08/07/12 – Naomi Roht-Arriaza – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, website is scotthorton.org.
And our next guest on the show today is Naomi Rott-Ariaza.
She is the coauthor of this very important piece.
It would seem to me here, uh, deadly aid, how us foreign assistance is helping human rights violators and how to stop it.
It's running at foreignpolicy.com.
Welcome to the show, Naomi.
How are you doing?
Fine.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Uh, well, I'm very happy to have you here.
A very interesting article here.
Um, and I really liked the way, uh, you kind of go on a little bit of a tour around the world here and some of the unintended consequences of American foreign aid, um, and maybe some intended ones too, uh, but starting in, uh, down in South America and Columbia, uh, you talk about, uh, some of the, uh, consequences of U S aid money, uh, going indirectly, but, uh, not very in directly to the pockets of the drug Lords.
Can you tell us that story, please?
Sure.
Well, here's what happened.
So a number of years ago, uh, the U S government decided to try to stop, uh, cocaine from coming into the U S by getting Colombian farmers to grow something else.
And as part of that process, which was a heavily militarized and, um, pretty highly contested process in Columbia.
A lot of people thought that, um, farmers were kind of getting squeezed in the middle, um, between, you know, U S government and, um, drug, drug people who were telling them they had to grow.
So what the U S did was they set up a program for alternative livelihoods, which was aimed at getting people to stop growing coca and start growing something else.
So all very well and good, but the problem was that, um, one of the things that they suggested that people grow instead of cocoa was palm oil.
Uh, and a lot of people jumped at the opportunity and the U S started funding a whole bunch of people who said they'd be happy to grow palm.
Uh, but they didn't do a good enough job.
They didn't do the necessary amount of due diligence to make sure that when those people said that they were the owners of the land, not only were they actually the owners, but that they hadn't taken the land from peasants, uh, who had been pushed off at the point of a gun, uh, at the time when this was happening, there was a lot of forced displacement going on of peasants in Columbia by various stripes of drug lords.
Uh, some of them, uh, affiliated with paramilitary groups, some of them affiliated with guerrilla groups, uh, some of them just plain old ordinary drug people.
Um, and basically, you know, even knowing, because there were reports in the news at the time that a lot of people were being pushed off their land.
Uh, basically what happened was that at the time, a aid mission didn't take the time to look behind the formal title and figure out who these people actually were.
And so they ended up in cahoots with a number of fairly unsavory characters.
Uh, and that's kind of the point of the piece was not that there's anything that we think is necessarily bad about foreign aid per se, but that if you're going to do it, you have to do some upfront due diligence to make sure that you're not only thinking about the intended consequences of what you're trying to do, which are almost always something that we all would agree would be good, like health or education or, you know, helping people, uh, get a better income, but also think about the unintended consequences.
Uh, like in this case, having, um, collaborated basically with, uh, the forced displacement of thousands of farmers.
And by drug cartel Lords.
Well, yeah, by the very people who were trying to fight, this is Joe Biden's plan, Columbia, right?
In effect, it wasn't Joe Biden.
No, this was done starting actually way back in the late 1980s.
And it went through a democratic and Republican administrations alike.
It was a bipartisan policy.
Yeah.
Uh, I was actually thinking of Biden when Bush was the president and he was in the Senate, but, but yeah, it does go way back though, I guess it goes way back and it, and it was absolutely Republican Democrat.
Everybody was on board with us.
And when you say that some of these drug Lords are the, are tied with the paramilitaries, that means at least allies of the military, that's the pro regime forces.
Right, exactly.
So what happened in Columbia is there's a long standing, uh, left-wing guerrilla force and starting sometime in the 1990s, uh, combination of, uh, former military, current military and large landowners decided to form their own militias, uh, which were, uh, sort of right-wing militias and both sides were pretty vicious.
Um, and anybody who was on land that they wanted had to get off in a hurry or they'd get shot.
Uh, which means that Columbia has at this point, probably the second largest number of displaced people in the world.
It's got a millions and millions of people were thrown off their land, uh, you know, from one day to the next, right.
At the point of a gun, boy, talk about a story that we don't hear about millions and millions of people forced off their land.
You're saying, Oh yeah.
Columbia has, I think the last time I looked at it, it was over 3 million people who've been forcibly displaced in the course of this, uh, of this conflict.
That's almost an Iraq war level of refugees right there.
Exactly.
You know, and it's not someplace with a declared war.
It's, it's this low level counterinsurgency/drug wars/conflict over land and resources.
Well now, and so when you talk about the American aid going, uh, not very indirectly, uh, just pretty much directly into the hands of these drug lords.
So through their front men, um, obviously the problem is information is, do you think that it's even really within the speciality of the U S aid and its employees to know, to be able to trace where this money goes?
Well, you know, it wasn't that hard in this case.
And eventually I've got to say, eventually the U S mission in Columbia did put in place, uh, the kind of, uh, uh, protocols or the kind of, uh, processes that they needed to, to make sure that they weren't just looking at the formal title saying, Oh, well, this all looks okay.
And then going ahead, but that they were actually looking at, well, what area is this in?
Is this an area where there's been this kind of problem where people have been forced off?
If so, how do we know that these people, you know, that we're looking at the title, the title, isn't just being held, you know, by some third party when the, you know, the real party and interest is from paramilitary leader or drug lord, right?
Well, eventually they put something in place to be able to do that, but it should being frankly hit over the head by, you know, all kinds of U S non-governmental groups by Congress, by everybody else saying what's going on here for that to happen.
And what we're saying in our piece is that kind of upfront due diligence needs to be done much better on the front end so that you don't end up having problems on the back end.
Right.
In other words, what you're saying is, um, there may be some kind of local information problem, that kind of thing, but in this case, they really should have been able to know, could have been able to know the whole time.
And there's nothing very detailed in terms of, uh, the local intelligence that they would need to make these decisions.
Just, you know, it's pretty obvious that we're dealing with the guy who stole that mountain over there from those people over there.
Well, the thing is, I mean, the guy doesn't put his name on it, you know?
I mean, it's not like, you know, I, Macaco, you know, signed this deed saying that I own this property, right.
It's owned by his cousin's brother-in-law's sister.
Right.
So it's not as easy as all that, but in the case of Columbia, what could have happened and what eventually did happen would be to have a kind of a system that says, look, if this is an area of the country where these problems have been endemic, then we need to dig a little deeper, right?
If this was an area of the country that has not been problematic, then fine.
We can just look at who supposedly owns the title and we'll go with it.
But you're saying they're much better about this now?
You're saying they're much better about this now?
In Columbia, they're better about it.
Yeah.
Because as I said, they've been back, they've been, you know, bashed on the head by so many people yelling at them about this, that they've actually done a better job.
Well, that's good at least.
What we're saying is it shouldn't take being bashed on the head.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, activism certainly counts.
All right.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
We got to go out to this break, but we'll be right back with Naomi Rott.
Or is it Ari?
I'm sorry.
Uh, yeah.
Ari Aza.
I had it right the first time, I think.
Anyway, we'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Scott Horton.org is website.
And I'm talking with Naomi Rott Ari Aza.
She is a professor of law at the university of California, Hastings college of law.
And the author of the book, the Pinochet effect, transnational justice in the age of human rights.
And that interesting, something we've discussed on the show with the other Scott Horton, numerous times Spanish prosecutions and, and this kind of fun.
I hope to see American politicians in foreign court someday since obviously I'll never see them in American courts for their international crimes.
Uh, but maybe that's another interview.
Uh, we're talking about, um, this great piece, uh, that Naomi co-wrote, uh, that appears at a foreign policy.com.
It's called deadly aid.
And it's about, um, American foreign aid being misused, uh, being misappropriated.
And, uh, we've been talking about the case study of Columbia in the last segment, but then, uh, you, uh, write quite a bit about USAID in, I think that, uh, USAID, all capitals and just regular USAID, uh, to Africa in numerous cases.
And, um, can we start with Ethiopia?
Can you tell us about the case you make here?
Sure.
So this was a difficult question because, you know, the U S spends very, very little money of its overall budget on foreign aid.
And so you'd like it to actually go to people who are really poor and help them pull themselves out of poverty.
Right.
That's the idea.
But what do you do when you've got a government like that of Ethiopia or Rwanda or Uganda or a couple other places that are actually both at the same time, trying to pull the people out of poverty, but they're doing it in a way that squelches civil liberties that doesn't allow for a political opposition that doesn't allow for free press that doesn't allow for civil society groups to get any money from outside the country.
And of course, Ethiopia is a pretty poor country.
So it's hard to raise money inside the country.
So what it basically means is those groups have a real hard time operating.
Uh, so what do you do when you have both of those things going on at the same time?
It creates a real dilemma because you can't, usually what we do in those kind of cases with foreign aid is we say, well, we won't give the money to the government because government's a repressive government.
We don't like them.
So we'll give the money to, you know, churches and youth groups and women's groups and whatever.
Right.
And they can use the money to do good stuff.
In Ethiopia, you can't do that.
Right.
Because there's a law that says basically, uh, none of those groups can get more than 10% of their pay from fraud.
So then you have the story of, well, we either support the government, uh, even though we know it's a repressive government and we just basically shut up about it, or we don't support the government.
We don't put any money into the country.
And then, you know, we are taking the risk of letting a whole lot of people die of famine.
And so that's kind of the dilemma that the U.S. has faced in these countries.
What we're saying is, yes, it's a dilemma.
We realize, well, it's been like that since the eighties.
Right.
And then what happened with all the hands across America and Michael Jackson and all that, all that charity, it's gotten, it's gotten considerably worse as these governments have gotten more authoritarian.
Um, so in Ethiopia, for instance, starting in 2005, uh, basically the ruling party decided that they didn't really want any political opposition.
Um, and there were elections and the opposition did much better than anybody thought.
And at that point they cracked down.
Uh, and so the last election, I think the guy who's now the president won with 99% of the vote.
So, you know, you gotta wonder, um, so, I mean, they've invaded Somalia.
They've invaded Somalia for us twice in the past six years, right?
That's part of the issue, right?
Is that we have geopolitical issues in the region.
And if you look around at who the neighbors are to Ethiopia, Ethiopia starts looking pretty good, right?
I mean, it's got a stable government.
It's not, you know, it's not kind of falling apart at the seams.
Um, it's not, it's not supporting, uh, radical Islamic groups that we don't like.
And so for all those reasons, we've been supporting government, right?
What we're saying is let's use whatever clout we have to push them in a direction of at least allowing more, uh, free press and more civil society.
What we're arguing is that the U S has bent over so far backward, right?
To support these, uh, governments that we squandered, whatever, you know, political capital, whatever weight we had, um, and are not using it to try to open up.
Political space, you know, what we're saying is, yeah, we understand it's difficult, you know, we understand that these are governments that are not the sort of, you know, old time kleptocratic, um, you know, sort of, uh, children eating dictators of the past that their governments that are actually trying.
To do some good stuff for their people, but they're also doing it in a way that's very contrary to what we say are our national ideals and that we don't have a balance, right?
And that we shouldn't be using aid in a way that, um, makes it easier for these oppressive tendencies to take hold.
So for instance, in Ethiopia, one of the problems with aid, and this is frankly, not just about USAID, it's also about international loans and about international aid from places like the World Bank, um, you know, there are poverty reduction programs that are financed by international grants and loans, but if you look at it on the ground, there've been a whole lot of reports that say that you only get access to this aid if you support the ruling party.
If you don't support the ruling party, you get cut off, right?
And so our question is, well, what do we do about that?
You know, are we willing to allow that to go on because at least some people are getting aid or are we going to put our foot down and say, you know, if we're going to finance this, we want to make sure that it's not being used in a discriminatory way.
Yeah.
You know, Congressman Ron Paul, he's just a blanket against all foreign aid.
He says, uh, most commonly foreign aid means you take money from poor people in rich countries and you give it to rich people in poor countries.
Or, you know, even worse local militias or death squads or armies, or, you know, some other horrible group are the ones who end up benefiting from the aid when it comes, they get to use it as blackmail against local populations and what kind of thing, and I guess his real point is ultimately the information problem says that the state department is never going to figure this out and we should no longer ask them to, because they're always going to get it wrong.
Or at least, I mean, I guess you're citing examples of, well, they can do it better and we'd like to see even better than that, but maybe just call it off.
What do you think?
No.
I mean, I, first of all, I think people in the U S have a very exaggerated view of how much we're actually spending on foreign aid.
And so when you ask people, you do surveys and you ask people, they tell you, Oh, 20, 10% of the budget, 20% of the budget, we should cut it down.
It's actually way less than 1% of the budget that we're spending on foreign aid.
So the numbers involved here are tiny compared to anything else.
Yeah.
But, well, compared to the national budget, but not compared to just money.
I mean, we're talking still billions and billions of dollars.
We're talking millions.
Um, if you include everything, we're probably getting up into billions.
Sure.
But now the question is, what do you get for your money?
Right now, you know, my sense is that some of what you get for your money is really important and you wouldn't otherwise get it.
So for example, a lot of, uh, you know, I work in the human rights area and I also do some work in the area of protection of air and water, right?
In both of those places, both of those things, you know, USAID helps support non-governmental groups that could never get funded in their own country.
Cause nobody has the money to do it.
And they're the only people standing up for human rights.
They're the only people who are monitoring governments like, you know, places like Zimbabwe or, uh, you know, Burma or any number of places, right.
Um, and are basically helping people get help.
If they get arrested, helping them get medical help, they get tortured.
I would hate to see that cut off.
I think that that's money well spent.
Uh, what I worry about is that that's, you know, a tiny fraction of the foreign aid that we actually put out there.
The bulk of it goes for health funding, agriculture funding, um, and economic development funding, and those projects I think need not to be stopped, but to be much more targeted, often much smaller.
We could do more with less money where we allowed people to do more of their own rather than, you know, sort of, um, imposing our views of what should be done.
So I don't think we should cut it off.
I think Ron Paul's wrong, but I do think we can do a better job of targeting.
I think we can do a better job of, uh, figuring out what the unintended consequences might be and thinking about how to deal with them.
And I think we can do a better job of targeting aid so that we're helping the people we're actually trying to help and not giving aid and sucker to oppressive governments.
Okay.
I think it is possible to do that.
Um, I understand there, you know, Ron Paul's not alone.
There, there are a fair number of people that say on balance.
All right.
I'm sorry, Naomi, you got to go.
It's Naomi Rott-Ariaza.
Thank you very much for your time.
Thank you.
The book is The Pinochet Effect and the article at Foreign Policy is Deadly Aid.
Thanks very much again.
Thank you.
All right.