USAID and NGOism

Alongside overt forms of domination — military interventions, territorial acquisition, direct political interference — Western powers have long developed parallel forms of intervention and control, sometimes called informal imperialism. Over the last few decades, a refinement and perfecting of these more subtle instruments of domination has sometimes partially displaced older forms. Due to its proximity to the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean have been important testing grounds for these practices.

Historically, these have involved policies such as promoting US ideology and culture with Christian missions or Hollywood blockbusters (the softest of soft imperialism), subordinating governments by covertly financing opposition political parties or presidential candidates, and the use of economic sanctions. The region has also witnessed an increasing reliance on developmental aid programs, a trend that can be traced to the advent of so-called multilateral aid initiatives led by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the mid-twentieth century. These organizations and initiatives were later used to compel nations in the Global South to adopt neoliberal policies, reinforcing their dependency on the United States and Europe.

This form of imperialism has empowered so-called civil society — nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society organizations (CSOs) — in the peripheralized regions. Among them are groups concerned with poverty and inequality, human rights, and, increasingly, the ecological crisis whose humanitarian interventions have often coincided with and even legitimated neoliberal reforms.

Instrumental to the mushrooming of these organizations have been Western developmental agencies — most notably, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank, and, more recently, the European Union’s numerous developmental aid programs. The latter actor has used the region as a testing ground for its “civilian power” approach to foreign policy since the late 1990s.

These Western developmental aid and humanitarian programs are not only fundamentally incapable of addressing the region’s severe social and ecological crises; they have also served as tools to reinforce the very structures that perpetuate these problems. Nearly a century into this model of interventionism, the historical conditions of poverty, inequality, exploitation, and oppression — the very issues these programs aim to resolve — remain intact even as new markets have been wrenched open.

The Early Laboratories of Civil Society

Like neoliberalism itself, much of this began in earnest in Chile. The US-backed military coup that overthrew the country’s socialist government in 1973 was the culmination of a more comprehensive foreign intervention that had started years earlier. Thousands of documents declassified by the US government between 1999 and 2000 confirmed the CIA’s involvement. The economic war and the military coup were the culmination of a broader effort, going as far back as the early 1960s, to keep Chile’s socialists out of power. Central to this effort was the funding and influencing of civil society groups such as trade unions, religious groups, and women’s organizations.

With Augusto Pinochet’s installation as dictator, Chile not only became a laboratory for neoliberal policies but also an important site for the deployment and development of Western-backed NGOs, particularly human rights ones. In other words, at the same time as the United States and Europe backed and facilitated Chile’s dictatorship and the brutal oppression of its population, they also played a role in its partial relief, funding human rights NGOs that performed roles as varied as denouncing the dictatorship’s abuses and providing meals for impoverished families.

As highlighted by James Petras in his extensive research on the matter, the growth of Western-backed NGOs in Latin America and the Caribbean coincided with Operation Condor, a campaign of terror against leftist leaders and movements and the installment of US-backed regimes beginning in the 1970s. By superficially alleviating some of the more obvious fallout from the installation of repressive regimes and the neoliberal economic policies they immediately adopted, these civil society organizations played the complementary role of neutralizing more organic and radical political and social movements, co-opting or weakening them and their leadership with the vast resources at their disposal.

With more significant funding from multilateral organizations like the World Bank beginning in the 1980s and, notably, from USAID and European developmental programs since the turn of the twenty-first century, these civil society groups have reproduced themselves across the region and become crucial to Western foreign policy.

Democracy According to USAID

By the 1990s, with the region’s leftist movement weakened in the aftermath of Operation Condor and former dictatorships transitioning back to electoral democracies, the West’s focus in Latin America shifted from NGOs concerned with human rights abuses to those promoting democracy and development, with the former cause increasingly integrated into the latter.

Operating in the region since its founding in the early 1960s, USAID took a stronger role in the 1990s as the friendly side of US interventionism. It poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Haiti for NGO initiatives and state-led “democratic” programs, financed microdevelopment projects in rural Paraguay to dissuade peasants from supporting insurgent groups, and countered the rapidly growing socialist movement in Bolivia through a multimillion-dollar democracy-building campaign.

This multifaceted approach to sustaining US hegemony in the region would eventually be joined and, in some countries, rivaled by other Western powers. From the early 2000s, the European Union began testing its novel civil society approach to foreign policy in war-ridden Colombia, proposing an alternative to the US-backed Plan Colombia, a hawkish counterinsurgent policy and corollary to the domestic US “war on drugs.”

But the EU’s so-called Peace Laboratories, receiving tens of millions of euros between 2002 and 2010, would, in fact, be implemented in Colombia alongside the counterinsurgency program, contributing to the weakening of revolutionary left-wing movements and their social base through, among other things, financing microdevelopmental projects that tied peasants in conflict areas to the agricultural exports industry. Moreover, as the Campaign Against Arms Trade highlighted, EU member states like the UK (then still part of the EU) and Spain contributed directly to the US-backed militarist efforts to subdue the population at the same time as the peacebuilding project.

As the United States made massive military transfers to Colombia, the EU surpassed it as the principal donor of developmental aid to Latin America and the Caribbean in the early 2000s. This developmental investment was accompanied by the intensification of trade between Latin America and Europe, which today approaches the region’s trade with the United States, facilitated further by several bloc-to-bloc free trade agreements, all of them containing normative clauses and conditions.

Though firmly aligned with violent, militaristic forms of intervention, European Union aid, USAID, and other such developmental agencies have worked in the region with relatively little scrutiny or opposition. This is largely due to the widespread assumption that their projects are inherently benevolent and a force for good.

This can be observed today in USAID’s continued allocation of millions of dollars to the region, most recently under the guise of aiding Venezuela’s migrants. It is also reflected in the World Bank’s annual loans, amounting to the tens of billions for so-called “sustainable” development programs, and the European Union’s yearly contribution of one hundred million euros in humanitarian aid — dwarfed by the approximate three hundred billion euros in goods traded annually between the EU and Latin America.

Imperialism Was Never Friendly

The contemporary practice of informal imperialism — of developmental aid and humanitarianism specifically — has become the favored form of tapping into new markets and maintaining favorable conditions for investment in the Global South. In this regard, the Western aid and NGO project in Latin America and the Caribbean has mostly been a success story.

How permanent the Trump administration’s pause in aid becomes remains to be seen. Either way, the change in foreign policy will likely face significant resistance among both state actors and capital, as such soft power has proven an effective tool in furthering imperial and ruling-class interests. For the rest of us, these troubling times present an opportunity to focus on those interests and how they’re advanced across administrations and policy regimes. This means unmasking the illusion of friendly US and European foreign policy and challenging its contempt for the world’s oppressed majorities not only when displayed openly but also when carefully concealed behind a facade of humanitarian benevolence.