Dear friends of LAB,

We write to inform you of a series of changes taking place at Latin America Bureau.

As many of you know, Latin America Bureau was founded in 1977 and over the last 30 years has produced accessible, high quality books, establishing a unique role in development education on Latin America in the UK and beyond. Your support has been vital to those efforts.

Yet since our co-funding grant from the European Union ended in 2003, we have faced the challenges common to many small NGOs of securing sustainable long term funding. While maintaining our output of publications and activities, we have been forced to constantly reduce our levels of staffing. A considerable rent increase for our premises at Amwell Street was also in prospect, and by late 2006 it was clear that this situation was unsustainable.

LAB's Council of Management and staff therefore reluctantly took the decision to make existing staff redundant and to close the offices at Amwell Street we have occupied for nearly 30 years. One of the most immediate consequences of these developments is that from the end of January our mail orders will be despatched by our distributor, Central Books. We have now put the editorial capacity of LAB into an editorial committee, chaired and staffed voluntarily. We are negotiating a co-publication arrangement with another, larger publisher, who will take on the marketing and distribution of most of LAB's existing titles. LAB will continue to exist as a charity and the imprint will continue, with the editorial committee aiming to commission up to three new titles a year.

We remain committed to continuing to publish books on Latin America and indeed have recently published a third edition of the highly successful Faces of Latin America, by Duncan Green and a new book on Peru, entitled Picking up the Pieces: Corruption and Democracy in Peru, by Nick Caistor and Susana Villaran.

We hope you will continue to support our efforts to maintain a LAB profile on Latin America. However, we appreciate that as we will no longer be able provide those of you who are regular LAB supporters with the range of services and events we were able to in the past, those of you that have standing orders with us may wish to cancel them. However, we hope you will continue to support us. We aim to maintain our monthly e-bulletin of Latin America related news and events and are trying to secure new premises for LAB. We will provide an update in the coming months.

LAB's Council of Management and staff would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your steadfast support of our work over the years.

With best wishes,

Sue Branford
Chair, Latin American Bureau Management Council