During the Christmas season 1972, Baez joined a peace delegation traveling to North Vietnam, both to address human rights in the region, and to deliver Christmas mail to American prisoners of war. During her time there, she was caught in the U.S. military's "Christmas bombing" of Hanoi, North Vietnam, during which the city was bombed for eleven straight days.
Her disquiet at the human-rights violations of communist Vietnam made her increasingly critical of its government and she organized the May 30, 1979, publication of a full-page advertisement (published in four major U.S. newspapers) in which the communists were described as having created a nightmare. Her one-time anti-war ally, Jane Fonda, refused to join in Baez's criticism of Hanoi, leading to what was publicly described as a feud between the two.
Human rights
Baez was instrumental in founding the USA section of Amnesty International in the 1970s, and has remained an active supporter of the organization.
Baez's experiences regarding Vietnam's human-rights violations ultimately led her to found her own human-rights group in the late 1970s, Humanitas International, whose focus was to target oppression wherever it occurred, criticizing right and left-wing régimes equally.
In 1976, she was awarded the Thomas Merton Award for her ongoing activism.
She toured Chile, Brazil and Argentina in 1981, but was prevented from performing in any of the three countries, for fear her criticism of their human-rights practices would reach mass audiences if she were given a podium. While there, she was kept under surveillance and subjected to death threats. A film of the ill-fated tour, There but for Fortune: Joan Baez in Latin America, was shown on PBS in 1982.
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