A BRIEF HISTORY OF AIEP

The Asociación Internacional de Escritores Policiacos (or "International Association of Crime
Writers") was founded in 1986 by Paco Ignacio Taibo II of Mexico and the late Julian Semionov of
the then U.S.S.R.

The goals of the organization are enumerated in our world-wide
constitution, which has been amended several times over the decades.
Originally, the primary goal of our members was to fight censorship
(indeed, even imprisonment and torture) of writers in the right-wing
dictatorships of Latin America and the left-wing ones of Eastern Europe.

As more countries in both regions democratized, however, the primary
goal of AIEP has become to encourage crime writing as a genre and
especially, through the efforts of the North American branch, to facilitate translations
of works from other languages into English toward possible publication
in the United States.

Each year, AIEP holds a conference in a member country to discuss issues of common interest.

Each fourth year AIEP holds a Congress, in which officers are elected.

Past presidents of AIEP have included K. Arne Blom of Sweden and Susan
Moody of the United Kingdom. The current president, elected in 2000 in
Prague, is Jeremiah Healy of North America. At the AIEP congress this
year in the Netherlands, a new president will be elected from a field of
three candidates: Carmen Iarerra of Italy, Emanuel Ikonomov of Bulgaria,
and Piet Teigeler of Belgium and Spain.

The world-wide organization, with nearly 1,000 members in 22
branch countries, is usually known by its Spanish acronym of AIEP.