35 Years: NACLA Anniversary Issue

The first issue of NACLA Newsletter, the magazine 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 Latin America, its fledgling publisher, had just come together as a coalition of "New Left" student activists. 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. role in the world. When the United States invaded the Dominican Republic in April 1965, the "movement" reacted quickly and strongly. It was out of that reaction that NACLA was formed. This anniversary issue of the NACLA Report tells the story of NACLA’s life.

November/December
2002
Volume: 
36
Number: 
1

Taking Note

Terry Gibbs
This publication was once known as the Latin America and Empire Report. “Imperialism” and “empire” had largely dropped out of the left’s political lexicon by the end of 1970s. “Empire” was dropped from the NACLA Report’s name in 1977.

Intro

Fred Rosen
In this anniversary issue of NACLA Report we have decided to tell the story of NACLA’s life—a life in solidarity with Latin America; a life on the left.

Updates

Jan Rocha
São Paulo’s Avenida Paulista is a monument to money: The wide avenue is lined with the solid concrete and glass towers of giant banking corporations. But on October 27, election night, a sea of red flags lapped at the doors of the banks as thousands of supporters of the victorious PT (Workers Party) waited for their hero, chanting campaign slogans.

Report

Fred Rosen
Soon, however, the fledgling organization was turning out a lengthening list of publications: Early NACLA Newsletters included analyses of the penetration of Latin America by U.S. corporate interests: “Kaiser’s Global Empire,” “The Hanna Industrial Complex,” “Brown Bros.
Fred Rosen
In the winter of 1969-70, five staff members moved to the San Francisco Bay area and established a second NACLA office in Berkeley. Fred Goff, who had lived in California and was anxious to move back, had gone out earlier to investigate the possibilities of establishing a West Coast office, and found a large West Coast constituency—mostly academics—that could potentially be very supportive of NACLA’s work.
Fred Rosen
NACLA’s “decollectivization” was well underway by the early 1990s. Everyone had a job title and there were intended lines of authority.
Fred Rosen
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union three years later created a world fundamentally different from the one in which the Latin American left had been active.
Fred Rosen
In 1981, Salvadoran politics took a turn for the grisly: In November, the five-man executive committee of the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR), the chief civilian opposition to the increasingly brutal military-civilian junta, was rounded up, tortured and killed.
Steven Volk
“In September, 1973, I was a 26-year-old doctoral student finishing my dissertation research ... my own political interests soon brought me into contact with a small group of progressive, young North Americans.
Fred Rosen
On July 19, 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) toppled the U.S.-supported Somoza family dictatorship that had ruled Nicaragua for nearly a half century. Later that same year, a coup of seemingly progressive “young colonels” overthrew El Salvador’s military government only to turn repressive and exclusionary themselves.
Fred Rosen
With the election of Allende’s Popular Unity coalition (UP), hopes for a “democratic road” to socialism ran high; fears that the United States wouldn’t allow an elected socialist government to succeed in the Americas ran even higher.
Fred Rosen
Black left NACLA two years later and his critical stance was taken up by a new recruit named Mark Fried. Fried, like Janet Shenk, started reading NACLA Report as an undergraduate. He was a 19-year-old student at Friends World College in 1973 when someone gave him a copy of NACLA’s New Chile and he found it fascinating.
Fred Rosen
The very apparent vulnerabilities of democratic socialism, combined with the secrecy induced by government surveillance, attracted one group of Naclistas to Leninist strategies and forms of organization.
Jon Frappier
“The most valuable characteristic of NACLA was its decision and ability to respond to events. Whether it was the 1968 massacre of hundreds of radical students in Mexico City or what was happening at Columbia [University in New York] and the student movement at home, NACLA was able to respond.
Jean Franco
“Much thinking on the left still relied on traditional definitions of public and private spheres, blinding it to the fact that the so-called private sphere was also a political space.
Michael Klare
“In order to administer an empire efficiently,it is necessary to construct an apparatus for collecting, analyzing and acting upon information concerning foreign territories.
Fred Rosen
In April 1965, President Lyndon Johnson sent some 22,000 U.S. Marines to the Dominican Republic to crush a military and popular uprising that sought to restore the constitutional rule of President Juan Bosch.
Fred Rosen
Steven Volk notes that Salvador Allende “promised to lead Chile through a peaceful transition to socialism, using the legal system of Chile to establish a new economic and political order.”
Fred Rosen
The first issue of NACLA Newsletter, the magazine 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 Latin America, its fledgling publisher, had just come together as a coalition of “New Left” student activists.

In Brief

Marc Becker
QUITO—Foreign ministers from 34 countries in the Americas gathered here in Ecuador’s capital the last week of October for the Seventh Ministerial Summit of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

Article

Brady Tyson
"From the beginning, several distinct groups have worked together to create NACLA. Organizationally, the prime movers were SDS and University Christian Movement personnel.