Excerpt of Interview with Fred Goff (NACLA, North American Committee on Latin America).

Interviewed by Chris Rosene, Oakland, California, July 20, 2016

 

Early NACLA/LAWG connection

 

Chris: There was a meeting in Chicago in the ‘60s which was said to have given birth to NACLA. At that Chicago meeting, a Canadian, Hugh Miller, attended. Do you have any recollections about that meeting and anything related to Canadians’ involvement?

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Fred: I remember there was a Canadian there. One reason we called it the “North American” Congress on Latin America was because we wanted Canadian participation. And Canadians were interested. The meeting was held in Chicago, I think in the summer of 1966, at what might have been the University of Chicago or someplace that a man who worked with the Packing House Workers, had helped to arrange.

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Chris: So the intention was to have it be North American?

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Fred: Yes, very definitely. And definitely, there was Canadian participation, by at least one person. There may have been one or two dozen people at that meeting from different places, different organizations. There was someone from SDS [Students for a Democratic Society], the Chicago organizing effort in New Mexico, SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], Peace Corps returnees, former missionaries, journalists.

There were two tracks in the organization. The tension of those two tracks kind of lasted throughout the whole organization. I remember one journalist who told me, “Every single article in Time Magazine is a political, editorial decision. Why one story gets told and not another, is determined by people very, very high up who have an interest in seeing that covered. And then there was the other stream that said, “one of the main ways we can help people who are trying to make change in Latin America is to try to  #1 - change US policy, and #2 - provide them with information that is helpful in their own work.” So a lot of the original focus of NACLA was just how our private interests translate into public policy, in terms of US policy towards Latin America. There had been a lot of efforts to try and do something, a lot of talk, but the thing that really was the button that kind of made this really happen, was the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in the spring of 1965. And the first big research project for NACLA carried out was the sugar industry in the Dominican Republic and how/what relationship it had to US policy.

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Chris: The Dominican Republic was also very important in LAWG’s early work. Going back to the NACLA/LAWG link, John also remembers you being in Canada in 1968 for a meeting. Can remember that and what it led to?

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Fred: Now, did we meet at York? Or at the University of Toronto? There were meetings. But I can’t remember where. You see, what I was doing at the time, was I was going around trying to build up chapters of NACLA. I went to Cornell. I went to different universities. Went to Canada to universities.

 

Educating a Whole Generation

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One of the important things about the NACLA Data Centre was creating a way to give people public access to progressive organizing. Part of it is preserving it. Another one is organizing it and the other one is making it accessible. That’s really an important part of history. A lot of the organizing in the last years of the Data Centre has been to help communities capture and document their own traditions and their own knowledge, and their own culture, and put it to work in their own interests, to allow them to document and to make their own case, to give them an equal standing at the table. I think that is one of the Data Centre’s big legacies for the movement.

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That is where a whole generation of young people were introduced to organizing and doing research and learning the importance of documenting what we were trying to argue.

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There are lessons. We always said that one of the threads throughout the whole history of NACLA and the Data Centre was the importance and the power of research. It takes many different forms, and can be used in many different ways. The Right Wing called the Data Centre the “intelligence op of the Left”. And, that’s really what it was. Using intelligence – basically using information and research – to achieve a certain political goal or to change some power relationship. So it was about how you could harness information, to help make social change.

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I think NACLA did a really good job over many years of educating a whole new generation about Latin America. And I’m sure LAWG did the same.