Enough Musk Spam

There was a program that gave people food.

It gave private businesses grant money to build out capital in neighborhoods controlled by politicians that the US supported. It gave local agri-business loans to consolidate farmland, then bought the farm product at a markup to redistribute to other private organizations affiliated with US allies. Always in pursuit of some kind of political angle or diplomatic gain. Often this means exporting food from the country to sell to grocers in the Global North.

This is how USAID operated in El Salvador during the Bush and Obama eras.

Rather than provide much-needed funds directly to the FMLN government, USAID prefers to pump millions through private companies, foundations, and third-party contractors to promote neoliberal, private sector-led initiatives that promote “entrepreneurship,” or train young people for offshore English-language call-center service work for US companies.

One such program partners with Microsoft to teach Salvadoran kids English and computer skills; another links small and mid-size farms with Walmart. USAID’s Salvadoran development partners are just as corporate, and overwhelmingly opposition-affiliated. The agency boasts that it helps “artisans in El Salvador sell products in Simán stores,” a regional department store chain owned by one of El Salvador’s oldest oligarchic families and principal donors to ARENA.

When it comes to violence-prevention projects, the dynamic is no different. Despite USAID’s claim to be supporting the Salvadoran government’s security strategy, the agency is channeling nearly all its violence-prevention assistance through the very corporations and organizations that are boycotting the SESP.

One of USAID’s centerpiece violence prevention initiatives is called SolcionES. The program is run by the Business Foundation for Educational Development (FEPADE), whose founding members include nearly every major Salvadoran corporation along with the foundations of the oligarchic Simán, Poma, and Dueñas families — a veritable who’s who of ARENA financiers.

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The management of this project is contracted to the US-based firm Creative Associates International. Creative Associates gained infamy in 2014 when its covert social media project in Cuba was revealed to be an attempt to galvanize dissidence. In Honduras, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Libya, USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) has contracted the company to prop up unstable regimes in the wake of US intervention — essentially counter-insurgency work.

Creative Associates International in El Salvador has a five-year, $24 million project with USAID which includes the establishment of youth outreach centers as well as observatories to collect municipal crime data across a target fifty-five municipalities in total.

Like SolucionES, the Outreach Centers promote a decidedly neoliberal discourse of personal responsibility and individual initiative that obscures material systems of power and oppression. One local partner in the project is the Dutriz Group, which owns one of the country’s most reactionary right-wing newspapers, La Prensa Gráfica. The company promotes USAID programs in the periodical’s pages and finances workshops with at-risk youth.

USAID is not a famine-prevention program. Its goal is not to save lives. Its leadership is not charged with a charitable mission. It is a tool of the State Department to promote fringe parties, bribe existing governments, and extort opposition parties that have inherited infrastructure laid down by prior administrations.

And when they're not bribing government officials, they're distributing right-wing video games to teenagers in order to spy on and radicalize them.

If you're wondering why Nayib Bukele is running El Salvador today, there's a straight line between his current administration and this kind of US intervention.