An acronym meaning United States Agency for International Development according to abbreviationfinder, USAID has a headquarters in Washington -DC, and “field offices” that account for its presence throughout the world.
It harbors a long history that illustrates all the falsity of its “humanitarian” claims, combining its actions throughout Latin America with the rest of the imperial network of interference.
Dozens of its agents move in the shadow of right-wing organizations, invented depending on the circumstances, and operate directly, or through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute (NDI ), Freedom House itself, and a few more facades, always under the guidance of the CIA.
Both bilateral and unilateral programs (which are the most) are also carried out “conditionally” through so-called “contractors” such as Development Alternatives Inc (DAI), a US corporation that provides technical assistance to many instances of the Latin American States in management issues. The DAI, as demonstrated by the arrest of Alan Gross in Cuba in 2009, is one of the fronts used by the CIA to carry out its secret operations.
Another of USAID’s “contractors” is Chemonics, an American NGO specializing in technical and social assistance to the states of the world.
It works closely with private voluntary organizations (NGOs), indigenous organizations, universities, US companies, international organizations, governments, and US and European government agencies and embassies. It maintains working relationships with more than 3,500 North American private companies.
The lines of separation between “development assistance” and “military assistance” programs have become increasingly blurred. The fact that both have had from the beginning the objective of preventing the expansion of revolutionary ideas, call it containment (Johnson doctrine) or Reversion (Reagan), has been complementing and articulating them around the concept of subversion.
Cuba
In 1971, the CIA organized an assassination attempt against President Fidel Castro, taking advantage of the Cuban leader ‘s trip to Chile. He commissioned with this criminal project an old associate, Antonio Veciana, an Alpha-66 terrorist, an accomplice in the plot against John F. Kennedy. At the time of the assignment, Venciana was working at the US Embassy in Bolivia, where he was a USAID official.
USAID has been involved in increasing financial and material support and encouragement of subversive activities in coordination with the US Interests Section in Havana, which has included the introduction of subversive print and video materials and the distribution of radios with special devices to guarantee subversive operations.
Between December 1996 and 2004, through USAID, the US government allocated more than 34 million dollars to 25 counterrevolutionary organizations. Only the Democracy Support Group, directed by Frank Hernández Trujillo, received from 1988 to April 2005 more than 4,600,000 dollars.
The USAID budget for the year 2003 for Cuba was six million dollars, figures that increased in the following years. This money was destined, according to its leaders, to NGOs that “promote a democratic transition in Cuba “, thus designated to counterrevolutionary groups financed by that Government and openly fed and supported by its diplomatic representation in Havana, with which they recognize that a foreign government finances internal subversion to cause a change in the political system, acts contrary to all international laws.
In June 2004, the United States government announced, as part of a set of measures against the Cuban government, the increase to 36 million dollars in the budget that the Department of State and USAID allocated to:
“to help the relatives of internal dissidents imprisoned in Cuba and to support programs for the democratization of the island”
The activities aimed at facilitating the overthrow of the Cuban government included the distribution of 10,000 shortwave radios in Cuba so that the inhabitants had access to counterrevolutionary propaganda, as well as the financing and training of journalists and NGOs opposed to the Cuban government.
The same strategy of giving money to right-wing organizations, many of them business-like, was used by the Bush administration to provoke the revolt in Haiti and to promote the referendum against then-president Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.
The funds were channeled to Rutgers University, the University of Miami, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), and the United States-Cuba Business Council.
Other groups that have benefited from US money include the CubaNet agency, which promotes anti-Cuban journalism and has received more than $800,000 for that purpose, as well as Freedom House, a New York -based “human rights” group, and that it has received, among other donations, one million 300 thousand dollars to publish around 40 thousand books, pamphlets and other materials on Cuba [1].
On July 10, 2013, USAID exposed a $6 million subversive program against Cuba by mistakenly using an unprotected line to send documents to US diplomats in Havana. The materials detail that said entity launched its initiative SOL-OAA-13-000110 and at least 20 non-governmental organizations requested funds to train alleged “dissidents” in Cuba in the next three years.
The plan includes budget proposals, ways to monitor and evaluate progress, organization charts, and experience from other destabilizing projects designed for Cuba under the 1996 Helms-Burton Act.
The initiative aims to provide opportunities for so-called opponents to travel abroad, learn technical skills and train in a “series of fields considered important for the development of democracy and civil society”, in open subversion of the political order [ 2].
Uruguay
Among the most disgusting pages in the history of the Yankee organization in Latin America, it is enough to remember how Dan Anthony Mitrione, an American instructor in torture techniques, appeared in Uruguay, with a USAID credential, at the end of 1970, to train policemen, in a secret program of destruction of the forces of the left in all of Latin America.
Venezuela
In Venezuela, USAID established its office in Caracas on August 1, 2002, with the foreseeable goal of providing timely and flexible assistance to strengthen democracy, an objective that translated, with the help of the IRI and the NED, into the movement to expel the then President Hugo Chávez through a coup or through a referendum.
On March 31, 2004, Jorge Valero, Venezuelan ambassador to the OAS Permanent Council, denounced that:
“In the year of the coup, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) of the State Department also disbursed US$2 million to support Venezuelan leaders and institutions classified as “moderate” but which, in practice,, were opposed to President Hugo Chavez ”
Haiti
In Haiti, USAID is among the US agencies that have organized, guided, and financed several of the Haitian political organizations that brought about the kidnapping and grotesque eviction of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
In December 2006, the Cuban-American mobster Adolfo Franco, director for Latin America of USAID, who was replaced in November 2007 by the administration of W. Bush due to the scramble for funds for “democracy in Cuba”, he stated that the Washington government would not work directly with the Haitian government until the country’s political impasse was resolved.
Franco was replaced by José R. Pepe Cárdenas, a mobster from the Cuban American National Foundation who, after the overthrow of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya on June 28, 2009, was hired by the puppet Roberto Micheletti to improve his image in Washington.
Interested in learning about the type of assistance from USAID, journalist Tom Reeves (of the prestigious publication Counterpunch) traveled to Haiti and met in Jacmel with Pierre Gestion, leader of the Haitian Movement for Rural Development, and one of the actors who overthrew to President Jean Bertrand Aristide in February 2004.
Boasting of his connection to the State Department and to Reinforcement of Democracy, a USAID program, Gestion told the journalist:
“They trained us and taught us how to organize ourselves, and we organized the groups to demand that the corrupt Aristide government be brought down”
Confirming several similar allegations, Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd pointed out that USAID had earmarked $1.2 million to train Haiti’s rebels, for more than 20,000 M-16 rifles and high-tech military equipment supplied by the neighboring army. Dominican Republic.
