...Locker, today an independent trade union consultant, remembers Goff's first call: "I'm a suspicious type of guy so I said 'What's your background?' He said 'I'm from a missionary family...
...The new group was very much a creature of what was simply called "the movement" in the United States of the mid 1960s: the loose grouping of forces opposed to the war in Vietnam, actively supportive of civil rights and liberation movements, attracted by alternative lifestyles and cultures, and increasingly distrustful of the U.S...
...N 15NACLA: A 35 YEAR RETROSPECTIVE attended to be the founding meeting of NACLA...
...It consisted of ten stapled-together, mimeographed pages...
...campuses, it was in a loose knit group called fighting for were "participatory democracy," social Students for a Democratic Society (SDS...
...Printing of the newsletter, promotional materials, stationery and small pamphlets was also underwritten by the Presbyterians...
...that the creation of small new groups to oppose war and injustice aroused hopes...
...policies and power was formed by looking at the United States from a Latin American perspective, through a Latin American lens...
...NACLA's early power structure research, in the radical empirical tradition pioneered by the sociologist C. 16 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS :.E W S LE T T Vol...
...It was decided to issue a communique announcing the formation of NACLA and "to begin a temporary house organ-newsletter...
...1 d on Archbishop Dom Helder Carar...
...3 Rising on Land Cne Trujillo's, N.Y...
...Goff spent the summer of 1966 touring eastern and midwestern campuses in search of recruits for the project...
...ith...
...A second meeting took place in Chicago on November 5 and 6 and is thought of by those who Vol XXXVI, No 3 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 Flier announcing the formation of NACLA, November, 1966 "A growing number of North Americans are deeply troubled by the widening gulf between our own lives and interests and the lives, needs and aspirations of more than 200 million people of Central and South America...
...They remained strong as Washington played an ambiguous role in the Dominican presidential election one year later Two of NACLA's founders, Fred Goff and Procter Lippincott had served as election monitors...
...This was because of Goff's personal history and because "the Free Election Committee was, in my opinion, a highly suspect organization...
...Contradictions in the system were seen as frequently bubbling up and becoming visible in Latin America first...
...I trusted him and I think he trusted me...
...When Goff came to Ann Arbor, Locker recalls "he comes to the house where I had been living, walks into the living room and-remember this is the sixties-looks as straight as an arrow...
...examine the assumptions underlying a "harmony of interest" approach to U.S.-Latin American relations and explore new relations which, due to a conflict of interest, may be needed...
...The first issue of what was to become the NACLA Report, then called the NACLA Newsletter, was published in time for the meeting...
...role in the world...
...build a community of informed and committed individuals who combine research and action and who will work to broaden the base in North America for a reorientation of U.S...
...In October, he hosted a two-day meeting of the UCM subgroup at Princeton...
...I speak fluent Spanish...
...Few thought the group would survive long...
...As this is written, we have been informed of Shaull's death after a long bout with cancer...
...Combined with this radical sensibility was a fundamental optimism that this new questioning could be channeled into constructive projects for radical change...
...young activists hungered for data and hard information: Who's in charge of the universities...
...The times were right for that kind of research...
...Despite this, says Locker, "we hit it off...
...policies...
...Later, in the rapid States and with a broad spectrum of Third World lib- radicalization and fragmentation of the movement, eration movements...
...It was out of that reaction that NACLA was formed...
...Latin America policy, to participate in the formation of study groups and dialogues with groups in Latin America and to look into starting a publication...
...From the mid 1960s through the mid 1970s, a radical sensibility, a willingness to challenge all beliefs and a sense that all was not well in the "free world" had a significant presence on U.S...
...campuses...
...By the fall, Goff, Lippincott and Locker had become the working core of the new project...
...The United States and Latin America were seen as operating within the same system...
...It would be "-" the answer to my dreams of . doing something that counted, working with really good people and all the rest...
...foreign policy, particularly in Latin America...
...The Congress is interested in maintaining contact (via a newsletter and eventually a publication) with university, church, labor and other citizens' groups across the nation who share these concerns...
...NACLA was born in a series of meetings in conference rooms, kitchens and living rooms around campuses in the Midwest and East Coast...
...the 1961 invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs by a Florida-based anti-Castro mercenary force...
...5 edent, by Hermano Alves...
...Second, I recall a lot of discussion about the term 'congress' in the name and the importance of . - linking ourselves to the 'congress of unrepresented people.' And I decided then that I wanted to work at NACLA...
...it moved quickly to a focus on the structure of Latin American political institutions and their relation to North American institutions, and moved from there to a critique of what NACLA came to call "the Empire": the U.S.-dominated system of inter-American relations...
...I don't know how you hold a free election in an occupied country...
...P. 14], they discussed the formation of an independent research center that might play a critical role in the transformation of U.S...
...2, No...
...Times...
...4 er-Eaton Financial Alliance Plans to Bring the Good Old Days...
...Those in-kind contributions aside, NACLA's first annual budget, including salaries, stood at just over $11,000...
...By April, the staff had grown to 11, two of whom were on the full-time payroll...
...it included "anti-Communism" that was the chief justification for groups who declared themselves in solidarity with the the suppression of dissent and social equality in what militant struggles of peoples of color in the United was then called the "free world...
...the 1965 invasion and SWS LETTER occupation of the Dominican Republic...
...policy toward Latin America...
...Who rules the Americas...
...NACLA reflected and served these attitudes...
...Latin America policy...
...Locker agreed with Goff and Lippincott's vision of creating an institute or a study center that would focus specifically on Latin America...
...Role in D.R...
...Judith Adler Hellman, who now teaches political science at York University in Toronto, was then Judy Adler, an undergraduate at Cornell and an activist in a group called the Cornell Committee on U.S.-Latin American Relations, founded, like NACLA, after the invasion of the Dominican Republic...
...students, influenced by a wide variety of Third World and anti-racist domestic movements, declared themselves in solidarity with "armed self-defense" of one sort or another, and others took to the study of revolutionary Marxism and the practice of Marxism-Leninism...
...Looking toward Latin America (for many North Americans, discovering Latin America for the first time), the student movement developed strong sympathies for groups seeking to liberate themselves from dictatorship, underdevelopment and "Yanqui" imperialism...
...Through research, publication and action, we intend to: -examine the Latin America policy of the United States, both government policy and the policies of North American corporations, philanthropic foundations and educational institutions...
...it included groups that gave birth some "new" new leftists would indeed declare themto the modern women's and gay movements...
...In attendance were provisional staffers Goff and Lippincott, and four "directors": Christian activists Shaull, Glenn Smiley and Brady Tyson, and Time correspondent John Gerrasi...
...They were concerned with creating "alternative lifestyles" within alternative institutions: An independent, unaffiliated, unencumbered base was one of their objectives, along with collective decision making, equality of tasks, clear political purpose, non-exclusion, openness to people of very different points of view...
...The newly named 1N1LA was seen ty Le ac vi st who met in Chicago as an extension of the work of that congress...
...Sources of income were newsletter sales (about $200 per month) and grants from the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church, the Division of Youth Ministries of the National Council of Curches and the UCM...
...The New Left never marched to the beat of a single drummer-nor even to the beats of a few easily identifiable drummers-and this was to be reflected in NACLA's own development...
...I would call it 'scholarly propaganda,' persuading people through facts and information that what you feel is true and correct, not through rhetorical flourish and ideological citations...
...Who owns the companies doing business in Latin America...
...role in the Central American wars of the 1980s would dominate NACLA's agenda...
...1 Feb., 1967 475 Riverside Dr., Now York, New York 10o27 (212) 870-2507 In This Issue: Lference - Feb...
...For the inclusion and an end to the global hegemony of the most part, SDS members of the mid 1960s declared then-superpowers...
...On February 11, the first public meeting took place at New York University...
...It would focus on systemic analyses of wealth and power in the Americas rather than on scandals or policy "mistakes...
...interventions that violated Washington's self-declared democratic principles: the 1954 CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the reformist Arbenz regime in Guatemala...
...I was down there for the Free Election Committee.' So I said come up," even though at first, "I was suspicious of Fred...
...power, a shared hope for significant political and social change and a shared faith that the agency for that change was at hand in the vast plurality of movements of the day...
...It was business as usual that NACLA's research uncovered, not scandals that could be seen as aberrations from the normal functioning of the system...
...The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) has been formed by a group of such North Americans as a result of serious consideration of the existing vehicles of confronting this problem...
...Supr rights, antiwar and labor activists Do.s who had met to organize chal- military y lenges to a broad variety of U.S...
...The North American Congress on Latin America, its fledgling publisher, had just come together as a coalition of "New Left" student A C L A NE activists...
...It was within this world that the Dominican invasion inflamed already existing passions...
...It was really rather a different idea, the idea that privileged middle class college graduates could explicitly make use of those privileges and put them at the service of the movement...
...deepen our understanding of the process and implications of social, political and economic change and the agents of this change...
...8 Wright Mills in the 1950s, was meant to shed light on interlocking structures of political and economic power throughout the Americas...
...What brought together this diverse collection of beliefs and ideologies into a frequently unified movement was a shared outrage at the multiple levels of oppression that had become suddenly visible in the United States and at the hands of U.S...
...Both of us were interested in good research, in solid information that was documented and not rhetorical...
...When the United States invaded the Dominican Republic in April 1965, the "movement" reacted quickly and strongly...
...NACLA had begun with a focus very specifically on the Dominican Republic and U.S...
...I was thrilled, mesmerized and excited, but this was a year or so before feminism ominican Republic would change everything and I SView just sat and listened to the men...
...And the contradictions that most caught the attention of the early Naclistas were questions involving U.S...
...The word "congress" ofs resonated from a recent gathering 500 Homes Rockefell called the Congress of Unrepre- Bock sented People, a meeting of civil open Pre U.S...
...It would be informed by a belief that what happened in the United States was integrally related to what happened in the rest of the world...
...Through the first year, NACLA was given free office space in the Presbyterian offices...
...Goff, Lippincott, Locker, Edie Black, Peter Henig and Stoney Shaull, were all working at least part time...
...She attended NACLA's February meeting at NYU and remembers the moment quite clearly: "The oc two things I remember from that meeting were first of all that I ETTER did not talk at all...
...Dismayed by this experience and frustrated by the lack of any independent sources of information on the Dominican Republic, [See "U.S...
...Many young students, for the first time, felt as though blinders had been removed from their eyes...
...Richard Shaull, a Christian theologian and activist who had been in Santo Domingo as the mainstream Protestant representative on the Dominican election commission, was then teaching at Princeton Seminary...
...By February, NACLA had a paid and volunteer staff consisting of six people working out of the Presbyterian offices at the God Box...
...The new group, announced its organizers, would be a source of reliable information and analysis on Latin America that could be of use to activists...
...6 Report," from Air Progress...
...Within New Left ranks were groups and collections of individuals that themselves "non-Communist" but not "anti-Commuspawned, inspired and incorporated a plethora of liber- nist," seeking to separate themselves from the official ation movements and alternative lifestyles...
...In this context, NACLA's understanding of U.S...
...In Ann Arbor he came across the work of an SDS activist and graduate student named Mike Locker who was researching the structure of the Dominican sugar industry...
...Please contact us at our provisional headquarters...
...The idea was to reveal the basic structures of power and influence on U.S...
...While large parts of the movement were inspired, motivated and educated by the nonviolent sit-ins, freedom rides and freedom marches of the southern Civil Rights movement, and many activists revered the memories of Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers, many middle class U.S...
...5 me Court Limits Travel Restrictions, But Not utlaw Ban...
...These sympathies were activated when the United States invaded and occupied the Dominican Republic in April 1965...
...And that became a very important feature among the founding principles of NACLA: Knock out the rhetoric and go straight to the facts...
...The minutes A C record 23 people being present...
...2 cd Guatemala Coto (1963) After Vote nneody Aides, by Georgie Ann Geyer...
...A few weeks later in New York, the first meeting of NACLA's Administrative Committee was convened at the Interchurch Center-nicknamed "the God Box"-the uptown Manhattan headquarters of several Protestant denominations...
...Who controls foreign policy...
Vol. 36 • November 2002 • No. 3
