Top reasons to give to Alliance For Global Justice NOW!

*Nicaragua Network — 35 Years of Friendship!

In February the Nicaragua Network will celebrate 35 years of work to buildpeace and friendship between the people of Nicaragua and the United States.  We were founded on Feb. 24, 1979, in solidarity with the struggle of the Nicaraguan people to overthrow the dictator Somoza.  We educated people about the Sandinista Revolution in the 1980s with our telephone Hotline and other publications. We organized against US aid to the contras, helping match the lethal aid the Congress appropriated with humanitarian aid to provide education and healthcare. We took tens of thousands of US residents to Nicaragua to pick coffee and cotton, to build houses, schools and health centers. We brought Nicaraguans to the US to educate our neighbors.

Please support our ongoing solidarity work– your support is essential. 

After the US-engineered and paid for electoral defeat of 1990, while many solidarity groups faded away, the Nicaragua Network continued to fight with our Nicaraguan friends to defend the gains of the Sandinista Revolution. Since 2006, when voters returned the Sandinistas to power, the Nicaragua Network has been at work to explain to people in the US about the poverty reduction, economic development, renewable energy, and participatory democracy advances that have earned Nicaragua the praise of international organizations from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (for advances in food security) to the World Bank (for effective execution of projects).  We see what a difference it can make for a small country to have a government with a “preferential option for the poor.”

Nicaragua Network is the oldest Latin America solidarity organization in the US. It has been part of every anti-war movement since its founding in February 1979. In 1998 it founded the Alliance for Global Justice and then became its largest project. Veterans of Nicaragua solidarity are currently in leadership positions in every social and economic justice movement in the US.

Today the Nicaragua Network publishes the only weekly English-language summary of the news from Nicaragua – the Nicaragua News Bulletin – which is the successor to the ancient telephone Hotline. We continue to take educational delegations to Nicaragua and have an Indigenous Rights Delegation planned for March 15-25, 2014, that will visit Bilwi/Puerto Cabezas and the Bosawas Reserve. Visit www.nicanet.org for information! We continue to mobilize to pressure our government to respect Nicaragua’s sovereignty and to stop interfering in its internal matters.

Please make a year-end contribution to help Nicaragua Network build towards another 35 years of solidarity!

*Border Militarization: A Human Rights Crisis

The North American Free Trade Agreement, combined with border militarization and criminalization lies behind the humanitarian crisis in the desert borderlands.  Undocumented workers whose communities and farms have been destroyed by NAFTA are forcibly displaced and seeking work. Border militarization pushes them into the harshest terrains. And every year people die, usually from dehydration, dysentery and exposure, but all too often from Border Patrol bullets.

At AfGJ we call border militarization what it really is: a human rights crisis caused by imperialism and capitalism. That’s why AFGJ’s Chuck Kaufman and volunteer Michelle recently put their bodies on the line in solidarity to stop Operation Streamline in Tucson, AZ. That’s why AFGJ joined up with the Overpass Light Brigade and the Backbone Campaign for an International Migrants Day protest of the NW Detention Center in Tacoma, WA. That’s why we are developing the Border Militarization Study Guide —because people need to know about what’s happening here and help us to stop it.

Your gift can help up carry on this work. If you agree with us on this important point — Will you help by sending a tax-deductible contribution?

The Border Militarization Study Guide is being designed to be adaptable, with a few featured articles and videos for those whose time is limited, and further study resources for able to dig deeper.  It can be used in classrooms from middle schools to universities; in churches, labor halls and neighborhood centers; and it can be studied alone.

If you support AfGj’s work against border militarization-we need your help! Won’t you make a  tax-deductible contribution to the Alliance for Global Justice today?

*Support Peace in Colombia!

We really mean it when we call for peace in Colombia. When the Alliance for Global Justice began its Colombia work, in August 2008, we were one of the few voices in the US calling for dialogue to end the civil war and trying to change US policies that impeded peace . Many on the Revolutionary Left felt it was impossible to have dialogue with the Colombian government and its transnational corporate masters. The Liberal Left called for peace, but at the same time treated the government, paramilitaries and the insurgents as if they were all the same (despite 70- 80% of political violence being committed by the Armed Forces and death squad allies). Neither saw much hope for a real peace process. But today, the peace process is underway and, despite many problems, its prospects are good.

From the beginning, we in AfGJ made advocacy for a peace process our top priority. Please make a tax-deductible contribution to AfGJ to support our Colombia solidarity work; we are on the cutting edge.

“From our mountains surge the water and the energy that they deny us every day.” There can be no just peace without land reform and the protection of Colombia’s natural resources utilized for the good of the people above the profits of the wealthy and the transnational corporations. Photo by James Jordan.

AfGJ has always said that the ones who started this war and keep it going are the US and Colombian oligarchies, transnational corporations and their military and paramilitary servants. We do not endorse, support or communicate with insurgents or clandestine groups, but we do recognize that they arose as instruments of rural peoples in defense of their lands and communities.

As peacemakers, we have to look violence in its ugly face and ask: where does this come from? That’s why we reject the US funded Plan Colombia and the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement. We reject the demonization of the insurgents, because that position only hurts prospects for peace. When AfGJ commits itself to peace, we want to know what are the practical steps to peace, and how can we support them?


Please show your support for Peace in Colombia by making a contribution to AfGJ to day.

And we are on the cutting edge in other ways. When no US labor body was acting in solidarity with Fensuagro, Colombia’s largest agricultural workers union and one of the most persecuted unions in the world, AfGJ established a strong, close and ongoing relationship of solidarity. And we are still the one US organization that has an ongoing project of solidarity with Colombian political prisoners.

It’s no wonder then that, along with the National Lawyers Guild, we were the only two US organization represented at the launch of Marcha Patriótica, Colombia’s largest Left mobilization for a just peace. And, by the way, the NLG’s Colombia solidarity work was launched as the result of a joint delegation we did in 2011.

Since we began our Colombia work, we have achieved some impressive results. We played a major role in helping US labor unions establish relations with Fensuagro; we have participated in successful campaigns for the liberation of key political prisoners; and we have been pivotal in turning the dominant theme of the US Colombia solidarity movement into one of practical support for peace.

You can be assured that your tax-deductible gift in support of AfGJ’s Colombia solidarity work is one way you can make a real and permanent contribution not just to us, but to that dream we all share of “Peace on Earth, Good Will to All!”

*Tear Down the Walls National Gathering & Nationally Coordinated Days of Local Action!

This past November Alliance for Global Justice invited activists from the US and beyond to strategize and network together at Tear Down the Walls National Gathering in Tucson, Arizona. We gathered to strategize and build a more unified movement for transformational change in the United States.  The gathering was a great success: With more than 86 workshops, 7 assemblies and over 400 participants!

We want to Tear Down Walls; Walls of Racism, Walls of Patriarchy, Walls of Homophobia, Militarized Border Walls, Wall Street, Walls to Citizenship, Housing, Education, Walls of Inequality, Walls of Class and the Walls that separate us from each other.

Now we need your support to continue to build cross-movement networks.

Next Steps: Nationally Coordinated Local Days of Action.  Organizers worked together to create People’s Power Assemblies (PPA), which were thematic, participatory forums.  Each PPA was t

asked with developing a nationally coordinated local day of action, to continue working together through the coming year.

Our next step is to organize the days of action around the country, which will be focus on: US Imperialism, Ecological Justice, Economic Inequality, the Drug War, Immigration and Border Militarization and the Prison Industrial Complex. Learn more about those dates.  We will be building on the relationships formed organizing Tear Down the Walls, and hope to leverage one gathering into an entire year of action. 

To do all this — to build a year of action and strengthen the movement for change — we need your participation and financial support.  Please make a  tax-deductable contribution to the Alliance for Global Justice.

 Please support the AFGJ today.

*Earth in the Balance

Stop. Stop, look around and breathe in the air and let it connect you to the sky. Take a drink of water and feel your body soak in the flow of life itself.

Then think about this: it’s all at risk. Look at the children in your life. During this holiday season—are we giving them a future?

Back in 2002, a major report was released that gave some ominous warnings: over a third of the natural world had been destroyed over the previous three decades and by 2050, we would need to colonize two new planets if our rate of resource consumption is not abated. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide has built up in the air far beyond traditional safety levels and drought and “natural” catastrophes have become almost commonplace.

At the Tear Down the Walls Conference in November, the Alliance for Global Justice made a proposal: let’s organize a series of Ecological Truth Commissions throughout the country to hear testimonies from expert witnesses and affected communities. Another idea was merged with that one. Let’s use these commissions to build grassroots resistance between now and the Paris 2015 Climate Summit, when new standards will be set. Let’s take to the streets to demand real change.

AfGJ understands that we can’t stop eco-collapse without dismantling the US/Corporate Empire. The world’s biggest single polluter is the US military and that military serves transnational corporations that are destroying the world we love. In fact, ninety corporations are responsible for two thirds of carbon gas emissions. We can’t reform this model—we have to get rid of it.

AfGJ’s Eco-Solidarity Project links ecological struggle to struggles against militarism and transnational corporate capitalism. Next year will be dedicated to mobilizing across the country to demand climate justice.  Will you take this opportunity to make a tax deductible contribution to support AfGJ’s ecological work?  This really may be our last chance.  Will you help?

Thank you, in advance.

Please help Alliance for Global Justice make life-changing delegations available to a wide range of US residents with a generous, tax-deductible donation.

*Delegations that Change Your Life!

Delegations can change people’s lives and Alliance for Global Justice creates the opportunities for those life-changing experiences. Help us organize even more delegations in 2014.

Alliance for Global Justice delegations to Colombia have helped free political prisoner Liliany Obando and expose prison conditions and the role of the US Bureau of Prisons in their creation. In Honduras AfGJ delegations have stopped an illegal eviction of a peasant cooperative in Rigores, accompanied cooperatives under threat of violence in the Aguan Valley, and exposed fraud in the presidential election. AfGJ delegations to Nicaragua and Venezuela have exposed participants to successful poverty reduction and participatory democracy projects that have transformed those countries and would transform our own.

Nothing promotes peaceful relations more than getting to know the people and culture of another country. Nothing beats witnessing for ourselves the reality of another country to expose the lies of our government and corporate media. Nothing inspires us more to change our own country than to laugh and cry, eat and play, with people who pay the price for the corporate greed and violence created by the US Empire and our own consumerism.

Please help Alliance for Global Justice make life-changing delegations available to a wide range of US residents with a generous, tax-deductible donation.

*Please support our life-saving work in Honduras!

Since the June 28, 2009 coup in Honduras, Alliance for Global Justice has led five human rights accompaniment delegations to that violent and poor country. In November 2013 we led a 55-person election monitoring delegation that documented blatant fraud in five different cities. (Read our Report). Individual donor support enables us to organize important delegations like this.

In 2012 a delegation of ours was in the country on May 11th,  when Honduran police and US DEA agents killed two pregnant women and a child from a helicopter gunship in the rainforest of La Mosqitia.  We threw out our planned agenda to travel by plane and river and take testimony from witnesses, exposing the dark underbelly of the US War on Drugs. Donations like yours made this delegation possible.

In July 2011 our delegation stood between heavily armed police and the people of Rigores, a community they had come to illegally evict. We did not move aside for 3-1/2 hours while snipers in the tree line aimed rifles at us and police had their pistols drawn. Rather than create an international incident, the police gave up and that community remains in their homes to this day. Your donation helps us save lives.

AfGJ is a founding member and leader of the US Honduras Solidarity Network. Together we work to pressure Congress to cut off police and military aid and training. We also work to shine the light of international attention on the hundreds of political murders and human rights violations of peasant farmers, LGBTQ activists, unionists, journalists, and LIBRE party activists.

 

Help us continue our important human rights accompaniment work in Honduras and our critical education and agitation activities in the US with a tax-deductible contribution.