North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) Archive of Latin Americana

The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) was founded in response to the April 1965 U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic. This armed intervention by the United States against a popular uprising -- classic gunboat diplomacy -- preempted the restoration to power of freely elected president Juan Bosch. It also paved the way for the thirty year dictatorship of caudillo Joaquin Balaguer. NACLA's founders were especially struck by the Johnson administration's ability to disseminate its version of events virtually unchallenged, while mainstream opinion makers set the tone of a limited public debate. Moreover, as the U.S. intervention in Vietnam began in ernest, progressive critics and opponents of U.S. policy, both abroad and at home, began seriously to consider questions about the nature of public education, the role of independent media, and how to make critical analysis of the U.S. power structure accessible to a broad and interested public.

NACLA, which took shape from these questions, was founded in October and November of 1966 in a series of meetings of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the University Christian Movement, and returned Peace Corps volunteers, along with assorted other individuals and organizations. According to its articles of incorporation, NACLA's role was "to encourage, produce and distribute information designed to identify and explain those elements and relationships of forces in the United States and Latin America which inhibit and frustrate urgently needed profound social and economic change." The "congress" in NACLA's name was suggested by the "Congress of Unrepresented People," a contemporary group of civil rights, antinuclear, and labor activists who came together to challenge elite conceptions of the national interest as fundamentally opposed to the real interests of the majority of the American people.

[See the preface of the attached PDF file (7.9 MB), linked under Detailed Description, for further details.]