Beware of aid agencies bearing gifts
Beware of aid agencies bearing gifts
USAID’s so-called ‘democracy promotion programmes’ are designed to foment dissent against governments unfriendly to Washington
By Linda S.Heard | Special to Gulf News
Published: 20:00 April 21, 2014
There is no such thing as a free lunch as states that are recipients of western aid understand only too well. The naive may believe that foreign aid is a tool to help developing countries; sceptics are convinced it’s a quid pro quo enabling wealthy powers to exercise geopolitical policy objectives. In a documentary, filmmaker John Pilger made the case that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are “The New Rulers of the World” on behalf of their largest donor countries — the US, the UK, Germany, France and Japan. But some less powerful nations are alleging that one agency — the US Agency for International Development (USAID) — is acting as a front for the CIA.
When the Bolivian President Evo Morales expelled and shutdown USAID in his country last year for alleged attempts to undermine his leftist government, he wasn’t being paranoid after all. As a recent expose by the Associated Press shows USAID’s so-called “democracy promotion programmes” are designed to foment dissent against governments unfriendly to Washington.
“In a number of countries, including Venezuela and Bolivia, USAID is acting more as an agency involved in covert action, like the CIA, than as an aid or development agency,” asserted Mark Weisbrot, an economist with a Washington-based think tank, the Centre for Economic and Policy Research.
In the late 70s, under the headline “Police programme is called CIA cover” the New York Times revealed that the USAID police training initiative facilitated the CIA to “plant men with local police in sensitive places around the world” as well as recruit “prime candidates for enrolment as CIA employees.”
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