Two weeks ago I had an article in The National Interest where I made the case against the Obama administration’s proposal to deliver hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Central American governments to help them fight organized crime, promote security and foster economic development. In my piece, I wrote that “…giving $1 billion to governments with dubious records on transparency and human rights will empower corrupt officials to the detriment of ordinary Central Americans.”
Last week, Jesse Franzblau had a revealing exposé in The Nation that proves how counterproductive this sort of aid can be. In his article, Franzblau publishes unclassified documents that show how U.S. authorities continued to deliver millions of dollars in aid to Mexican security agencies despite knowing that those same forces were infiltrated by drug cartels. This money came under the auspices of the Plan Mérida, a $2.6 billion program aimed at helping Mexico fight drug cartels. In some instances, the documents seem to show efforts by U.S. officials to cover up or downplay serious human rights abuses committed by Mexican security forces so it wouldn’t affect the continuity of Plan Mérida.
As Franzblau points out:
While US laws explicitly prohibit the delivery of aid to foreign individuals and units implicated in systematic human rights violations, internal reporting on the implementation of Mérida programs reveals that institutional connections to organized crime are consistently overlooked, ignored or kept hidden from public scrutiny as counter‐drug money continues to flow.
This is serious stuff. Instead of helping the fight against drug cartels, U.S. aid might be empowering them. As I mentioned in my article, there is well‐documented evidence about how the security agencies and judicial systems of Central American countries have been infiltrated by powerful criminal organizations, from drug cartels to youth gangs.
Franzblau’s article also shows a well‐documented phenomenon regarding aid: once it starts flowing, the bureaucracy in charge of delivering it has an incentive to disregard the evidence of whether it is accomplishing its goals or being counterproductive since discontinuing the aid would compromise the bureaucracy’s own existence. In this particular case, Franzblau mentions that “US officials were well aware of the effect that reports of abuse could have on Mérida assistance.”
There is no reason to believe that the Obama administration’s massive aid plan for Central American governments won’t suffer from the same flaws that Jesse Franzblau exposes in his article.