According to abbreviationfinder, USAID stands for United States Agency for International Development. It is a government agency that defines itself as a non-governmental organization, although it is one of the instruments of the White House that the intelligence services use to obtain information on countries in the region and influence their internal and foreign policy.

Characteristic

Since 1961, it has been the main agency of direct interventionism of the United States in the nations, and since then it has distributed millions of dollars in military and economic “aid” to the countries where it exercises its dominance in protection of North American interests. For this purpose, it uses different types of “aid” such as: development loans, technical assistance, emergency funds and, above all, military and political support with an emphasis on strategies of espionage, destabilization, and armed intervention, following the rules of his Confidential Repressive Manual.

Places where it operates

It operates in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, Eurasia, and the Middle East. Decides, finances, directs and controls plans, programs and projects related to the development of agriculture, democracy and governance, economic growth and trade, education and universities, the environment and global alliances to preserve the new capitalist world order, under the guise of humanitarian assistance.

History

Its origins are found in the Marshall Plan and the Alliance for Progress that the United States promoted in 1948 and 1961, respectively, to face the new political map resulting from World War II and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution.

The Marshall Plan was launched in 1947 by the Secretary of State of the United States, George Marshall, theoretically for the reconstruction of Europe after a World War II that had pitted the Allied forces against the German – Italian – Japanese bloc. However, it is evident that the Plan, which channeled close to 15 billion dollars in that direction, represented an expression of the dispute for hegemony with the socialist bloc of Eastern Europe and an instrument of containment against the danger of expansion of communist ideas in the rest of Western Europe.

In 1949, President Harry S. Truman proposed an international development assistance program based on the Plan. The program focused on two fundamental objectives:

1. Creating markets for the United States by reducing poverty and increasing production in developing countries.
2. The lessening of the threat of “communism” by helping countries that thrived on capitalism.

From 1952 to 1961, support programs for technical assistance and capital projects were considered the main form of US aid to other countries, being a key component of US foreign policy.

Instead, the Alliance for Progress, formally created on March 13, 1961 after a little over a year of preparation by many US officials who participated in the conception of the Marshall Plan, was conceived by the State Department and the President John F. Kennedy to promote an “Alliance of the two Americas” that would develop the forces of democracy made in the USA and prevent the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution, on January 1, 1959, from spreading to other countries of the continent.

The Alliance for Progress failed very quickly for two reasons: on the one hand, because the 20,000 million dollars committed by the United States depended on conditions that most Latin American and Caribbean countries were unable to meet, and, on the other hand,, because the so-called “Peaceful and Democratic Revolution” that was going to be consolidated in the continent failed early due to the defeat of the mercenary invasion in Playa Girón, Cuba, in April 1961, the first imperialist military defeat in Latin America, and because of the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965.

Before the Alliance for Progress was cancelled, President John F. Kennedy brought together existing foreign aid organizations and programs, being responsible for this transformation by recognizing the need to unite development under a single agency tasked with managing the ” help other countries to promote social and economic development” and signed the Foreign Assistance Law on November 3, 1961, creating the Agency for International Development, USAID, by executive order. The character of his “philosophy” and the scope of his actions are located on the global political map in general and of Latin America in particular.

In the 1970s, USAID began to shift its focus away from capital and technical assistance programs, and emphasized so-called “basic human needs,” focusing on food and nutrition, population planning, health, education, and resource development. human Resources.

A turn towards free markets occurs in the 1980s when foreign assistance sought to stabilize currencies and financial systems, USAID promoted the so-called “principles of markets” to restructure the development of policies and institutions in the countries.

By 1990, the themes of sustainable development and democracy began to govern USAID programs, playing roles in planning and executing programs after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, “helping” establish so-called democracies with open economic systems in transition countries.

Following the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, USAID was called upon to “help” these two countries “rebuild government, infrastructure, civil society, and basic services.” The Agency began to rebuild with a view to making the most of its funding allocations and began an aggressive campaign to reach out to new partner organizations, including the private sector and foundations.

On December 17, 2014, Rajiv Shah, head of USAID, announced his resignation for February 2015, after a simultaneous speech by the presidents of Cuba, Raúl Castro Ruz and Barack Obama, of the United States when they announced the reestablishment of relations diplomatic relations between the two countries.