Dear friend,

I knew about Chuck Kaufman years before meeting him, and I learned about the Nicaragua Network and the Alliance for Global Justice well before getting involved. Back in the 80s and 90s, I suddenly lost my job because of anti-war activities. I was a minimum-wage worker, so the blow was pretty hard. A retired anthropologist helped me through that period by hiring me to sort old papers he had in disarray. He also asked me to read letters asking for contributions and advise him on where he should give. There was a group of organizations that always stood out. They were not just pleas for contributions but much more than that. Their letters were informative, with strong anti-war, anti-imperialist analysis. Inspiring without BS. They taught. They mobilized. I always advised my old benefactor to give.

At some point, I saw that all these letters not only looked alike but also came from the same address. Campaign for Labor Rights, 50 Years Is Enough, The Nicaragua Network, and others. I did not know it then, but these were all written by Chuck Kaufman. By 1998, the various parts became the whole, and the Alliance for Global Justice was born.

Back in 2002 and 2003, during the lead-up to and then the resistance to the Second Gulf War, I was focused on solidarity with Iraq and opposition to the sanctions since the beginning of the first Gulf War, and I was thus one of the main local leaders of our mobilizations in Tucson. At one point following the invasion in 2003, I was a bit depressed. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the rightward turn in Nicaragua at that time, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I was sunk with a feeling that everything I was doing was fighting against something—but very little fighting for. Then, I heard about some intriguing figures: Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Jean Bertrand Aristide in Haiti. I saw the movie The Revolution Will Not Be Televised on cable TV. Wow, I wanted some of that! I wanted to be part of something that wasn’t just resisting and fighting back against the right but with a vision for the future, something that was building a New World!

I started looking and one name kept coming up: the Alliance for Global Justice. So, I dug deeper: they were standing up to Capitalism and its wars. AFGJ was one of the founders of the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition and regularly endorsed, helped plan, and participated in significant anti-war actions. But what really reached me is that anytime I found anything in English or US-based about Hugo Chávez and Venezuela, AFGJ was almost always part of it, and they saw a bigger picture. They talked about all of Latin America and the emerging 21st Century Socialism and the need to not just act in solidarity with the region but to study, learn, and bring home this vision. I finally got in touch with Chuck in early 2004, and soon I was a regular volunteer, coordinating working groups against US electoral interference in other countries. By the summer of 2007, I was AFGJ staff.

Chuck asked me to start writing some of these letters, and he would show me how. But I’d already been studying his incredible letters before I ever met him! I hope that occasionally, my letters are a quarter as informative and inspiring as his. And this is where it gets painful in a personal way. It is with deep sorrow that I tell you that this could be one of the last, if not the last, of these letters. 

AFGJ is currently under attack because of our Latin American work, our solidarity with Palestine, and our opposition to the genocide in Gaza. We have been deplatformed by the corporations that process online financial activities. One foundation after another has closed its door to us, citing false allegations. What are we to do if foundations won’t fund us and if our access to contributors is blocked online? We must turn directly to you and ask that you take out pen and paper and send us your tax-deductible contributions.

Why is AFGJ so targeted? Our record speaks for itself. In the Spring of 1979, even before the Sandinistas had won their revolution, AFGJ’s predecessor, the Nicaragua Network, began to support the Sandinista struggle, the first such organization in the US. This work continued through the 1980s and branched off to support other movements as well.

The 1990s were an especially hard time. The decade began with the fall of the Soviet Union and the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Rather than shrink away, the Nicaragua Network stood with the Nicaraguan people through thick and thin. It also stood strong with Cuba during the “Special Period,” when they were so lacking in resources. In 1991, we participated in the founding of the National Network on Cuba.

During the 90s, we initiated and co-led many demonstrations and campaigns leading to the famous “Battle in Seattle” and A-19 in Washington, DC. We became leaders of the anti-sweatshop movement. We emphasized the role of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and showed how the US had spent over $20 per Nicaraguan voter to defeat the Sandinistas in 1990. By 1998, the year that Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela, the Nicaragua Network, Campaign for Labor Rights, 50 Years is Enough, and other organizations formally organized into the Alliance for Global Justice.

As the 21st Century rolled around, AFGJ spread the word about Venezuela even before most activists knew about the Bolivarian Revolution. By 2007, we founded the Venezuela Solidarity Network. AFGJ’s role was critical as Latin America was experiencing a series of wins (“The Pink Tide”) as well as some setbacks. The Sandinistas were reelected to power, and Ecuador and Bolivia turned towards the Left. At the same time, in a plot engineered by the International Republican Institute, a core institute of the NED, the elected government of Haiti was brutally overthrown.

Our work in Haiti was unique. We raised thousands of dollars to support the CTH Haitian Workers Federation, which was being hunted down, jailed, and killed for opposing the coup government. We helped bring CTH leadership to important international labor meetings. We were doing this at a time when no US union and few popular organizations were even recognizing, much less supporting, the CTH. We initiated a series of popular tribunals in Haiti, advanced by a coalition of the leading solidarity groups.

In 2008, we began our solidarity program with Colombia’s FENSUAGRO union of family farmers and farm workers. That union was also completely ignored by labor unions in the US despite FENSUAGRO members being threatened, jailed, displaced, and murdered at the highest rates of any union in the world. Because of our work, that situation changed, as we carried their case to union after union, secured a series of resolutions supporting these Colombian comrades, and sponsored two FENSUAGRO tours with union support. This work also led to a campaign to free Liliana Obando, a jailed FENSUAGRO leader. That opened our eyes to the US restructuring of the Colombian prison system and our first explorations of the concept of “Prison Imperialism.”

In 2009, we also followed events in Honduras. The morning the coup against the government of Manuel Zelaya was underway, Chuck and I were on the phone. We divided up our tasks. I would put together an alert to go out as soon as possible urging calls and emails to the State Department to denounce the coup, while Chuck reached SOA Watch and worked with them to organize a demonstration in Washington, DC, that same day. Shortly after, AFGJ was among the founding organizations of the Honduras Solidarity Network. 

We continued our work into the 2010s. We created the Eco-Solidarity Project (ESP), helped organize the anti-war contingent of the Great Climate March, and sponsored the largest US delegation to alternative activities in Peru around the COP 20 climate negotiations. The ESP’s work continues today via our Eco-Zine and the Eco-Solidarity Update (on YouTube), and we are hoping to attend and report on COP 30 in Belém, Brazil, in November.

We increased our work around political prisoners in Latin America. We helped successfully win medical care for more than 70 prisoners in La Tramacúa and other US-designed prisons in Colombia. We helped win the freedom of Lily Obando and Hubert Ballesteros, political prisoners from the FENSUAGRO union. We helped maintain the Honduras Solidarity Network’s campaign for the freedom of democracy activist Edwin Espinal. We helped win the freedom of Mario Luna and other Yaqui eco-defenders in Mexico. In the 2020s, we were US leaders of the campaign to free Alex Saab, the Venezuelan diplomat arrested for trying to secure resources to feed those impoverished by the US blockade and sanctions.

The 2010s saw the beginning of our project against Prison Imperialism based on our experience in Colombia. We investigated how Prison Imperialism was exported to El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. We have exposed Prison Imperialism programs in Saudi Arabia and various countries in Africa. We have exposed the utterly inhumane conditions in US-built and restructured prisons in Haiti, where inmates have even starved to death.

Indeed, in the upcoming weeks, AFGJ will be on the ground in El Salvador to continue its investigation related to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison and the export of US deportees, along with the threat to send US citizens. You can help us continue our work with a tax-deductible contribution!

Through our Respect for Democracy Campaign, AFGJ became a primary source of English-language information on Venezuela and Nicaragua. We organized media missions against the coup in Bolivia and for the election of the first Leftist president in Colombia’s history. We organized to denounce the 2022 coup in Peru against Pedro Castillo and continue to support popular movements there fighting the US-backed oligarchy.

We were among those calling for a peace process in Colombia when most US solidarity groups were confused about what to call for. Because of our nuanced and principled position, we were the first non-government popular organization from the US invited to observe negotiations in Cuba.

If I were to say anything to encapsulate our work in the 2020s, it would be that we are bringing home what we have learned from Latin America to apply today in the US. For instance, we began our Human Rights School and have published reports on human rights in the US and a comprehensive list of US political prisoners.

I never want to leave out our finance and fiscal sponsorship team. We could accomplish nothing without their tireless work. Fiscal sponsorship has given us a special vantage point regarding the broad spectrum of US and international progressive movements. This team has managed the contributions and finances of not only AFGJ but also scores of other organizations.

Is this a dead end or a fork in the road? That depends on several factors, one of the greatest is you and all the readers of this letter. Your response to this letter will enable us to finish important tasks and find new ways and new homes for them as needed. A good response could buy us the time to reorganize the organization and continue. We still have some options. Layoffs and/or cuts in our hours are among the difficult ideas on the table. Could AFGJ continue as an all-volunteer endeavor? Certainly, if it comes to it.

Truthfully, even if we can survive all this, we still need to go through a transformation. AFGJ and other solidarity movements must go back to their bases. A progressive organization, a movement, is strongest when it is supported by the many. It is strongest when our main source of income, from $5 (and less) to $50,000 (and more), comes from contributors who also give of their time and activity. Don’t get me wrong. We’ll take grants and big checks if someone from the 1% wants to write them to us. But what we need is YOU. 

Why does AFGJ even exist? Is it still relevant? The Latin America solidarity movement of the 1980s and early 1990s included many older peace activists who had resisted the war in Vietnam and saw resisting Reagan’s dirty wars in Central America and Colombia as the next stage. They were drawn to the hope, the spirit of liberation, and the depth of struggle coming from the region.

Everyone soon learned that in Latin America, the vision of the new world, peace, and the struggle for liberation from the old was more than theory. It flowed through the veins, the very pulse of life, of the buen vivir. Latin American movements taught many that poetry is just as important as ideology. Latin American revolutionaries breathed New World life into Old World political theories. They taught us with words such as one rarely encountered in heated discussions of political theory:

“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.”

There you go. Love indeed. I know for a fact that great feelings of love have guided AFGJ. We have made heart-to-heart connections that have propelled our work everywhere we have gone. We haven’t just visited political prisoners in Colombian jails—we’ve danced with them. We haven’t just denounced violence and repression against farming communities in Honduras—we’ve stood between them and the bullets of the police and paramilitaries. We have been welcomed into families, and we have welcomed people into our families. We know all about class analysis, eco-defense, anti-imperialism, and socialism vs. Capitalism. Yes, we do. Of course, we do. But are these the things that motivate us? No. What motivates us is love and the kind of connection that one finds best in the intermingling of roots, of grassroots. We’ve seen the undying fire of people who stand up to the oppressors, who sometimes win, sometimes lose, but never give up. AFGJ does not focus on meeting the bigwigs and dropping the big names. We have always worked from the grassroots up. Our collars have rarely been white, but our boots have been muddy. And if our collars were White, they were stained with sweat.

When we depend on the goodwill of the wealthy and the foundations, we become a movement of treehouses in a forest where the roots are dying and the soil is depleted. The wood dries up, the lightning strikes, and everything burns down.

Times are extremely hard for AFGJ right now. We are working to survive, to keep going. We will continue to develop our new mission reporting on eco-solidarity throughout the Americas and the world and continue with other enduring activities. Whether we are full-, half-, or barely staffed, or all-volunteer, we plan to keep this work going and to build it on the only true foundation we could ever have: you. We need you because you represent, you are, the grassroots movement that we spring from. 

Your gifts are still tax-deductible, but even if they weren’t, that shouldn’t stop anyone from giving. Is Latin America solidarity still important, still something that we North Americans should be focused on? Yes, yes, and yes! Is there still a place for the Alliance for Global Justice? Again, yes. In fact, I dare say that this country, this continent, and our movements still need AFGJ. And we need you.

With revolutionary love,

James Patrick Jordan