At its founding meeting in 1966, speakers on the platform who agreed to be executive board members included Paul Sweezy, editor of Monthly Review; John Gerassi, author of The Great Fear in Latin America; Father Felix McGowan; Catarino Garza, Socialist Workers Party candidate for governor of New York; and Joseph Hansen, editor of the Militant. The author of this article, Mike Kelly, was the executive secretary of USLA.
 

Guatemala, Brazil, Uruguay; La Banda, AAA, White Hand; Tres Alamos, the Dark Fortress, La Victoria, Pinochet, Banzer, Somoza—the countries, the death squads, the prisons, the dictators all bear a “Made in USA” stamp. That’s why we have always felt that people in the United States have a special obligation to defend political prisoners in Latin America.

The Dominican labor leaders that USLA helped free were victimized by a regime placed in power through an invasion by the U.S. Marines in 1965. And U.S. encouragement of the [1973] coup in Chile and the continuing aid to the Junta make it especially incumbent on us to aid the victims of that regime.

It was this feeling of responsibility for the victims of political persecution in Latin America that led a very diverse group of people to form USLA in 1966.

Since that time USLA has utilized a variety of activities to call attention to those it is defending and to the repressive conditions in various countries. USLA-sponsored speaking tours by Latin Americanists John Gerassi, Richard Fagen, Ralph Della Cava, Richard Falk, James Petras, and others have reached tens of thousands of people face-to-face and many more through the media.

Our first tour, in early 1967, saw John Gerassi addressing meetings of up to 1200 on the West Coast. That tour focused on the cases of Victor Rico Galan, a writer for the Mexican magazine Siempre, and Adolfo Gilly, an Argentine journalist, both of whom were imprisoned in Mexico, and Hugo Blanco, the Peruvian peasant leader who was then facing the threat of a death sentence in his country.

Some speakers have themselves been victims of torture and imprisonment. Amy Conger, an art history teacher who was arrested in Chile at the time of the coup, and Mary Elizabeth Harding, who was a victim of the Banzer regime in Bolivia, both shared their experiences with audiences at meetings we sponsored. Marjorie and Tom Melville, who experienced the repression in Guatemala firsthand, spoke for USLA and served as its executive secretaries in 1973.

Other speakers have been outstanding defenders of democratic rights in their own countries. Argentine Socialist Juan Carlos Coral, for instance, was under a death threat from the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina when he toured this country for USLA in 1975.

We have also sponsored tours by people such as former CIA operative Victor Marchetti, and Harald Edelstam, the Swedish Ambassador to Chile at the time of the coup. Some tours have had to be cancelled, however, when the United States government refused to grant visas to our projected speakers, as happened with Argentine Daniel Zadunaisky and more recently with Hugo Blanco.

USLA has also sponsored hundreds of picket-lines and demonstrations in its ten years of activity. Worldwide demonstrations, including those USLA helped organize, have saved thousands of prisoners from torture in Chile, to cite one example.

Countless people, including members of Congress, film stars, labor, church, Black, Chicano, and student leaders have signed USLA-circulated telegrams, letters, mass petitions, and newspaper ads.

This fall, for example, members of Congress such as Hubert Humphrey, Bella Abzug, Michael Harrington, Ron Dellums, and labor leaders Leonard Woodcock, Cesar Chavez, Arnold Miller, and Patrick Gorman have supported USLA campaigns.

One of the most important jobs USLA sets for itself is the dissemination of printed materials on Latin America in this country.

To that end we have published a wide variety of educational materials. Our first pamphlet, published in 1967, was entitled Hugo Blanco Must Not Die, based on a speech by Andre Gunder Frank. In 1974 we published our first book, Chile’s Days of Terror. Containing eyewitness accounts of the carnage accompanying the right-wing coup, the book has since been translated and published in Japanese and French.

Our most important publication, of course, is the REPORTER, now beginning its ninth year. The REPORTER often provides information not available from other sources, such as the documents smuggled out of Chilean women’s prisons in 1974.

In the recent past the REPORTER, which has been scheduled to come out bimonthly, has been somewhat irregular in its frequency of appearance due to recurring financial and staff shortages. Since it has been coming out approximately four times a year, we are recognizing our limitations and are changing the publication schedule to quarterly, starting with this issue.

This year also marks the tenth anniversary of USLA’s on-going financial crisis. What we have been able to accomplish, and what we have been able to take on, has always been determined to a large extent by the available funds.

Our staff takes great pride in being very tight with money. We don’t waste it, and we work it to death. But our permanent financial crisis affects us in more ways than might be readily apparent. In addition to limiting what USLA can contemplate doing, the constant need to do fundraising means that precious staff time is diverted from organizing the defense of political prisoners to raising funds.

Our biggest single fundraising event did not benefit USLA itself. It was a Chile Emergency Art Exhibition in New York, at which more than $30,000 was raised for refugee aid.

But the bulk of the funds for USLA’s functioning comes, year in and year out, from small contributions from our members and supporters. It is the five and ten dollar contributions that have kept USLA going for the last ten years.

It has been these modest contributions that have enabled the committee to follow cases over the course of years. To cite a few examples, for ten years we have been around to defend Hugo Blanco when the need arose. We helped save him from the executioner in Peru, saw him through exiles in Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, through his rescue from the junta by Swedish Ambassador Edelstam and into another exile in Sweden and a European speaking tour for Amnesty International, to his recent return to his native Peru as a beneficiary of an amnesty from that country’s new rulers.

Similarly, we have covered the case of five Puerto Rican nationalist prisoners for nearly a decade. And in this issue we report the most recent release of Manuel de Conceicão from prison. But we have organized campaigns to defend this Brazilian peasant leader in 1972, in 1973 and 1974, and again in 1975. While we hope that with his release he will no longer need our efforts, we stand ready to defend him again should the need arise.

Tenth anniversaries are a natural time to look back on what has been accomplished. No one can say how many prisoners we have saved. All too often we learn of a prisoner’s fate months or even years later. Sometimes we never know. These governments repress information as well as people.

But just recently we got another glimpse of the impact of USLA’s campaigns. A source in the American Embassy in the Dominican Republic told an USLA staff member that the embassy had been receiving urgent inquiries from the Balaguer regime about the protest letters it had received around the recent campaign to free the CGT leaders.

We have also seen, over the past ten years, a major change in the outlook of the average person in this country. In 1966 it wasn’t easy to convince Americans that their government was guilty of “destabilizing” governments or assassinating foreign leaders. This naivete, so to speak, was a barrier to accepting the responsibility we must bear towards the fate of Latin American political prisoners. But times have changed!

While we have cause to celebrate our successes, we temper this with the sobering realization that a huge task remains. Tens of thousands still face the torturer, jailer, and executioner for their political beliefs in Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Guatemala, and other countries.

But today there are thousands more Americans who will sign a petition, send a telegram, walk a picket line, attend a meeting, or send a contribution than there were in 1966.

So while we cannot contemplate closing up shop after ten years, we are confident that you, our supporters and members, will continue to support USLA in the future as you have in the past ten years.  
 
 
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