The following are excerpts from conversations with Louise Casselman in 2015 and a joint 2015 interview with Louise and John Foster.

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Important Moments

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There are these moments – when history just grabs you and you can decide, oh I think I’ll go to the suburbs and get married and have ten kids and I don’t want to know about this. Or, you’re in it – the vortex! And you’re engaged in it. And it just drags you forward. Our history, it’s a history of all these movements, or “this moment” – in which we were part. We were all connected.

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The way I look at it, it’s not so much whether we had “an impact” or not. I think the impact would have been there, with or without us [LAWG]. These were changing times. And I think we fell into those times. I came out of the New Left. It’s not that we were different than anybody else. It’s just that, I think, for reasons that are beyond our individual contributions, it’s “a moment”. And you either take advantage of it or you don’t. What are the reasons that made LAWG what it was? The Christian Left was one of them. But there were also people that came out of the women’s movement. They made contributions. And I was more like New Left coming out of Quebec in part, which was another history. Different people brought these different dynamics, but we were in the movement. The movement was happening, and we were part of it. We were part of a moment when things were opening up and we took advantage of it. Or, we were there helping to lead it. I would be hesitant to say we “made” the changes in the labour movement, for instance, but we made our contribution and other people were probably making very similar contributions.

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Vietnam was so important. For me, Vietnam was the single most important international event that opened my world to the international work. If it hadn’t been for Vietnam, I don’t think I would be here doing what I’m doing. Vietnam changed my whole life. I remember listening to my friends saying we were on the wrong side. And I said, “Well, aren’t we on the side of democracy in defending the war in Vietnam”!! I didn’t know anything back then! I was just coming out of Catholic school. I was sixteen, seventeen … I didn’t understand, I thought we should fight communism wherever communism was, right? But by eighteen I was in front of the embassies and getting busted-around like everybody else. But it took somebody to shake me up, to say, “Do you really know what’s going on?” And of course, the press, the things, the images that came out of Vietnam, you had to say, “This can’t be good!” Is this the way we fight communism, by killing a bunch of innocent people and children and women?? This is horrific! This is a genocide.

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So many of us grew in that period. Not all of us, but a lot of our generation were incredibly, deeply impacted. Other generations would have been impacted by other kinds of struggles. I think it’s the reason I left school. I thought, “What am I going to learn here? I’ve got to get out there and help fix things.” So I became an activist because I thought that was making a better contribution than becoming a doctor or studying whatever, because “we need to stop the war in Vietnam.” All my energies went to that. And then we find out about everything else going on in the world and so, when I say “the moment” – there’s those incredible moments, that changed our view of the world.

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Remembering the Chilean Coup

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When the coup in Chile happened I was in the Dominican Republic, in Bonao, with the miners and I remember it was at night, because I could come out at night. I was almost underground in Bonao, it was so dangerous. I was walking with the union president and we were listening to a little radio, it was Radio Havana, and Allende’s last words … we were listening to the radio and it was happening. Live!! And I turned to the guy, his name was Pineda, I said, “I need to borrow 40 bucks!” Because I needed to get a flight out of the Dominican Republic, to change my ticket, and to get the bus from Bonao to Santo Domingo, so I said, “My organization will need me. I have to leave now.” So they lent me 40 dollars – and later I sent money back. I had to leave Bonao, just like that! I got to Santo Domingo, made the change with the ticket, and left the next day, arrived in Montreal, because my ticket was to Montreal, took the bus – it was summer, it was one of those farm meetings, or meetings that were  held at an ecumenical centre somewhere outside of Toronto. I made it to that meeting and remember everybody was so crushed. Everybody. Such an important moment.

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Early Brazil Work

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We can’t underestimate that one of the most important influences on LAWG in that early period was Brazil. The Dominican Republic and Brazil would be the two things. Like, we were receiving refugees from Brazil, right, with horrendous stories of torture, seeking refuge in Canada.

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I remember being very involved at the time with the Brazilians living in Montreal or Quebec City. These were people who had come out of jail, who had been picked up and tortured, and were now living in Quebec. It was at the time of the War Measures Act. I was in the Our Generation office, reading about the Patriots’ Revolt and seeing these police with machine guns outside, surrounding the building, walking around, and then they came in and dragged out and arrested a whole bunch of people. And they said “It doesn’t matter. If you’re against the system, that’s what matters to us. Whether you’re a pacifist or not, is of no consequence.” That incident just clarified a bunch of stuff for me that I’d never understood, because I was a pacifist. Those were very, very important moments.

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So the Brazilians in exile, the work was veru big in Quebec. There was the big “There’s Blood in Labatt’s Beer” campaign. That was when Jean Marc came to Toronto in the spring of ’72. Torture became a big issue and I remember that work was very, very important. In LAWG we didn’t so much work on the Labatt’s stuff. We worked on Brascan.

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We decided, as one strategy, that we would go to the Brascan AGM to denounce its complicity with torture, as with the case of Manuel del Conseçau who was a peasant leader who had been imprisoned for I forget how many years. As part of our work on corporations we had all bought shares in Brascan, so we went to the Annual General Meeting. I’ll always remember how brave Rachel was. Rachel got up and read Manuel de Concesau’s letter from prison, from this hell hole where he had been kept. As she read it out loud she was shaking. It was such a hard thing to do in a room so full of people who were hostile.

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She’s reading and describing the horrors of this man’s torture. He’s talking about electric shocks and this woman this woman shuddering and saying, “Oh this is terrible” and “be quiet”, like, people just didn’t want to hear this. “Stop this now!” I think Rachel managed to get to the end. And then we all marched out. We didn’t stay for the whole meeting. We said something about “We are divesting our shares” and made some kind of gesture and left. We didn’t stay for the whole meeting. But it was that moment, to read his letter in the board room of La Luz.

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That was the beginning, of a movement around issues of corporate responsibility, and around the time of the torture, as people began to realize that one of the companies behind the coup, we believed, was Brascan.

 

Nicaragua 1978

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When I arrived in Nicaragua the first time it was April of 1978. At the time, there was a student takeover of all the universities and colleges throughout the country. I travelled by land, by bus, to Choloteca to get my visa from the Nicaragua consular officer in that very hot, dry, sleepy, dusty town. I remember I was quite scared. I walked into this consular office. The door was open and there was this very huge, fat sort of woman sitting in a rocking chair and she wouldn’t even get up when I walked in the door. This was the consular office – it was really their home. She kind of looked at me and asked me what I wanted. She didn’t want to get up and do anything.

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I said I had come for a visa to go to Nicaragua. So she, with great effort, got up out of her rocking chair – she dragged herself into an office and opened a door. It was kind of a room on the side. She signaled me to go in.

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And there was this even huger person in there, who was the consular officer. He was a huge, huge, huge man, and I remember the walls were filled with Lion’s Club type sticker things, all over the wall. He asked what I wanted. And I thought, “What am I going to say?” Why would anybody go to Nicaragua?? There was a lot of fighting going on in the country. So I told him I was a birdwatcher. Because I had read a little pamphlet before going in, that there was some kind of a bird haven on some little island in the country. So I chatted him up about this and about that, and tried to act as absolutely like a dumb tourist.

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I did get my visa. But I remember I was so fearful. But once I got this thing I went away and I got on a bus and went on to Nicaragua. I had to change onto another bus on the Nicaraguan side – at this point the bus was just filled with local people. There were no tourists. There was myself and two others and we were extremely careful. At one point they did take everybody off the TICA bus and checked everything. But because we were North Americans, or something – we got on the bus and we drove through a banana plantation. I remember this because it seemed absolutely endless.

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Finally we got to Leon where the students had taken over the colleges and all the colleges. But we were able to get into one of these places and actually take photographs and talk to the young students who had their faces covered, obviously, and heard the kinds of demands that the student movement was asking for. These people, of course, were Sandinistas. Very, very, young cadres. As well as teachers and professors were all in on this takeover of colleges and schools and universities. The whole city was painted with graffiti. You didn’t see people on the streets because the students were inside and had occupied buildings in various schools. So you saw all this graffiti around the city but you didn’t see very many people walking around.

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There had been a major offensive prior to this. There were three significant offensives before the final one was successful and this one was in this period of April or May. Then there was the September 1978 one that happened later. And then the truly final one, which was successful in 1979, more than a year and a half later. But you could tell the support for the Frente at that time was very, very huge.

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I came back to Nicaragua one more time in that same month. I met Margaret and we drove in to do a study on Canadian mining interests. Our intention was to have an opportunity to do more investigation on these mines, including Noranda. And one of the places we went for information was to the National University. But that was occupied with students when we arrived, with students inside and the National Guard surrounding the university. We didn’t think we would get out. We were pretty scared.

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But we managed to get to the geology department and met with one of the professors who was part of the occupation. I will always remember that we wanted all this information on the mines – and he just opened up all these boxes. He didn’t even have a filing cabinet. There had been so much deficit and the state wasn’t putting any money into universities or education. So in fact most of the drawers were empty. There were no school supplies. There were very, very, few files. This university professor was complaining about this and kicking boxes around, and he was saying, “Well, if we can get this thing over [referring to the revolution], then we’ll get some work done around here! Anything that you can find to help us, please let us know.” You could see this professor was very supportive and yet, I suppose, somewhat annoyed that he couldn’t get on with the intellectual and academic studies.

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And then we didn’t think that we would get out of the university, but the students helped us to sneak out again. So for me, that first trip had a very strong impact.

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One of my dreams was to be in Nicaragua when Somoza was finally toppled. I was in the region doing some research on Guatemala and met a woman who was living near Lake Isabel, where INCO had its nickel mine, and she was also doing research there. So I went up to stay with her. When I was crossing the lake, Lake Izabal – it was one of those boats, a ferry, that shuffles people back-and-forth from one shore to another – and Radio Sandino that was being played on the radio. Everybody on the boat listening to this, looking the other way, pretending they weren’t listening. And Radio Sandino played throughout the whole crossing of the ferry.

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There was a demonstration in support of the Sandinistas when Somoza fell, but I had been warned not to go near it because it could potentially be very dangerous. But I went with a friend and we got, who was a doctor. We tried to get quite close to the demo but could not. I remember we had the radio on, and all of a sudden we heard that Somoza had fallen. So we drove down a little side street and played the radio so that we could hear it more clearly. I don’t know if it was Radio Sandino. It may have been just a regular radio broadcast that Somoza had fallen. I remember weeping. Here was the moment of glory. One wanted to be there. And here I was in Guatemala. With tear gas everywhere. It was a moment of euphoria and a moment of fear. And sadness, at the same time. I will always remember that. It was a very powerful moment.