Venezuela to Take-Up Job of Aiding Nicaragua
CNN reports that Venezuela has promised to give Nicaragua $50 million after the U.S. cancelled its $62 million promise to aid Nicaragua through the Millennium Challenge Corporation.
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega claims Obama as a hypocrite: “He expresses good will, but in practice, he has the same policies as President Reagan,” and connecting the new American President to Reagan, who backed the gruesome contra war in Nicaragua that caused much of the present political tension in Managua, shows that Nicaragua has not forgotten its history with the States. The U.S. government claims it pulled funds from the Millennium Challenge Corporation because municipal elections were supposedly fraudulent. Ortega, whose Sandinista party won elections in a landslide, disputes those claims. Ortega’s party has yet to publish official results of those elections.
News like this makes me wonder. Why does an organization like the Millennium Challenge Corporation have to be the pawn in this twisted (and childish) of game of global power-politics? Shouldn’t organizations that provide vital aid projects to many of the needy communities in Nicaragua (let alone the many needy communities in the world) be exempt from the disputes of politicians? Doesn’t using foreign aid to police the world only perpetuate the structural violence that keeps countries like Nicaragua in the long list of poorest countries in the world?
I agree with your disappointment in development being made political, but MCC was basically designed to be a political pawn that rewarded governments the US approved of.
Then what can we do to develop development into something less political and more, i don’t know, concerned with the poor’s welfare? It feels even worse to know that the most hugely funded development projects are created with premeditated political designs.
Making USAID a cabinet-level agency, like DFID, would be a start.
Who knows if it’ll amount to anything, but I just wrote the MCC expressing my disappointment and sending them this post.
http://www.mcc.gov/contact/index.php
I think an interesting and important question to ask is what are the institutional reasons behind the selfish, shortsighted, and ultimately destructive policies such as this one that are repeatedly made throughout history? We are lucky that there are many do-gooders out there who are driven to fight uphill battles by their powerful sense of morality and solidarity. But if the vices of greed and exploitation are not addressed on the institutional level, we will always be fighting an uphill battle against the “establishment.”
I do not believe that world leaders lack the moral capacity to understand or even be personally affected by the human tragedies that often result from their (or lack of) actions. But they are constricted by the fundamental concept of cost-benefit analysis that pervades any policy decision. And politics, unfortunately, remains very much a zero-sum game. When pragmatic solidarity replaces Machiavellian thought as the dominant philosophy in international relations, the world would be a very different place. This transformation, of course, is a quite a lofty goal, but when we look at the moral strides that international relations has taken throughout history, it becomes not so crazy anymore to dream of such a future. It was only decades ago when the leaders of the US and USSR, driven in large part by their personal egos, were frighteningly close to destroying the world. Yet, just today, the two countries signed a treaty as part of an unprecedented effort towards decreasing nuclear proliferation. This is why the challenges in global health must be tackled at the institutional level. Large scale behavioral changes by countries are ultimately driven by systemic reforms that change the playing field for global actors. We should look towards a future when the fight for global health equity is no longer an uphill battle against the establishment; it will be the establishment.