Dear Friend and Colleague: Whether the changes in the US government on January 20, 2009 will bring real changes in its policies toward Latin America will likely depend on the accuracy of the information available to the public about what goes on across the borders. Reporting sets the context by which men and women govern. What the public doesn't know can hurt you.

Now, I'm going to write many of the very important reasons why we need your donation today to keep a good thing going, but if you don't have time to read the whole pitch, then here's the short version: Please send your contribution today to:

The Fund for Authentic Journalism
PO Box 241
Natick, MA 01760 USA

And if you can, make your donation right now, online, at:

http://www.authenticjournalism.org

Five days after a new president is inaugurated in Washington DC, voters of Bolivia - a country that expelled the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) last month for engaging in political surveillance - will go to the polls to vote on a new Constitution. The proposed new charter would guarantee equal rights, regional autonomy, community ownership of property and resources alongside both private and public sectors, agrarian reform, recall referenda, judicial elections, free education and health care and would prohibit foreign military bases among its provisions.

We'd like to put a reporter on the ground to cover the January 25 Bolivian vote. You can be certain that rest of the English-language media won't give you the facts as straight or professionally as we do, and without a Narco News reporter there to watch them, they, too, will usually attempt much more mischief and distortion. How accurately the Bolivian referendum will be reported in English could play a deciding role in whether healthy and respectful diplomatic relations are reestablished between the government of President Evo Morales and that of President Barack Obama.

Meanwhile, the new administration in Washington has a list of campaign promises regarding US-Latin America policy made by candidate Obama to comply with, yet no other news organization except for Narco News has catalogued them and vowed to keep the check-list front and center. During his campaign, President-elect Barack Obama pledged:

• To renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada, beginning that process within "six months."
• To stop the US-Colombia trade deal.
• To ease the US embargo of Cuba, allowing Cuban-Americans to visit and send money to relatives on the island.
• To push immigration reform in the US Congress in his first term.
• To meet face to face, in his first year of office, with the leaders of Venezuela and Cuba to seek diplomatic solutions to tensions between them and the US.
• To visit Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Bolivia as a first year diplomatic mission.
• To appoint a special envoy for Latin America.

If you haven't heard much about these pledges since the US election, it's because the commercial media hasn't been reporting it.

In the coming months, new US ambassadors and envoys will be appointed in every country in the hemisphere. What media organization is going to tell you who these people are and what their backgrounds indicate about policy toward those nations other than Narco News? The same goes for a new assistant secretary for the Western Hemisphere, US Trade Representative and other key posts for the region.

And there's the $800 million gorilla in the room: The US-imposed "Plan Mexico," bringing weapons and resources to Mexican military and police forces, purportedly to fight the "war on drugs," but with a history of being used against popular movements. It was Narco News reporter Kristin Bricker that broke the story in 2008 of the US company giving training sessions in torture to Mexican police forces. In the coming months, we'll learn - and if you make it possible we'll report - which "human rights" organizations will have entered into a conflict of interest by accepting Plan Mexico money for an alleged monitoring role with no teeth or authority at all.

In the United States there are whispers of possible changes in drug policy: Continued reporting by Bill Conroy and other Narco News reporters along the US-Mexico border - and the whistleblower sources in law enforcement agencies that trust only Narco News to protect them - is going to become more vital than ever to demonstrate the failures of current policies and the urgent need to change them.

The role of monitoring human rights in this hemisphere has sadly been shirked even by some organizations that claim to keep watch over them. Over the past almost nine years since Narco News began publishing from South of the Border, the job has increasingly fallen upon a free press to pick up the slack. We need your continued help to keep doing that.

And as we report to you, day in, day out, on the news that others don't tell you, we continue training young authentic journalists of talent and conscience, which has kept our journalism fresh, hopeful, aggressive and accurate.

Finally, as you know, Narco News expanded its reporting area in June to important news inside the United States - its politics and its grassroots community organizing efforts - through my blog, The Field. If you contribute today, we will keep that going, too.

All of this is up to you. We need to raise $10,000 by December 31. Today we're putting a bar graph up on our front pages to track the progress of this final fund drive of 2008, the one that will get us off the fast start that will be needed in January 2009.

We've counted on you before and you've come through. We're counting on you again and we thank you so much for your continued support.

Please make your tax-deductible contribution today online at:

http://www.authenticjournalism.org

Or send a check to:

The Fund for Authentic Journalism
PO Box 241
Natick, MA 01760 USA

This is a wonderful moment to be reporting and to be reading these reports. Change is in the air. Let's put a big spotlight on these stories to make sure that change comes to the ground, too.

From somewhere in a country called América,

Al Giordano
Publisher, Narco News

Or, alternately, please consider becoming a monthly sponsor of The Fund for Authentic Journalism:

The Monthly Pledge is convenient because it allows your bank or credit card to make the monthly payment for you. Although there is no long-term commitment - you can cancel at any time - the Monthly Pledge is of great importance to the Fund as one reliable source for maintaning Narco News' regular operations.

Support the work of journalists like Al Giordano, his blog, The Field and the publication of Narco News.

Please use the buttons in the section above to make your donation online via PayPal, or send a check to:

We support the work of independent journalists like award-winning veteran reporter Al Giordano's (read more about his work here) The Narco News Bulletin, as well as the training of young journalists through the School of Authentic Journalism and related projects. The Narco News Bulletin is one of the most respected and popular online newspapers in English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese and Dutch from Latin America and the US-Mexico border.

Please use one of the PayPal links above to make a contribution to keep Narco News and its journalists reporting the news independently from commercial media constraints.

Thanks to You…

Nancy Davies’ The People Decide: Oaxaca’s Popular Assembly (2007, Narco News Books) is published and available for shipping!

Authentic Journalist Nancy Davies' reports from the Mexican city of Oaxaca throughout 2006 during the rise of the Popular Assembly movement are now compiled into one book (with additional updates by Davies).

Appendix by George Salzman

Preface by Al Giordano

Available for a $17 donation plus shipping & handling costs

In the United States: $3 shipping & handling ($20 total)

$20 order now

In Canada: $5 shipping and handling ($22 total)

$22 order now

In Europe, South America, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, Australia, New Zealand and everywhere else: $10 shipping & handling ($27 total)

$27 order now

(Make sure you include your mailing address with your donation
so we can send you the book)

Study & Action Book Club Offer:

Receive 10 books plus the DVD The Other Oaxaca

(US and Canada only)

$100 including shipping and handling

1 Book Club Pack $100

2 Book Club Packs $200

For a donation of $100 to The Fund for Authentic Journalism, we’ll send you ten copies of The People Decide plus the DVD with three video newsreels made in 2006 in Oaxaca during the visit by Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos (versions of each video in English and Spanish are included, for a total of six video newsreels).

These three documentaries, lasting from six to 13 minutes each, were broadcast statewide on Oaxaca Channel 9 last August when women of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) seized the state TV station. They include:

• Subcomandante Marcos Goes to Jail
• Prisoners of “Democracy”
• The Windmills of Capitalism

The newsreels were produced by Narco News’ The Other Journalism with the Other Campaign and made possible by your support to The Fund for Authentic Journalism.

The Study & Action Book Club Package is ideal for organizations, educational groups, book clubs, book sellers and individuals seeking to break the information blockade on Oaxaca, Mexico’s popular pro-democracy movement.

Use this link if you wish to make a donation larger than $20 but still only want one copy of the book.

Combo Package:

Receive the book The People Decide plus the DVD The Other Oaxaca plus the DVD Delegate Zero in Yucatán & Quintana Roo with a $50 donation
(includes postage and handling; US and Canada only)

$50 Combo Pack

Any Questions?

Write Chris Fee at bazarov3@gmail.com

2007:
Support more accurate reporting from Latin America

Letters in support of the 2007 Fund Appeal:

Letters in support of the 2006 Fund Appeal:

Click here to see the work of The Other Journalism with the Other Campaign.

The Fund for Authentic Journalism invites your partnership in supporting the authentic journalism that is rising in tandem with authentic democracy in Latin America.  A more honest and authentic journalism will and does help people gain fuller and more authentic justice, liberty, and autonomy.

Through your donations, the Fund for Authentic Journalism supports three original yet proven projects in this field: a hard-hitting on-line newspaper, The Narco News Bulletin; its participatory project in The Narcosphere; and the hemisphere-wandering School of Authentic Journalism which may soon – with your help – put down roots in Mexico.

Narco News reports on the drug war and democracy from Latin America.  It is the first publication to win extended First Amendment protections granting freedom of the press for all Internet journalists from the New York Supreme Court in 2001.

Narco News readers, journalists, and supporters are involved daily in publishing the newspaper, as co-publishers, through the innovative group blog known as The Narcosphere.

Over the past two years, Narco News has trained more than 100 journalists from throughout the hemisphere, through the School of Authentic Journalism, to be great investigative reporters at the service of the people, and not the special interests.

Your donation of any size - whether your money or your labor - to The Fund for Authentic Journalism or the projects it supports makes you a co-publisher of Narco News who can post your comments and reports directly to The Narcosphere and help guide this historic, ground-breaking, project for a media of, by, and for the people.

Gary Webb, 1955-2004

The Fund for Authentic Journalism mourns the loss of Gary Webb,
a great and truly authentic journalist this world will miss dearly.

About the Fund

Where the people cannot act collectively to govern our lives in our own interests, there is no democracy. Where the information required for the people to act in our own interests is suppressed, democracy cannot function.  Where such conditions prevail, The Fund for Authentic Journalism shall do its work.

Against a news media climate bereft of in-depth and incisive international reporting, adrift from the ethical bonds it once claimed for itself and overpowered by an incessant corporate conglomeration, The Fund for Authentic Journalism stands firm in the wind to support the unlikely, the unfunded and the uncorrupted journalists.  In these perilous times, arbitrary market forces and a handful of powerful personalities must not be allowed to monopolize the vital work of educating the public on international issues.  These are times to foster the outsiders, the independents, the authentic journalists and irrepressible tellers of truth.  To cultivate and empower them to get vital stories into the public's hands, however uncomfortable the facts therein may be, for advertisers, governments, corporate boards or whoever unduly tries to manipulate the news.  These are no times to let uncomfortable truth fall silent in the wind.

In December of 2003, The Fund for Authentic Journalism organized to form a support and funding mechanism for important journalistic work, which might not otherwise see the light of day.  We pledge to seek out, sustain and strengthen projects of exceptional value to the public interest and in the process help to create an environment where invaluable journalism, uncorrupted by the pressures of today's media climate, can grow and flourish to the benefit of all.  We hope you will join us in supporting these efforts.

Sincerely,

The Directors of The Fund for Authentic Journalism

Bill Conroy
Michele Stoddard
Douglas Wilson

How You Can Help

The Fund for Authentic Journalism supports the work of The Narco News Bulletin and its School of Authentic Journalism, which plans – depending on your support – to establish a permanent campus in Mexico.

Narco News (www.narconews.com) is a free, online, newspaper that publishes educational journalism in the public interest - "reporting on the drug war and democracy from Latin America" - free of advertising or other pressures, and that involves the public in three languages to be more effective at influencing journalism and insuring they are better served by it.  Narco News was the first online publication to win First Amendment protections from the New York Supreme Court under the provisions of Sullivan v. New York Times in December of 2001, and stands as a model for nonprofit journalism throughout the world.

The School of Authentic Journalism, which held its first session in February 2003 on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, has trained 30 journalism students from different countries, in Spanish, and in English, in reporting skills, international reporting, press freedom law, journalistic ethics and philosophy, and skills specific to online, print, video and radio journalism.  The next major session of the School of Authentic Journalism, supported by this fund, took place in Bolivia in July and August 2004.

The Fund for Authentic Journalism has applied to the United States Internal Revenue Service for 501c3 tax-exempt status.

Please send your contribution, today, making your check out to "The Fund For Authentic Journalism," and by sending it to:

The Fund for Authentic Journalism
P.O. Box 241
Natick, MA 01760 USA

Or use the links, above, to make a secure online donation via PayPal.

Read the June 2005 fund appeal from Al Giordano: “Help Protect Your Journalists at an Hour of Moral Crisis”

Letters in support of the Fall 2005 Fund Appeal

Letters in Support of Fall 2004 Appeal

Letters in Support of Spring 2004 Appeal

Letters in Support of the second major session of the School of Authentic Journalism

Thank you, in advance, for your support toward this important work.

Contact: info@authenticjournalism.org