The NACLA Benefit Gala was a huge success, raising some $60,000 and bringing together Naclistas of all generations to celebrate this distinguished and vital organization. Thank you to all who attended! If you could not attend, but would like to support NACLA's work, please visit our donate page.

Video of remarks by Ariel Dorfman
Click below to watch the moving remarks made by Ariel Dorfman, winner of the NACLA 2008 Latin America Peace and Justice Award, at the NACLA Benefit Gala. Produced by Deep Dish TV.

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Photos from the Celebration
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Transcript, Welcoming Remarks by Executive Director Christy Thornton

Welcome, everyone, to the NACLA Benefit Gala, celebrating four decades of fighting for justice in the Americas. This event has been a long time coming – so long, in fact, that we are now either 41 or 42, depending on which founding moment you chose to celebrate. I’m thrilled to welcome so many long-time friends of NACLA, together with some new faces, to this celebration.

This is a propitious moment for NACLA; just as we enter our fifth decade, more of the world’s attention – not least of all that of the US government – is turning to Latin America.

At this very moment, just uptown at the Waldorf Astoria, at a party that is surely much more lavish than this one, the Cato Institute is presenting Venezuelan student opposition leader Yon Goicoechea with $500,000 and the “Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty.” In the press release announcing the award, Cato praised Goicoeacha for his “commitment to a modern Venezuela,” and said that he “emphasizes tolerance and the human right to seek prosperity.” The prosperity and tolerance they are honoring, of course, is prosperity for business elites, tolerance for market fundamentalism. From the perspective of the Cato institute, as well as a US government that has continued to fund the Venezuelan opposition and denounce its democratic leadership, there is no prosperity for the poor and working class, and no tolerance for new or different ways of organizing society’s relationship to the market.

We have also recently learned the U.S. has reactivated the Navy’s Fourth Fleet, which patrols the US “Southern Command” area – the Caribbean and Central and South America – and hasn’t been in service since 1950. In addition, NACLA recently reported on the establishment of the International Law Enforcement Academy in El Salvador (where student activists have been assassinated just in this past week); and we recently witnessed the announcement of the Merida initiative, also known as Plan Mexico; and each day we learn more about the continued brutality of workplace raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement that separate families, or worse, detain them indefinitely in privately run prisons. These developments are but a few that set one part of the stage upon which our work plays out – where US policy and interests in the hemisphere continue to undermine democracy, stability, and progressive change.

The other part, of course, is represented in the tremendous gains of social movements and progressive forces throughout the Americas in recent years – as well as the challenges they face from within. There is much to celebrate, and to learn from, in our hemisphere today: victories of left governments at the national and local level throughout the hemisphere have brought tremendous changes in the daily lives of the poor, the working class, women, ethnic minorities and other underrepresented peoples; indigenous movements have won recognition and representation from Chile to Mexico; legal challenges have been brought – and won – against military leaders from some of the region’s darkest days; social movements that emerged to face crises, such as Argentina’s economic collapse in 2001 or the repression of striking teachers in Oaxaca last year, have built lasting structures that have redefined how their communities are governed; and millions of immigrants and their supporters have rallied to oppose draconian legislation that would make the lives of this country’s immigrants dramatically more difficult. What’s more, challenges to US hegemonic power have gained traction, as regional integration and ties to other countries in the global south have gained legitimacy and pushed international institutions, like the IMF, to recognize their sovereignty and dignity as nations. This is not to say that the left does not face serious challenges in Latin America: as the recent struggle over autonomy for the wealthy eastern region of Bolivia shows, the imperatives of the market and its proponents are alive and well, and will fight any attempt to subordinate the rights of capital to the rights of the people.

In this context, the role NACLA has to play is a vital one: today, as much as any period in our history, the need for information and analysis is crucial to the struggle for radical social change. It is certainly true that accessing information about daily events in Latin America is almost inconceivably easier than it was at NACLA’s founding. With online access not only to English-language sources of news, but direct access to many of the daily newspapers of the region, there is no doubt that we have access to more information than ever before. But this access can cause a glut of information, an indecipherable cacophony of voices of varying legitimacy and motive. It is here that NACLA is poised to play our most important role: as a trusted source of information and analysis for four decades, we are uniquely positioned to cut through the cacophony and bring our audience of scholars, journalists, activists and students the knowledge they need. And we must not forget that this is an explicitly political process: we are here to bring people the overlooked, the under-reported and the covered-up, in the service of social change.

And so tonight, we both look back on and celebrate our history, and look forward to our future. Just as the NACLA of the past played a crucial role in some of the most important movements this country has seen – the student movement of the 1960s, the Chile solidarity movement of the 1970s, the Central America solidarity movement of the 1980s, and the nascent global justice movement of the 1990s – so today are we affirming not only NACLA’s importance, but also the importance of the social movements that we both participate in and serve: those fighting against free trade and economic subordination, for immigrant rights, and in solidarity with the people of Latin America. We are here tonight to commemorate, but also to propel forward our project, and our struggle. Thank you for being here tonight, and for being a part of this tremendous moment in NACLA’s history.

Check back soon for more updates!