The strength of NACLA has long been its on-the-ground reporting. With a focus on hemispheric politics, political economy, and social movements, our Reports and articles have both considered and steered away from broad considerations of imperialism and U.S. hegemony, analyzing conflicts and developments on their own terms.
Faced with the lack of reliable information on the 1965 U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic, for example, U.S.- based critics of the invasion—mostly students, many of them veterans of the Peace Corps—reached out to one another to coordinate research on the island and in Washington. The research was empirical, and quickly came to incorporate both interpretation and analysis. Ideological commitment entered into NACLA's reporting, and it did so out of necessity. After the aggression in the Dominican Republic, lack of reliable information led to a search for a credible interpretation of those events, and a way to present its findings in an accessible manner. That necessity gave birth to NACLA.
As we complete our 50th year of research, publication, and activism, we look back in this issue of the NACLA Report to where we have been, how we got there, and some of the challenges—and opportunities—that lie ahead.
For some, NACLA's continuous and reliable reportage and research on Latin America has opened the door to an understanding of the underlying dynamics of the region and its relationship with the United States, and provided progressive interpretation and analysis that is grounded in concrete realities. For others, NACLA has created a critical community of diverse activists, academics, and a broad spectrum of progressive strategists and policymakers.
NACLA has also ser ved as a guidepost of sorts for the evolving assumptions and commitments of the North American Left. When we held our f irst open meetings in New York back in 1966 and 1967, we believed—as did observers and policymakers of all political stripes—that most Latin American and Caribbean conflicts were fought out on the terrain of the Cold War. Coming from the Left, most of our coverage took, as a starting point, the assumption that the key political conflicts—in Santo Domingo and San Salvador, as much as in Santiago de Chile and in Washington itself— were rooted in U.S. imperialism.
Above all, early Naclistas saw the organization they had created as an outpost of anti-imperialism. Over the past half century, that assumption has softened and, to a certain extent, changed, as NACLA, along with many of our companion movements and publications, has moved from an “old left” to a “new left” perspective.
In this 50th anniversary issue, we have pulled some fragments of reporting and analysis out of the Report that represent that gradual transformation. Once we were guided by a belief that history, especially capitalism's history, has a revolutionary logic for leftists to uncover and take part in—principally a struggle between capital and its own industrial labor force. Over time that belief has given way to the notion that the future is unwritten, and that the Left can create its own history in the course of defending social, political, and human rights. Such rights are defensible on their own terms—rights that sometimes but not always come with a revolutionary logic.
Thus for this issue, we have chosen to present pieces that reflect NACLA's evolving style as well as some of the key leftist assumptions that shaped the historical moment in which they were written and published. As readers will see, while the sharpest focus of our first few decades was on the role of U.S. activity and policy in the region, local dynamics have drawn more of NACLA's attention in the more recent past.
In short, there has been a steady shift from the analysis of a single hegemonic system, reflected in the original name of the NACLA Report—“NACLA's Latin America and Empire Report”—to an analysis of a wide variety of causes that have led and not led to a state of affairs we might recognize as “revolution.” Equally important, there has been an unwritten agreement among NACLA writers and editors that reporting and interpretation can and should reflect an understanding that not every Latin American and Caribbean conf lict emanates from the United States, that not every militant movement is revolutionary, and that not every radical movement is directed against capitalism. –Fred Rosen
What’s in the Issue
The issue's format takes on the Sisyphean task of fitting 50 years of history into a single volume. It follows flashpoints in Latin American history and politics over the past five decades, and NACLA's coverage of them, in roughly chronological order. We’ve paired archival excerpts with modern-day reflections by NACLA contributors new and longstanding, which review and introduce these topics, providing an update from the lens of hindsight. While we did not ask our authors to predict the future, it is our hope that these contributions are forward-facing, looking towards a brighter and more just future for the region.
The issue opens with a brief retelling of NACLA's history in an abridged version of Fred Rosen's “History of NACLA” Report from 2003, written at the time of the NACLA's 35th anniversary. Rosen's piece follows NACLA and the issues that fueled the founding of the Congress and magazine: from the invasion of the Dominican Republic to the Chilean coup to 1980s solidarity movements with Central America. It also follows the ideological schisms and splits that NACLA endured, reflecting Naclistas’ deeply-held convictions over time.
Christ y Thornton, who since 2003 has held nearly every role imaginable at NACLA, then updates readers on NACLA's history from 2003 to the present. In the last 15 years NACLA's content has grappled with the onslaught of neoliberalism, the wars on terror and drugs, and followed the ebbs and flows of the Pink Tide. Meanwhile, the magazine has struggled to stay afloat amid the explosion of the world wide web. Through it all—and not without sacrif ice— NACLA has managed to survive, and even thrive.
The Report then covers the Dirty Wars of the Southern Cone. Steven Volk analyzes the hope and despair of 1970-1973 in Chile, reflecting on a 1970 NACLA interview Saul Landau conducted with Chile's then-president Salvador Allende. Greg Grandin then responds to a 1979 report, “The Long Night of the Generals,” which provides a sweeping look at the terror and chaos wrought by the military dictatorships from Brazil to Bolivia to Uruguay to Argentina and Chile.
1979 also marked when the Sandinistas toppled the decades-long Somoza dictatorship, unleashing an era of Civil Wars across Central America. Our section on these conflicts reprints archival photography by Susan Meiselas from Nicaragua, introduced by Fred Rosen, then offers a longer discussion of El Salvador by Hilary Goodfriend. Goodfriend ref lects on Bob Armstrong's 1980 article, “There's a War Going On,” which zooms into the horrors of everyday life in El Salvador against the abuses of the U.S.-funded military. Solidarity played a major role at the time, which Janet Shenk discusses in her sidebar on the delegations she led with NACLA to Central America in the 1980s.
Fifteen years later, activist and scholar Van Gosse looked at the state of the solidarity movement, shortly after the Sandinistas were voted out of power in Nicaragua. Goodfriend also ref lects on how solidarity and activism from the United States with El Salvador has shifted to focus more on immigration justice, including the voices of young people and of Salvadorans themselves. Filmmaker Pamela Yates considers a different kind of solidarity with Guatemala, whose civil war ended in 1996. She focuses on 1983, when the article “The War is Not Over” appeared at the height of the most violent moments of Guatemala's civil war under dictator and genocidaire Efraín Ríos Montt.
Though neoliberalism in Latin America has its roots in the Chilean dictatorship, the fall of the Berlin Wall and end of the Cold War in 1989 brought with it the hegemony of late capitalism, a dynamic that NACLA has explored at length. We’ve reprinted German Sánchez Otero's 1993 article, “Neoliberalism and its Discontents” as representative of NACLA's coverage of these themes, prefaced by Peruvian economist Oscar Ugarteche's reflection on how the economics of privatization have increased inequality and stagnated growth across the region, from the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994) to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In Peru, the era of the Washington Consensus combined with terror, both by the Peruvian state and by Sendero Luminoso insurgents under the regime of Alberto Fujimori. Jo-Marie Burt, a former editor of NACLA who witnessed the historic trial against the late former dictator, discusses this era, its own “dirty war,” as Carol Barton reported in 1983 in NACLA as the country's insurgency and counter-insurgency intensified.
Alongside these developments came a political groundswell that opposed such policies, though their strategies to do so ran the gamut. James N. Green was perhaps the first person in the United States to write about Brazil's Workers’ Party, and he did so in the pages of NACLA in 1979. His piece traces the rise of its leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the “third way” forward he proposed for Brazil: pro-capitalist, yet also pro-working class. This has of course elicited critiques from Naclistas and other committed leftists, and panic from the right-wing. After the 2016 impeachment of former president Dilma Rousseff and this year's imprisonment of Lula, the Left has suffered devastating losses in Brazil, and the way forward remains unknown, and likely bleak.
The elections of Pink Tide leaders Hugo Chávez in 1999 in Venezuela and Evo Morales in 2003 in Bolivia marked high points for left and left-leaning governance in the region. As Fernando Coronil predicted in 2000, however, putting hope for building a new, anti-neoliberal order into the figure of a messianic revolutionary can often backfire. Twenty years after Chávez's election, it's hard to remember how Venezuela once stood as a paragon and a hope for an alternative world order, as Executive Editor Alejandro Velasco writes. Meanwhile, under the leadership of Evo Morales, the country's first Indigenous president, Bolivia has made strides towards enacting policies that benefit the country's Indigenous majority. Yet by 2009, as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui warned in NACLA, the Morales government was already making concerning moves towards consolidating its own power, a trajectory that has only increased since, leaving Bolivianists and leftists alike disillusioned as extractivism has exploded across the country, Linda Farthing writes.
The Pink Tide also faltered when it came to intersectionality: largely led by men, the movement did little to interrogate patriarchal norms across Latin America. In this vein, we’ve reprinted Elisabeth Jay Friedman's introduction to our 2007 issue, “How Pink is the Pink Tide?” Continued reliance on resource extraction has continued to plague the region, as the environment suffers the effects of climate change. These attacks on nature, as Nicole Fabricant and Bret Gustafson revisit in introducing our 1994 Report, “The Conquest of Nature,” have their roots in the first days of the Spanish conquest of the Americas.
Somewhat of an outlier is Colombia, whose 50-year civil conflict has been a mainstay in NACLA's coverage. Winifred Tate reflects on the complexity of this conflict, and both the hopes and missed opportunities of the 2016 peace accords. The explosion of the Drug War and the end of the Cold War represent a deadly combination that Dawn Paley explores in her article. As early as 1993, Kate Doyle was referring to the drug war as a “quietly escalating failure” in the pages of NACLA, and people like Coletta Youngers, Tate, and Alexander Aviña have expounded upon these analyses with detailed accounting of the expenditures, harmful impacts, and histories of these policies in the Andes, in Mexico, in Central America and the Caribbean.
Its inter ventions in the region has often made U.S. reach and mobility seem limitless, but as NACLA has long reported, restrictive immigration policies have made “the border” between the U.S. and Mexico (and therefore Latin America) an increasingly concrete, militarized, and dangerous reality, which Peter Andreas explored in his comprehensive 1999 article on the incipient policy of “prevention through deterrence.” Judy Hellman zooms in on this moment, when a previous porous border cleaved itself into two clear lines. Such policies have only deepened in the wake of 9/11 with the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Today, capital moves unbound, while people's mobility is strictly controlled. We thus f ind ourselves in another difficult political moment, facing mounting anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia amid a regional right turn. David Bacon's piece on Mexican labor and immigration reflects on the push factors that have led to increased migration to the United States in the wake of NAFTA, and how U.S. policies have fueled it. Today, as Central Americans flee structural and gang violence in their home countries, NACLA reminds readers to look to the roots of such crises, whether domestic or international. Yet long-time activists like Guadalupe Castillo, who Todd Miller interviews in this issue, have proven indefatigable in their resistance. NACLA's research and reporting has served as a resource for Castillo and many other activists over the past half-century.
The Caribbean, like the U.S.-Mexico border, remains so close and yet so far away. Political and economic trends there both parallel and diverge from Central and South America. William LeoGrande follows Cuba from the special period to the economic opening through today in revisiting articles from 1995 by Manuel Pastor, Andrew Zimbalist, and Mirta Rodríguez, and from 2013 and 2016, respectively, by the late Roger Burbach and Sarah Stephens.
Nearby, Puerto Rico, facing a trifecta of economic crisis, austerity, and natural disaster, remains a U.S. proto-colony, which Ricardo Gabriel discusses in his reflection on Puerto Rico, followed by excerpts from NACLA's archives.
All told, this issue captures NACLA's expansive breadth and depth of coverage over five decades, a stunning achievement in its own right well-captured in reflections by longtime supporters for whom NACLA continues to stand, as it long has, for its unique coverage, its hard-hitting analysis, and its impact on developing the passions and careers of young people over decades. In fact, as undergraduate Kate Reed attests in her piece after encountering NACLA in a class project, NACLA has been particularly useful in the classroom, opening students to ideas and themes they may not have otherwise found. We hope this issue will serve as a tool for educators.
In assembling any issue covering 50 extraordinary years, certain absences are inevitable. For instance, NACLA devoted 1978 to publishing Reports focusing on different aspects of the Caribbean—from oil in Trinidad to U.S.- Jamaica relations to Caribbean migration. What we have selected here reflects both NACLA's strengths as well as areas we missed, and what we will endeavor to bring into the fold in the decades to come.
Fred Rosen, a former editor and director of NACL A, is a semi-retired writer living in Mexico.
In our most recent issue, the order of the authors in Guillermo T. Aveledo's review of Venezuela's Polarized Politics: The Paradox of Direct Democracy Under Chávez was misstated. The authors names should be listed as follows: Ana L. Mallen and María Pilar García-Guadilla, in that order. We regret the error.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Laura Weiss
Laura Weiss is Managing Editor of NACLA.