U.S. Aid Is Crucial to Defending Democracy in Latin America

Yahoo

03-03-2025

'Why are there never coup attempts inside the United States?' an old joke among left-wing activists in Latin America goes. 'Because there is no U.S. embassy there.'
It's a reference to U.S. actions during the Cold War to undermine democratically elected governments across the region, including Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in the 1950s and Chilean President Salvador Allende in the 1970s. Under the auspices of fighting communism, Washington backed right-wing military coups and dictatorships throughout the hemisphere. As late as the 1980s, Jeanne Kirkpatrick—a foreign policy adviser to then-President Ronald Reagan who later served as his ambassador to the United Nations—issued a defense of authoritarian regimes that she believed helped to protect their populations from even worse revolutionary ideologies.
But the joke was outdated even before January 2021, when then-U.S. President Donald Trump tried to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. In fact, over recent decades, the view of the United States as a defender of authoritarianism, at least in Latin America, has become an anachronism. Eventually, Washington lent support to the Concertacion coalition that defeated then-dictator Augusto Pinochet at the polls and led to the reestablishment of democracy in Chile in 1990. And in 2001, the U.S. backed the Inter-American Democratic Charter, which clearly states in its opening that '[t]he peoples of the Americas have a right to democracy and their governments have an obligation to promote and defend it,' while promising to remove nondemocratic governments from various hemispheric institutions.
More recently, perhaps the top three achievements of former President Joe Biden's policies in Latin America all came in defense of democracy. His administration supported a democratic transition in Honduras in 2021 after Xiomara Castro defeated the ruling National Party's candidate in the country's presidential election that year. Washington then had outgoing President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who had stolen Honduras' 2017 presidential election, extradited on drug-trafficking charges so he could no longer interfere in domestic politics. A year later, Biden's team pressured Brazil's military leadership to stay clear of a coup attempt led by outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro after Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won that country's presidential election in 2022. And the Biden team safeguarded an incredibly difficult presidential transition in Guatemala at the end of 2023 to ensure that President Bernardo Arevalo took office, overcoming the efforts of that country's corrupt elites to keep him from power.
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The U.S. record is far from perfect, and this column will no doubt provoke responses detailing the many wrongs Washington has committed in the region in recent years. But the U.S. really did shift toward a more pro-democracy stance in Latin America since the end of the Cold War. As part of that shift, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, funded numerous local NGOs that promoted human rights and anti-corruption efforts. The National Endowment for Democracy—a government-funded semi-autonomous organization—backed training for political parties and civil society that contributed to grassroots civic activism at the heart of democratic values, winning NED the hatred of authoritarian leaders who viewed those efforts as a violation of their sovereignty. Various other U.S. agencies also provide grants for research and think tank work that is critical to policy debates in the region. All those efforts go beyond the specific episodes, such as those by the Biden administration, when the U.S. government backed a democratic movement at a critical moment. They were cooked into U.S. policy in nearly every country.
That is not to say that U.S. support is the only thing sustaining democracy in Latin America. Democracy can't be imposed from abroad. The biggest efforts come from the people of Latin America, who work to improve their countries' governance on a daily basis. They deserve far more credit than the U.S. does. But U.S. funding and leadership has become a critical part of the scaffolding and infrastructure for promoting democracy and civil society throughout the hemisphere.
Many groups have come to depend on it and were not prepared for the shock of recent weeks, when with minimal warning, that scaffolding was suddenly ripped away after Trump returned to the White House in January. Working through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, run by Elon Musk, the Trump administration has put a freeze on nearly all foreign aid. Even programs that supposedly received waivers remain stuck in limbo, and payments that U.S. judges have ordered USAID to unfreeze do not seem to be flowing. In my conversations with analysts and activists across Latin America in February, I've been stunned by the sheer number of accounts I've heard of offices closing and laying off employees, important humanitarian assistance being cut and contracts not being paid by the U.S. government, even for work that has already been completed. It will likely take months before the full extent of the job losses and program shutdowns are reported.
Authoritarians around the region are gleeful at the turn of events. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has taken to Twitter/X to encourage Musk to cut funding for NED, whose efforts Bukele portrayed as not only wasted but bad for the region. Bukele has also cheered on both Trump's efforts to defy the judicial branch and calls by Trump's supporters to remove judges who attempt to block his policies.
In the short term, civil society organizations in Latin America are just trying to survive long enough to find new funding sources. Many op-eds have been written discussing how China or other global powers may fill the vacuum as the U.S. withdraws from its influential position in the region. But so far, there is just a vacuum. Contrary to the accusations thrown around by DOGE about waste, fraud and abuse, the vast majority of these NGOs and political parties were never particularly well-funded. They survived on shoestring budgets, and replacing the funds for any one of them would be a drop in the bucket for an interested patron. But for every organization that finds a new source of funding, many others will be forced to shut down. No other country or global institution has the resources and interest to fund these groups at the level the U.S. did just a few months ago.
The long-term implications of this cut are incredibly damaging to U.S. interests. Along with the shock, the sudden collapse of funding is generating a sense of betrayal among civil society in Latin America—with good reason. The U.S. has broken its promises and let them down. They won't easily trust the dependability of U.S. support in the future. Decades of efforts by the U.S. to shed its Cold War reputation are being swiftly undermined, not by an activist foreign policy that directly supports dictators, but by one that cuts off aid to the grassroots organizations on the front lines of Latin America's efforts to push back creeping authoritarianism.
If and when the U.S. tries to readopt a more supportive role for democracy and civil society four or eight years from now, it will likely find a much more hostile and distrustful environment. That will benefit the United States' adversaries around the world, but more immediately it will benefit democracy's adversaries in the region.
James Bosworth is the founder of Hxagon, a firm that does political risk analysis and bespoke research in emerging and frontier markets, as well as a global fellow at the Wilson Center's Latin America Program. He has two decades of experience analyzing politics, economics and security in Latin America and the Caribbean.
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