USAID - A Chilling View

Click here for an article by Mark Ames at pando.com entitled "The murderous history of USAID, the US Government agency behind Cuba’s fake Twitter clone."

Click here for the Wikipedia entry for USAID, described as "... the United States federal government agency primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid," an organization I have always taken to be pretty benevolent, administering useful aid programs around the world. I was once involved in an arbitration concerning a USAID project in Egypt which involved the expenditure of several hundred million dollars in the development of an irrigation project. the article quotes Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research as saying:

In a number of countries, including Venezuela and Bolivia, USAID is acting more as an agency involved in covert action, like the CIA, than as an aid or development agency.

While Ames says:

It’s important to note that not everything USAID does is patently evil — in fact, there are many programs that could even be described as good.

He also says:

But USAID, as with any agency of American power, is fully capable of and will continue to be an instrument of geopolitical and corporate force.

There's some pretty ugly stuff in this article. See more after the break.


The article concentrates on "the agency’s Office of Public Safety (OPS) program — and its most notorious official, Dan Mitrione." It describes the political intrigue, including acts of torture performed by or under the direction of USAID officials, especially Mitrione, in Brazil and Uruguay, but also in Vietnam, Laos, Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, Peru, Russia, and Palestine.

Here's Mitrione quoted on torture: “When you receive a subject, the first thing to do is determine his physical state, his degree of resistance, through a medical examination. A premature death means a failure by the technician.

“Another important thing to know is exactly how far you can go given the political situation and the personality of the prisoner. It is very important to know beforehand whether we have the luxury of letting the subject die . . .

“Before all else, you must be efficient. You must cause only the damage that is strictly necessary, not a bit more. We must control our tempers in any case. You have to act with the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon and with the perfection of an artist . . .”

Journalist A.J. Langguth, in a book about Mitrione and USAID’s torture programs entitled “Hidden Terrors,” quotes Manuel Hevia, "a CIA double-agent secretly working for Cuba," giving an eyewitness account of Mitrione’s live torture demonstrations:

“As subjects for the first testing, they took beggars, known in Uruguay as bichicones, from the outskirts of Montevideo, along with a woman from the border with Brazil. There was no interrogation, only a demonstration of the different voltages on the different parts of the human body, together with the uses of a drug to induce vomiting — I don’t know why or for what — and another chemical substance.

“The four of them died.”

Mitrione was kidnapped and murdered in Uruguay in 1970.

The article reports that during the Vietnam War, USAID trained police and ran civilian jails. USAID also participated in the “soft” side of the Phoenix Program, described in Wikipedia as "... designed to identify and 'neutralize' (via infiltration, capture, terrorism, torture, and assassination) the infrastructure of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF or Viet Cong)."

In Guatemala:

By 1970, USAID trained over 30,000 Guatemalan police to suppress local leftists, according to William Blum’s book 'Killing Hope.' Just over a decade later, Guatemalan death squads under US-backed dictator Rios Montt unleashed a genocide on the Mayan peasants.

According to Victoria Sanford’s 'Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala,' USAID programs supported the death squads as they carried out the genocide.

In El Salvador:

According to NYU historian Greg Grandin, in El Salvador, where 75,000 were killed between 1979 and 1992,

“[I]n the early 1960s agents from the State Department, Green Berets, CIA, and USAID organized two paramilitary groups that would become the backbone of that country’s death squad system.”

In Haiti, the organization worked to facilitate the overthrow of democratically elected populist left-wing president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

In Peru:

Between 1996-98, the Fujimori regime forcibly mass-sterilized some 300,000 women, mostly indigenous peoples in the Andes and Amazon regions. Fujimori’s mass forced-sterilization program is one of only two such national programs known since the end of World War Two. And yes, it received enthusiastic funding from USAID, which donated $35 million to the program.

In Russia, after the fall of the Soviet Union:

There were many ways to transform Russia in the 1990s, but thanks to funding from USAID, the path chosen was the most brutal and disastrous of all: Shock therapy, mass privatization, and the mass impoverishment of 150 million people.

In the "Comments" section of the article, here's one from a reader called "Ygret":

Seriously, you don't know anything about the "Chicago boys" and their privatization agenda that destroyed Russia's economy after the breakup of the USSR. The Milton Friedman, neoliberal cabal that overthrew Allende in Chile and turned that country into a plutocrat's paradise, worked its "magic" once again in Russia, setting up an oligarchy and bleeding that nation of its wealth until finally a strong enough leader emerged to put a stop to it: V Putin. Of course he's a thug, but so are Jeffrey Sachs (who has since recanted) and the western banking, finance and industrial cartels that bleed nations dry for fun and profit. USAID, the CIA and the US military have a proud history, ever since WWII, of decimating nations and stealing their wealth, be it agricultural (United Fruit kicking millions off their land to plant bananas), making Central America safe for US conglomerates to rape and pillage, our noble works in southeast Asia, Africa, Central Asia, etc. etc. The world is in chaos and getting worse everyday because the US government works tirelessly to steal the wealth of nations via IMF "aid", USAID "democracy" programs, and outright CIA coups. Iran is a theocracy now because the CIA overthrew their democratically elected president and installed the Shah, who was a brutal dictator for decades, and who gave over Iran's oil fields to western oil companies, until the Iranian people had finally had enough. And now the same rape and pillage tactics of the neoliberal banking and industrial cartels are brought home to the USA, where obscene criminal acts by large banks, including laundering hundreds of billions of dollars for murderous drug cartels, trillions in housing mortgage fraud, etc., don't even land a single banker in prison. Wake up. The world is being overrun by neoliberal bagmen who only love money and power, and justify their murder and reeving with paper thin propaganda about "spreading democracy" and "free markets". USAID is a major part of this, as evidenced recently by their good works in Venezuela and Ukraine, stirring up and supporting neo-Nazis (after all, anyone is better than a socialist right?) against the popularly elected Ukrainian government. What you read in the mainstream media is all lies and propaganda. Wake up.