CounterPunch recently published a piece by former USAID employee Jared O. Bell titled A Real-Time Cautionary Tale of Stolen Democracy from Nicaragua in which he compared the rapid transition to what he calls autocracy in the United States under Trump to the governments of three Latin American nations. While I understand that the point Jared Bell was making about the rapid transition we are seeing in Washington, DC to an autocratic government, I find his argument lacking.  Besides the fact that I would call what is happening in the United States a move towards fascism not autocracy, a big reason I say this are his examples of autocracies. In a world that includes national rulers such as Hungary’s Orkan, Poland’s Nawrocki and El Salvador’s Bukele, it’s at best curious that the governments Mr. Bell chooses to make his point about Trump’s White House are all leftist. In nature, furthermore, they have also all been under attack from successive US governments for varying numbers of decades.  As is usually the case with socialist-leaning governments, the reason they are under attack from Washington is their refusal to become as subservient as Washington would like them to be.  To be clear, as a leftist, I have criticisms of each of the governments Mr. Bell names.

At the same time, history tells us that each of the revolutionary movements these governments sprang from have an understanding of democracy more universal than anything most people have experienced in the US for a while.  Since Mr. Bell was an agent of the US State Department in Nicaragua, let’s use that government as an example.

It’s one thing to question some of Ortega’s actions. Hell, I had differences of opinion with some elements of Sandinista politics when it was still fighting the Somoza regime.  I continue to question some of the policies of the government in Managua even now.  However, to attack that government together with the governments in Cuba and Venezuela without even mentioning the major role US intelligence agencies, Congress, the White House and numerous pro-US NGOs have played in disrupting many democratically managed programs in those countries fundamentally misrepresents the truth.  To clarify further, no matter what former staff or liberal politicians argue, the essential function of US AID was to install, expand and protect US corporate power into countries the global north calls “developing nations.”. In the cases of Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba this means destroying the current systems through funding opposition movements, creating pro-US media, intensifying government and social dysfunction, sanctions, covert operations and even war.

To be clear. I know that a number of the programs administered by USAID focused on improving the health, education and even human rights of some of the world’s marginalized people. I am also aware that the cessation of those programs during Trump and Musk’s attack on USAID almost certainly caused the deaths of perhaps thousands.

However, the reality of these and other programs operating under the auspices of USAID is that they can be administered by other organizations and agencies that are not arms of the US government and without the conditions demanded by Washington to participate. As noted above, USAID has always been part of a much broader program whose primary focus has been to bring poor nations into the sphere of US capitalism. Its history is one where it not only operated in nations with considerably more autocratic governments than the three Mr. Bell lists.

At the same time, it has operated in unison with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) across time and from Laos to Afghanistan, Honduras to Ukraine. In Afghanistan CIA assets placed within vaccination teams going into the countryside to vaccinate Afghans against smallpox and other diseases reported back to the CIA and US military what they saw; that information was then used to target villages for attack by the US military. In Laos, USAID operated as part of the Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS) program directed by Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) CIA station chief William Colby. This program was an important part of the effort to win the “hearts and minds” of the people of Southeast Asia. It manifested itself in numerous ways, from the forced displacement of civilians into so-called strategic hamlets under Operation Phoenix to the training of mercenary troops opposed to the revolutionary Pathet Lao and in favor of the monarchist Laotian government. One unfortunate yet ironic aspect of the freezing of USAID funds in the early weeks of the Trump administration was a halting of a program removing unexploded ordnance dropped by the United States in the 1960s and 1970s from the farms and forests of Laos.

Mr. Bell’s concern about the autocratic nature of the Trumpist regime is valid, even though I would use stronger terminology; in other words, what we are seeing is creeping fascism, not autocracy. However, to link the left-leaning and anti-US imperialist governments of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela to the rightwing regime of Donald Trump is both dishonest and misleading. Not to mention, it gives Trump considerably more credit than he deserves.

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