About Disarm
The Disarm Education Fund plays a vital role in movements for peace, social justice, and human rights at home and around the world. Now, in a dynamic partnership with Global Health Partners, Disarm is promoting community-based medical programs that provide training and resources to support sustainable public health systems throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
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 1980s, Disarm broadened its focus to build opposition to nuclear weapons, particularly such first- strike systems as the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”). Our support for the Plowshares movement, led by antiwar activists Daniel and Philip Berrigan, reflects our ongoing commitment to a world without nuclear weapons. And 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 human needs.
In this period, 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 was especially active in protesting Washington’s role in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala.
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 open the door for peace and democracy.
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. We built a close collaborative relationship with Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu and the Rigoberta Menchu Tum Foundation which enabled us to provide material support to indigenous communities throughout Guatemala.
Disarm supports the impoverished indigenous communities in Chiapas, a region the Mexican government has militarized in order to suppress popular opposition.
We helped give a voice to these villages by participating in highvisibility delegations that have exposed and publicized human rights abuses. Disarm has also provided material support to the San Carlos Hospital in Altamirano, which delivers free health services to indigenous villages throughout Chiapas.
For the past 15 years Disarm has been in the forefront of efforts to end the immoral and illegal U.S. embargo against Cuba. While building a broad national movement to press for normalization of relations, Disarm has helped stock Cuba’s public health system in the face of the embargo – delivering more than $80 million worth of desperately needed medicines and medical supplies to hospitals and clinics across the island.
Disarm’s Global Health Partners initiative is currently providing training and resources to the staff of Los Pipitos, Latin America’s most advanced program for children with developmental disabilities. And we are working with the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health to launch a program for the prevention, screening and treatment of cervical cancer. In addition, we are currently exploring new programs in Bolivia, Ecuador, El Salvador and Mexico.
