Latin America Working Group Records

Founded in 1983 as the Central America Lobby Group, a project of the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy; became a separate entity in 1988, under the name Central America Working Group; it changed its name in 1995 to Latin America Working Group to reflect its expanded mandate. The group was based in Washington, D.C. and did most of its work in coalition through such means as sign-on letters to which the leaders of various organizations and religious bodies would attach their signatures. Its main purpose was to lobby Congress about issues of concern relating to Central America and Latin America.

The material in this accession came to the Peace Collection arranged by year, with each item produced by LAWG (such as sign-on letters, newsletters, mailings to Congress, etc.) in a separate folder, interspersed with reference material folders. The archivist sorted through the files and removed the items that reflected the group's program work and placed them in box 1, merging many documents into new folders of similar material. The newsletter "Legislative Update" from 1989-1994 [incomplete set] was removed to the Periodical Collection. Many folders were marked by LAWG as "drop" letters, meaning that a mailing, memo or sign-on letter was created and then dropped off at legislative offices. It was difficult when sorting the files to tell when CAWG/LAWG was the sponsoring group for such drops; thus, the researcher should be aware that there may be "drop" material in the reference files in boxes 2-6 as well (though it is likely that this material was sent to CAWG/LAWG to show what other organizations were doing).