USAID: ‘Sterilize your women or you get nothing this year’

USAID: ‘Sterilize your women or you get nothing this year’

By Nury Vittachi

Writers at The New York Times, the Guardian, and other mainstream press are this week working really hard to mislead their readers into thinking USAID was purely an aid organization, nothing more. But Elon Musk says it is a “criminal organization” which was “beyond repair”.

What’s the real story? A study of its accounts reveals that its huge budget (US$50 billion a year) means it does have plenty of cash to give out for actual aid work—but the money often came with some distressing strings attached: “sterilize your women or you get nothing this year”.

The fact is that USAID has a long history of political interference in other countries, often in ways that would cause outrage if other nations tried doing the same thing in United States politics.

U.S. ASSETS FROM HONG KONG

USAID’s political activism is often just millimeters under the surface.

For example, on 14 December, 2021, USAID administrator Samantha Power held a meeting with Nathan Law, a man widely used as a US asset against China. Law was leading figure in the anti-extradition protests that created a months-long 2019 violent insurgency that led to billions of dollars’ worth of damage to the infrastructure of the city.

Also present at the USAID meeting was Brian Leung Kai-ping, director of the Hong Kong Democracy Council. Despite that name, the group is an anti-China campaigning body founded and based in Washington DC. (Nathan Law would later be banned from attendance at HKDC meetings and dropped as a western asset after the group received credible accusations that he was a sexual harasser.)

Why would an aid group like USAID be working with anti-China political activists from wealthy Hong Kong? The organization’s policy was to withdraw from places which had reached prosperity, and it had withdrawn from South Korea, Turkey, and other places.

The answer was obvious to anyone who has done any serious reading about USAID: it is a dual purpose body, used as a charity group and as a CIA-linked instrument for the advancement of US interests globally.

A BRIEF HISTORY

1961

On November 3, 1961, USAID was founded to administer the foreign aid efforts of the United States. But they weren’t there to just hand out cash. US aid policy had been set earlier by President Harry S. Truman with two goals, commercial and political: to reduce poverty with the aim of creating consumer markets for the United States, and to spread capitalism by moving the world away from socialism/ communism.

1962 onwards

But the CIA quickly spotted an opportunity to enhance their influence around the world, and got deeply involved.

In 1962, USAID launched its Office of Public Safety, working with the CIA to send agents around the world to “train police officers”.

But the trainers were playing dirty, teaching “enhanced interrogation techniques” that were simply forms of torture. The news leaked out in 1966. After years of controversy, the OPS was finally shut down in 1974 – although the CIA continued to use the “enhanced interrogation techniques”, and went on to share them with the military.

MASS STERILIZATION

1966 onwards

The US decided that it wanted global population control, so USAID launched its Office of Population. The country passed new laws which said that poorer nations could henceforth only get cash aid if they established population control organizations to cut the number of births in their countries. USAID created a global network of groups to promote mass sterilization and abortion globally.

1980

By 1980, USAID administrator John Gilligan was openly saying that the organization was simply a “graduate school for the CIA”. This was not some disgruntled ex-staff member – this was the working leader of the organization at the time. Father George Cotter, a priest who worked with USAID multiple times, wrote in an academic journal in 1981 that USAID operated as “the CIA’s little sister”.

1993

USAID effectively took control of Peru’s national health system from 1993 to 1998. They were involved in a program which resulted in the forced sterilization of approximately 300,000 indigenous women, according to documents uncovered using the Freedom of Information Act.

Despite an outcry, USAID did not stop funding sterilizations in Peru until 1998. It later became evident that an artificially shrunken generation in rural areas increased poverty among people who were already struggling.

SAVVY BRAZIL, NAÏVE HONG KONG

1990s

USAID announced it would manage Russia’s transition to a market economy, and funded a group called the Harvard Institute for International Development to run it. However, the project became bogged down with conflicts of interest and accusations of corruption – and Harvard University eventually settled a lawsuit with the US govt for $26 million for mismanaging the project.

2005

USAID funded “democracy” seminars and workshops in Brazil, for members of the country’s congress and others. This was exactly what another US political interference body, the National Endowment for Democracy, was doing in Hong Kong.

But the Brazilians were far more politically savvy than the less-politicized people of Hong Kong. Brazilians expressed deep discomfort about the level of US involvement in their legislative processes and edged the foreign agents out. Hong Kong did not—and would pay the price in 2014 and 2019.

USING AID ‘TO BUY VOTES’

2006

A long-term Harvard study of US aid handouts in 2006 revealed that poor countries received millions of dollars more from the US if they were taking their turn on the 15-member UN Security Council. When their turn on the influential body was over, there would be a sharp drop in US cash for those nations. The study tracked U.S. economic and military assistance from 1946 to 2001. Critics said the findings clearly showed how US aid was used to buy UN votes. USAID denied this.

2009 to 2012

USAID ran an infamous program to incite regime change in Cuba. This consisted of two operations. One created an anti-government digital social network called ZunZuneo. The other was a program which sent out CIA agents disguised as aid workers and tourists to cultivate groups of anti-government activists. The multi-million dollar program failed.

2012

By this time, many countries realized what USAID was really doing and worked on developing legislation to ban the organization from their shores. This included Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda. In 2013, Bolivia ejected USAID.

2016

By 2016, there was growing puzzlement that “the Panama papers”, which was supposedly a 2015 global leak of financial information of powerful people, seemed to largely target US enemies like Russia and Syria and China. In 2016, Wikileaks pointed out that the journalism group behind it was funded by USAID and units controlled by George Soros, a billionaire known for using his money to spread anti-east media narratives.

2024

It was revealed that USAID was a major supporter of BBC Media Action. This is a “charity” that goes around the world preaching to journalists that western standards of moderation are “correct” and the rest of the world’s standards of moderation are “wrong”. For example, trainers disregard claims by Singapore and China that their tighter standards of moderation created enough stability to lift their populations out of poverty, even though the evidence shows that this was exactly what happened.

2025

To sum up: yes, USAID ran a great many charity projects. You cannot give away $40 billion to $50 billion a year without some positive effects.

But from its earliest days, it has been infected by the CIA and wedded to the larger goals of US foreign policy. In many cases, the methods used by USAID and its offshoots have been highly problematic to say the least. The list above is just a tiny fraction of the projects with which USAID has been involved. Some might be entirely innocent. Many, clearly were not.

Yet it cannot be denied that its key goal, overall, was to push US dominance on the world. Let’s not forget: even if USAID goes through a dramatic restructuring, the ultimate aim of US foreign policy has not yet been publicly abandoned.