The drop in aid to Latin America foreseen in the Obama administration’s 2011 aid request to Congress, issued a week ago, has caused a minor stir in the region’s media. Typical is this opening sentence in Miami Herald columnist Andrés Oppenheimer’s Sunday column.
If President Barack Obama’s foreign aid budget request for 2011 is a reflection of his priorities in world affairs, it looks like the president is saying “adios” to Latin America.
A look at the region as a whole does reveal U.S. aid declining sharply in the hemisphere, by 15 percent from 2010 to 2011. A region-wide view also makes 2011 appear to be the least militarized aid package since 2001; the ratio of economic and military aid would approach 2:1 for the first time in ten years.
(As always, do keep in mind that we’re looking only at assistance in the foreign aid budget here. The U.S. defense budget also provides military aid to the region, much of it for counter-narcotics programs, which normally increases the military-aid total by about one-quarter to one-third. The Defense Department does not have to report its aid expenditures, however, until the year after it spends the money.)
The picture changes dramatically, however, if you remove just two countries: Mexico and Colombia. These two countries:
- are the number-one and number-two recipients of U.S. aid;
- account for more than two-thirds of all military and police aid to the region;
- have been the recipients of mostly military U.S. aid packages big enough to get their own “brand names:” the Mérida Initiative in Mexico, and Plan Colombia in Colombia; and
- both would see aid cuts — with almost all of the reductions coming from military aid — as both “brand-name” aid programs exit their “delivery of big expensive helicopters and other military equipment” phase.
Here is the same chart as above, leaving out Mexico and Colombia. The difference is striking.
When Mexico and Colombia are removed from the equation, aid to the rest of the region follows a different trend.
- Total aid actually increases from 2010 to 2011. The only reason 2009 is higher than 2011 is that it included the Millennium Challenge program, which provided much aid to El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras that year (despite cutoffs to the latter two) and has not gone on to aid other Latin American countries.
- The aid is far less military in nature, with military and police aid making up less than one-sixth of all aid in the foreign aid bill. However, it becomes slightly more military from 2009 to 2011, with the economic-to-military aid ratio slipping from over 6:1 to just barely over 5:1. The main reason for this is the Obama administration’s launch of a new Caribbean Basin Security Initiative, an anti-crime and anti-drug program in the Caribbean.
- The 2010 bar on these graphs will grow taller. Economic aid — and, as a result, overall aid — will grow by hundreds of millions of dollars once the administration requests, and Congress approves, a special “supplemental” aid appropriation to help Haiti rebuild from the January 12 earthquake. The amount of this additional 2010 aid is not yet known, as the request has not yet been issued.
Look at the aid this way, and it’s pretty clear that nobody is saying “adiós” to anybody. We need not lament that the tempo of helicopter-buying for Mexico and Colombia has slowed, and we note that economic and social assistance is holding remarkably steady despite the Millennium Challenge program’s decline in the region.
February 9th, 2010 at 10:08 pm
OK, I’ve some naive and admittedly leading questions about U.S. foreign aid:
1. Has US foreign aid to Latin America produced any success stories?
2. Can the emergence of Chile and Brazil be attributed to U.S. foreign aid?
3. How much foreign aid has gone to Central American countries and what have they got to show for it? In his column, Andres Oppenheimer says Guatemala is on the verge of collapse, Nicaragua and Honduras do not appear to be too far behind.
4. Would Latin America be better off without any U.S. foreign aid?
February 9th, 2010 at 11:03 pm
Comun you don’t seem to be aware of the so-called nation building pratice in which the US is deeply involved. That’s the catch, regardless of the fate those countries endure, they will follow a patern and behaviour mandated by the Global Powers, for their own benefit. Recently embassador in Colombia James Brownsfield mentioned Colombia and Afghanistan as the two most successful nation building outcomes of that policy.
Here is a link for starters.
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1753/
February 9th, 2010 at 11:36 pm
USAID seems to have accomplished the economic compliment of the military component of Plan Colombia:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090615/ballve
Why would Adam Isaacson and beltway human rights organizations call for and rejoice at more of this?
February 11th, 2010 at 12:04 am
Well, we don’t get to talk about foreign aid that often in this blog so why not? Yes, there’s a growing current of opinion against foreign aid based on the fact that many Third World countries that receive lots of aid still remain real basket cases. Sure enough, the Easterlys of the world can always point to some horror story about aid. That’s fine by me. If you tell me that aid is often wrapped in First World arrogance, misconceived priorities etc, I’m not going to be surprised. But I think it’s not helpful to just call for scrapping aid without putting anything else in place. It is just callous and rather unnecessary to simply stop the flow of aid, supposedly to wean countries from it, in the hope that they’ll simply “sink or swim” (most likely the former).
Of course, in the long run, you want to reach a point where countries don’t need any more aid. But how to get from here to there? I know the answer many will give: FREE TRADE NOW!!! Sure, trade is part of the answer but we know that there are lots of complications with it. And, as we all know, ahem, ahem, there are people in this forum that ignore basic facts so badly that they make it impossible to have a moderately enlightening discussion about FTAs so, as far as that discussion is concerned, “let’s not and say we did.”
February 11th, 2010 at 1:41 am
Humanitarian aid to the displaced, programs for small farmers, support for judicial units and NGOs working on human rights cases, and child disease-prevention programs are a “Beltway” thing now?
We don’t support the USAID program to “create employment” by aiding agribusiness, criticized in Teo Ballvé’s piece. And our last report lays out a lot of concerns about the USAID-supported “Integrated Action” programs.
But we’re on the side of fixing what’s not working, not on the side of slashing assistance down to zero.
The first choice is for people who believe that engaging with other countries and improving how government works are worthy goals. The second choice is for isolationists and ideologues.
February 11th, 2010 at 11:51 am
It seems as though with foreign aid as with trade, the devil is always in the details: the recipient government’s institutions, and governance, as well as the intentions of the aid provider. What is clear to me, as a layman, is that foreign aid to Latin America has not worked…certainly not as intended.