Early History
The founders of the North American Congress on Latin America, a "contemporary group of civil rights, antiwar, and labor activists" organized together in 1967 to challenge the elitist conventions of the "national interests" of the American people in order to express the "real interests" of those fundamentally opposed to those prior concepts. Rolling off a mimeograph machine in New York of that year, the "New Left student activists" who had just come together by its founding publisher, NACLA, released the first issue of NACLA Report on the Americas. The term "Congress" was utilized to carry in the spirit of "Congress of Unrepresented People," a liberal faction of American activists unrecognized or supported by mainstream American elites to promote the "systematic analysis of wealth and power" in Latin America by focusing on the theme that what happens in the United States has a direct relationship on the unfolding history of the rest of the world.
In NACLA’s first year, the group was given free working space in the Presbyterian offices of the Interchurch Center in uptown Manhattan. Printing of the newsletter, promotional materials, stationery and small pamphlets was also underwritten by the Presbyterians. Those in-kind contributions aside, NACLA’s first annual budget, including salaries, stood at just over $11,000. 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 Churches and the UCM. Few thought the group would survive long.
U.S. policies and power drawn by the lens from a Latin American perspective would expose the parallel systems and contradictions causing powder keg events in the region. NACLA's intentions pursued U.S. interventions violating "Washington's self-declared democratic principles." NACLA's agenda followed the course of investigating those violations such as: the 1954-CIA orchestrated overthrow of the reformist Arbenz regime in Guatemala; the 1961 invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs by a Florida-based anti-Castro mercenary force; and the 1965 invasion and occupation of the Dominican Republic.
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