Our History
The Disarm Education Fund brings over 30 years of experience to establishing peace, social justice, and human rights at home and around the world.
Founded in 1976 as a gun control group, Disarm worked to ban all private ownership of handguns and to require the licensing and registration of all rifles and shotguns. Our early efforts led to the creation of the National Coalition to Ban Handguns.
In the 1980’s, Disarm expanded its programs to help build opposition to nuclear weapons, particularly such first-strike systems as the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”). Our support for the Plowshares movement – to “turn swords into plowshares” – reflects our ongoing commitment to a world without nuclear weapons. Disarm was an early and persistent advocate for a reduction of the bloated military budget and the redirection of government resources to education, the alleviation of poverty, and other social needs.
As a vigilant defender of human rights, Disarm became a prominent critic of U.S. intervention in the internal affairs of other nations in the Americas, a stance we vigorously maintain.
Disarm has been an active force for peace and social justice by providing vital humanitarian assistance, life-saving medicine and political advocacy to the most vulnerable communities in Central America and Cuba.
Throughout El Salvador’s long civil war, Disarm worked to end U.S. military aid and support for the right-wing death squads, while helping the country’s popular liberation movement gain a still-fragile peace.
We helped build the movement to cut off Washington’s support for the “Contra” war in Nicaragua and end U.S. interference in that beleaguered country’s politics. We continue to support popular Salvadoran and Nicaraguan organizations committed to genuine democracy and economic development.
Disarm also joined efforts to end the genocidal war against the indigenous majority in Guatemala, where succeeding military governments inflicted immense suffering and deprivation for four decades.
Disarm supports the impoverished indigenous communities in Chiapas, Mexico, a region the government has militarized in order to suppress popular opposition. We helped give a voice to these villages by participating in high-visibility delegations that have exposed and publicized human rights abuses.
Disarm also provided material support to the once besieged San Carlos Hospital in Chiapas, where armored military vehicles stood at the entrance to monitor and intimidate the progressive nuns who run the facility. We broke through that imposed isolation by delivering medicine with a wholesale value of $225,000 to the hospital, and contributed to the end of that military hostility.
Our effective advocacy continues today through our opposition of the U.S. embargo against Cuba and by alleviating the devastating effect of this policy on the health of the Cuban people. Disarm’s Cuban Medical Project directly benefits fully 20% of the Cuban population.
