By Danielle Kurtzleben and Ali Gharib
WASHINGTON, Jul 20 2009 (IPS)

Governmental corruption and the refusal to cooperate with U.S. counter-drug efforts are worsening a ballooning drug trafficking problem in Venezuela, according to a new report by the investigative office of the U.S. Congress.

The report, released Monday by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), may further fray long-tense relations between the two countries which had appeared to improve modestly since the inauguration six months ago of President Barack Obama.

The report says that gains from the U.S.’s six-billion-dollar Plan Colombia counternarcotics programme are being undermined by Caracas’s “permissive environment” for Colombian insurgent groups, notably the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a left-wing guerrilla group that supports itself in part through drug production and trafficking.

“According to U.S. officials, a high level of corruption within the Venezuelan government, military, and other law enforcement and security forces contributes to the permissive environment,” said the report.

Venezuela’s 2,000-km-long border with Colombia has long been a preferred route for Colombian drug runners. But shipments of cocaine from Colombia to Venezuela skyrocketed from 60 metric tonnes in 2004 to 260 metric tonnes in 2007, said the GAO.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez denied the GAO’s findings as they were leaked to various press outlets over the past several days, calling the study a smear and accusing the U.S. of hypocrisy because drug trafficking is fuelled by U.S. demand.

“This is a tough issue for the U.S. to lecture Latin America about because the U.S. hasn’t done its part,” said Michael Shifter, vice president for policy at the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD), a think tank here. “It’s both demand, and it’s a failure of law enforcement here, too. The U.S. also deserves to be criticised.”

In the past, the U.S. and Venezuela have cooperated in anti-drug efforts, but as the relationship deteriorated, cooperation fell off, culminating in Chavez’s 2005 expulsion of U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) officials from Venezuela, accusing them of espionage.

Chavez said that Venezuelan anti-narcotics efforts have continued without the U.S. But the GAO report claimed that Venezuelan security forces are known to take bribes in exchange for facilitating drug shipments or, upon seizing drugs, either returning them to the traffickers or keeping them.

“[The U.S. State Department] reports that members of the special counternarcotics units of the National Guard and the Federal Investigative Police often facilitate or are themselves involved in drug trafficking,” said the report. “In addition, although the Venezuelan government reports that it seizes cocaine and incinerates it, some may be taken by Venezuelan officials or returned to drug traffickers.”

According to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) 2009 World Drug Report, seizures of cocaine in Venezuela dropped from 58 metric tonnes in 2005 to fewer than 32 metric tonnes in 2007.

Perhaps the strongest charge made by the report is that Venezuela provides a “lifeline” to the FARC and other groups.

“By allowing illegal armed groups to elude capture and by providing material support, Venezuela has extended a lifeline to Colombian illegal armed groups, and their continued existence endangers Colombian security gains achieved with U.S. assistance, according to U.S. and Colombian government officials,” the report asserts.

“For any government to support a group like the FARC is very serious,” Shifter told IPS. “Being involved in the drug trade is something that is of concern, but it’s not limited to Venezuela. Support for the FARC has more serious political and strategic considerations.”

“The findings of this report have heightened my concern that Venezuela’s failure to cooperate with the United States on drug interdiction is related to corruption in that country’s government,” said Sen. Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations committee who commissioned the GAO report.

Tensions between Washington and Caracas came to a head in September 2008, when Venezuela expelled the U.S. ambassador, accusing him of spying. The U.S. followed suit by expelling the Venezuelan ambassador.

U.S.-Venezuela relations have since softened; Chavez applauded Barack Obama’s election in 2008, and the two leaders greeted each other warmly at the April Summit of the Americas.

Ambassadors in both countries were reinstated in June.

Lugar, a moderate Republican who, among other things, has called for moving toward normalising relations with Cuba, had asked the GAO to determine whether Venezuela was “in the process of becoming a narco-state, heavily dependent (on) and beholden to the international trade in illegal drugs”.

“The report’s findings require, at a minimum, a comprehensive review of U.S. policy toward Venezuela,” Lugar said late last week when the GAO’s findings first became known.

“President Chavez has recently approved the re-establishment of our respective ambassadors. I hope he sees this as an opportunity to further dialogue in areas of common interest, but also in matters of sharp differences,” Lugar added.

The recent agreement to return ambassadors marked the latest step in a gradual détente between Caracas and Washington since Obama became president. But tensions seem to be on the rise again, particularly in the wake of the ongoing political crisis over the coup d’etat against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya.

While both Obama and Chavez have called for Zelaya’s re-instatement, Chavez’s call for more aggressive actions as well as his charges that U.S. government agencies were behind the coup itself and his strong scepticism of the mediation undertaken by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias have clearly irritated Washington.

It is in that context that the latest report is expected to be seized on by anti-Chavez forces here, led by hard-liners in the Cuban-American community, such as Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and former Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Otto Reich, who gave strong backing to the coup attempt against Chavez and who has also spoken out against Zelaya, depicting him as a puppet of the Venezuelan leader.

That characterization of Zelaya during the Honduran crisis has been used as well by prominent neo-conservative commentators in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the National Review, and the Weekly Standard who see “Chavismo” as the greatest threat Washington faces in the Americas and who have also played up Chavez’s alleged friendship with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The latest edition of the Standard, for example, features a cover photo of an embrace between Zelaya and Chavez entitled “Comrades in Arms” and sub-titled “On Hugo Chavez’s Honduran Adventure”.

Adam Isaacson, a Latin America specialist at the Centre for International Policy, said that the report should be of concern to Venezuela itself.

“Venezuela has this rapidly growing problem, and won’t even deal with the DEA,” he told IPS. “Venezuela should be worried as well. If you have that amount of cocaine going through the country, you’re risking ending up like Mexico, with powerful organised crime and violence. No leader wants violence.”

Rather than siding outright with narco-traffickers, it’s likely that Venezuela doesn’t have the internal security capacity to deal with the problem, Isaacson said, noting that despite large oil revenues, Chavez has not properly addressed public safety.

“You’ve seen it happen in Colombia, Mexico and Central America. A country not set up to combat the money of crime and narco-trafficking just gets steamrolled by it. That could be what you’re seeing in Venezuela.”

*Jim Lobe contributed to this story.

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By Danielle Kurtzleben
CRYSTAL CITY, Virginia, Jul 13 2009 (IPS)

Sam Worthington is the president and CEO of InterAction, a coalition of 175 U.S.-based non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that focus on aiding the world’s most poor and vulnerable people.

Sam Worthington Credit: InterAction

Last week, InterAction held its 25th annual forum in Crystal City, Virginia. Representatives of civil society, the U.S. government, the United Nations and academia gathered for four days to engage each other on questions of how best to address development at a time of U.S. political change and global crises.

Speaking with IPS, Worthington discussed what he considers the successes and potential of U.S. international aid, as well as gaps in current U.S. policy and practice.

While the Barack Obama administration has made significant shifts in rhetoric, he says, old development paradigms focused on nation-states and national security persist, and much still needs to be done in the way of reforming U.S. development policy.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

IPS: Some NGOs, including some InterAction members, are frustrated with the implications of “smart power” for international aid. These organisations say they want aid to be given for its own sake, without other motives behind it. Do you sense that frustration? SAM WORTHINGTON: What holds our members together and the voice that we bring to Washington is centred on a desire to improve human dignity and the well-being of the world’s poorest. So our framework is not a power framework at all.

For example, we published a paper called “The Other Partner”, which showed that, of the private resources our members raised, their resources were going to the poorest countries, whereas [US]AID had, I think, two of the 10, but most of their resources, of course, were going to strategically important [countries]. The disconnect is that there’s a belief in Washington that the only way you can sell development is through a power-security framework.

IPS: And the Department of State and USAID are getting more involved in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan – places the U.S. has concerns about instability and “failed states”, and is using counterinsurgency strategy. Does that cause any concern to you or your member organisations? SW: There is a disconnect – and we’ve been quite explicit to the administration about this disconnect – between a counterinsurgency strategy and a strategy that is focused on the development of people within a country. We’ve tried to make it clear to this administration that if you pursue a development strategy closely linked to a counterinsurgency strategy, in many ways it is entirely possible that that development strategy will fail.

If you explicitly link development to counterinsurgency, you in essence are saying, “The only reason we are helping you in your development process is to achieve a goal for us.” What would be most effective for us is to say that our development strategy is for you, the people of this region, and an intended benefit of that is help with a counterinsurgency strategy.

IPS: InterAction lists as one of its major priorities advocating for the creation of a Cabinet-level Department of Development and Humanitarian Assistance. Tell me about that initiative and what progress you have made. SW: That is an aspirational concept. We introduced it about three years ago, and we were able to get the concept well enough established and discussed so that we were able to get all the former aid administrators and some members of Congress on board with the idea.

That said, we know it’s aspirational, and it really requires a president and, particularly, a secretary of state, who sees that as a vision that he or she wants to achieve. In many ways I’ve been thinking of this as sort of a 10-year process. But by having that as part of the conversation, we then created a tremendous amount of room for a conversation about reform, because there was a radical option on the table that a significant portion of the development community thought was a viable option. As a result, it raised expectations, and put significant pressure on the new administration to do something because there is a general agreement that the system is broken.

IPS: Obama’s 2010 aid budget is moving through Congress. What in this aid budget is praiseworthy, and what would you change about it? SW: The Obama administration has taken a major step in the right direction, particularly in the areas of supplementals. We’ve traditionally had an approach for world emergencies where we only partially fund them and then halfway through the year, money runs out and you have this very difficult transition that actually costs lives. So for the first time, they tried quite hard to up-front put resources in.

[The budget] has significant increases, but in many ways was a continuation of the basic budget format of the Bush administration. The budget – and this is true for our entire foreign assistance programme – is a patchquilt of programmes, not a strategic investment with some logic to it, so it is difficult to get a clear sense as to what is being achieved with this budget.

It requires what we call a “grand bargain” between the administration and Congress and interested parts of society interested in development on reframing budgets in such a way that we can be more effective. There is significant talk about doing that, but that has yet to happen.

IPS: Do you sense any nervousness amongst your members about the fact that the Obama administration has yet to appoint new leadership to USAID? SW: There’s significant nervousness. I personally may be a little more understanding in the sense that I do believe that the secretary of state and president and new leadership in the administration really want to do something right in development. Yet they’ve had difficulty because there isn’t a clearly articulated structure or strategy or resources and capacity to find someone who will take on that tough job.

And it’s also not clear that that individual will have the necessary authority to really push as a leader in development. It’s our hope that they will take a bold step in finding someone, because the longer we wait, the more we see the bureaucracy of the State Department assuming a dominant role in the shaping of U.S. development assistance.

And while that makes sense in certain parts of the world, it does not make us confident that you can end up with enough development really focusing on human well-being as its end goal.

IPS: In terms of the economic and food crises, have we perhaps seen a smarter allocation of resources, such as cash aid instead of food aid? SW: I think that the shock of the food crisis resulted in a possibly pretty significant shift of allocation of resources, and I understand the G8 is talking about announcing a 15-billion-dollar investment in global food security.

[The G8 has since announced that it will invest 20 billion dollars in this effort.]

It’s a very interesting time to study these questions. Coming out of the food crisis, we’re getting a shift in policy. Coming out of the economic crisis, we’re getting a realisation of the injustice and the need to focus on resources and the world’s poor. Coming out of the climate change crisis is the realisation of the needs for some fundamental changes.

The challenge is to recognise that development is about nation-states helping their people, but it is also about building societies within nation-states to maintain more transparent democratic and prosperous societies. The free market helps with that, and it is important in a sense, but it is not in any way sufficient to ensure that particularly the world’s vulnerable will benefit from a development process.

That is the space where civil society and the NGO community come in, and I think, sadly to say, we’re here for generations to come because the problems caused by this gap of mounting global expectations and the world’s poor is increasingly being met by civil society and not nation-states.

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With women now comprising 61 percent of all people infected with HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa, international donors, governments and advocacy organisations are looking more closely at the connections between HIV/AIDS and gender inequality.

A new report released last week by two Washington-based think tanks, the Centre for Global Development (CGD) and the International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW), more closely explores the connection between HIV/AIDS and gender inequality, and to what extent donors and countries are using this knowledge to help in the fight against AIDS.

Representatives from a host of gender advocacy, development, governmental, and donor groups gathered on Jul. 1 at the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington to discuss the findings.

The report, “Moving Beyond Gender As Usual”, scrutinises three major AIDS donors – the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR); the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria; and the World Bank’s Africa Multi-Country AIDS Programme (MAP) – and their treatment of gender in three AIDS-afflicted countries in which they all work, Mozambique, Uganda, and Zambia.

HIV-infection rates among women have steadily risen since the start of the epidemic. According to the UNAIDS 2008 Report on the Global Aids Epidemic, in the 1980s, around one-third of all HIV-infected people were women.

By the late 1990s, that number surpassed 50 percent. Though this figure has been stable for several years, women’s infection rates in some countries have continued to rise.

In some sub-Saharan African countries, the infection rates of young women far surpass the rates of their male counterparts. The number of HIV-infected women age 15-24 in Zimbabwe is double that of men in the same age group. In South Africa, triple the number of women 15-24 are infected.

In Swaziland, infection rates for women age 15-24 are quadruple those of men of the same age group.

One of the major themes addressed by many of the speakers at Wednesday’s report launch was the need to look at the global HIV/AIDS epidemic holistically, putting the disease within a regional and cultural context before creating strategies to fight it.

“If we only attack the HIV virus and not real life, then we won’t be successful in the fight against AIDS,” said Nandini Oomman, one of the report’s authors and the director of HIV/AIDS Monitor, a CGD project that works to track the effectiveness of aid given toward easing the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Factors that contribute to gender inequality, such as gender-based violence, unequal access to resources, and cultural gender norms, can all contribute to greater infection risk and fewer treatment options for women.

Cultural norms and values, for example, can prevent infected women in some societies from seeking HIV/AIDS treatment. For example, a woman in a society in which HIV carries a heavy stigma might choose not to disclose to her partner that she is infected, for fear of violent retaliation. The expectation for a woman to stay home can likewise prevent her from seeking anti-retroviral medications (ARV).

“How can a program succeed in preventing mother-to-child infection if such gender-based violence, stigma, discrimination, and unequal access to resources – all aspects of gender inequality – prevent such women from openly taking the medicine they are given?” wrote Oomman in a Huffington Post editorial on Jun. 30.

Lack of women’s access to education can also be a major contributor to the spread of AIDS. Karen Hardee of Population Action International cited the figure that for every year of education a woman receives, she has a 7 percent decreased risk of HIV infection.

Gender norms also make HIV transmission to women happen more easily.

“Gender norms often limit women and girls’ ability to negotiate the limits of their sexual behavior,” noted Kim Ashburn, a gender, HIV and AIDS scientist at ICRW.

Societies in which men view forced sexual intercourse as acceptable, women engage in commercial sex work, or women are not able to negotiate safer sex will naturally have elevated HIV-transmission rates.

Likewise, the expectation of women to continue having children and to breast-feed, even once infected, causes many pediatric HIV infections via mother-child transmission.

One less-explored HIV-prevention option is birth control. A 2007 study by Family Health International, a North Carolina-based NGO, found that while ARVs prevented 101,000 child cases of HIV over a seven-year period, contraception prevented the births of 173,000 infected babies each year.

Under President George W. Bush, PEPFAR was notably reluctant to provide funding for contraceptives.

The linking of AIDS and gender inequality is coming to the forefront of the AIDS dialogue as efforts move more towards prevention. Though PEPFAR successfully treated and extended the lives of hundreds of thousands of Africans since its founding by President Bush, it was also criticised for its failure to effectively prevent new infections with its ABC (Abstinence, Be faithful, Condom use) approach.

Though the Obama administration professes different attitudes towards providing contraception as a part of PEPFAR, no PEPFAR legislation thus far has explicitly addressed family planning. Thus, while it is not restrictive on the subject, it also does not explicitly recommend contraceptives as an HIV prevention measure.

In an interview with IPS, Oomman said that, though this does not mean that the programme will not address family planning, it is up to the administration’s interpretation of that legislation to determine the place of contraceptives within PEPFAR.

In her remarks last week, Oomman added that, because gender inequality is such a major contributing factor to HIV transmission, she also considers addressing gender inequality in AIDS prevention a simple way to increase the efficiency of aid use during the global recession.

The three countries that the report examines all have policies that express the need to address the gender-AIDS link. Jane Mpagi, the director of gender and community development in Uganda’s Ministry of Gender, Labour, and Social Development, agreed that gender is an integral factor in preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS in her country, because “women are affected, and the factors that lead to their vulnerability are rooted in gender inequality”.

Yet implementation seems to be lacking. The report calls the national gender-based AIDS policies of Mozambique, Uganda, and Zambia “high-level rhetoric with few objectives or actions and little follow-through”.

One major hindrance to any AIDS relief effort is the fear of governmental corruption in aid-receiving countries.

Some African governments which are marked by corruption are also countries with high HIV-infection rates. For example, a new report released this week by the New Partnership for Africa’s Development showed Mozambique to have high levels of corruption among its civil servants.

As the only representative of an aid-receiving country represented on the panel, Mpagi chose her words carefully when asked about donor fears of corruption.

“No country would like to be termed as corrupt,” she said. “Corruption is everywhere, and we need to combat it together.”

The report made several specific recommendations for each donor it examined, addressing four areas: gender analysis, gender-related programming, gender-sensitive monitoring and evaluation, and gender capacity. One of the common recommendations, however, is the need for greater collaboration with country stakeholders so that analysis might better be implemented.

Another hindrance at the governmental level can be attitudes about gender. At any level, the pervasiveness of social norms is difficult to measure and evaluate.

So although donors “do find that there are policies on the national level,” as Oomman told IPS, individual government officials can at the same time themselves hold views on gender that promote inequality.

“These are social norms that individuals either follow or don’t follow,” said Oomman. “You will have government officials who don’t understand the importance of gender inequality… But change is slow because it’s about changing people’s ideas about men and women and their roles in society.”

By Danielle Kurtzleben and Ali Gharib
WASHINGTON, May 12 2009 (IPS)

Interest in reducing the harm caused by diarrheal diseases has waned among the global health and aid communities, said two new reports released Tuesday in Washington.

The reduced attention is disproportionate to the great harm done by the illness, particularly in developing countries.

Though diarrhea and related health problems remain the second leading cause of mortality among children under five, both reports said that resources to combat the preventable disease have fallen off and need to be reasserted as priorities.

The report “Diarrheal Disease: Solutions to Defeat a Global Killer”, released by PATH, a health advocacy and aid group, speaks broadly about increasing resources to prevent and treat diarrhea, while “Fatal Neglect: How Health Systems are Failing to Comprehensibly Address Child Mortality”, a report from WaterAid, focuses on the need for better sanitation and clean water to prevent the diseases.

Diarrhea can cause a whole host of other problems, notes the executive summary of the PATH report.

“Diarrhea causes more illnesses than any other ailment,” the report says. “Children who survive persistent diarrhea are likely to suffer from malnutrition, stunted growth, and learning difficulties.”

The report also notes that the benefits of addressing diarrhea don’t only create a health-oriented imperative to act on them, but an economic one as well. PATH points to sub-Saharan Africa where 12 percent of health budgets go to treating water-borne diseases and to a World Bank estimate that diarrhea and associated illness “cost low-income governments up to nine percent of their annual gross domestic products (GDP).”

Both reports put a strong focus on sanitation and hygiene, as their lack is among the leading causes of transmission of bacteria and viruses that cause diarrhea. The press conference releasing the reports put a strong focus on forming comprehensive prevention and treatment programmes.

What troubles both reports is that attention was focused on fighting diarrheal diseases in the 1980s and 1990s, but has since fallen off, despite the fact that the sicknesses have remained major killers.

“[O]ver the last decade, momentum has slowed, with declines in research and funding commitments and competing global health priorities,” said the PATH report.

The report speculates that because raising awareness and funding were so successful in earlier decades – “including a reduction of mortality rates by almost 50 percent” – many may have “considered the issue ‘solved’.”

“The perceived lack of urgency and taboo nature of the illness may have also contributed to the current low level of awareness surrounding the issue,” says the report.

The WaterAid report also focuses, with much sharper language, on how the lack of attention on diarrhea is a “symptom of a wider problem: the failure of the aid system to respond adequately to evidence.”

“First, the aid system needs to respond better to the disease burden by targeting resources at where that burden is greatest,” says the WaterAid report, “including diarrhea caused by poor sanitation.”

The report points to child mortality for those under five years old as a “‘golden indicator’ of [a country’s] development.”

It goes on to say that when taking into account adult deaths, funding for HIV/AIDS is balanced, but when considering child deaths, the large resources for fighting the disease are disproportionate.

“[F]inancing for the diseases that kill children currently bears little relation to the number of child deaths caused by those diseases,” says the WaterAid report.

However, the report repeatedly makes disclaimers that it is not aimed at sparking a funding battle between the priorities.

“The conclusion that diarrhea is a neglected does not imply that the targeting of resources to address it should come at the expense of vital investments in tacking malaria of HIV and AIDS,” it says. “Furthermore, this is not an attempt to detract from the huge adult morbidity and mortality burden of these diseases, which must be addressed.”

But it does say that disproportionality needs to be addressed at a national level, citing Madagascar and Rwanda where HIV rates are relatively low, but where HIV/AIDS got five times more funding than sanitation in 2004 –2006 (Madagascar) and three quarters of health-related donor assistance (Rwanda).

“However, it is not a matter of choosing between on disease and another, and different diseases are not in competition for financing,” says the report. “At issue is the ability of the aid system, and national health sectors, to deliver resources at targets and volumes proportionate to needs at the national level.”

“National health challenges rather than global causes need to inform the allocation of aid,” it said.

One of the points of both the WaterAid and PATH reports, which was cited at the press conference releasing the reports, is that relatively cheap fixes already exist to head off diarrheal diseases.

“We have the lifesaving, cost-effective prevention and treatment interventions at hand to stop the second-leading killer of children worldwide,” said the PATH report.

“We are actually not waiting for the next technological breakthrough. We know what works right now,” said John Wecker, the director of the Immunisation Solutions Programme at PATH.

Wecker said that getting countries to prioritise their own national health systems towards diseases that aren’t on the list of well-funded global causes can be troublesome.

“HIV/AIDS is their priority because that’s where the money is,” he said.

But despite the insistence that there is no “competition for financing”, the strains of the global financial crisis have caused U.S. President Barack Obama to scale back some of the ambitious plans for foreign aid on which he campaigned.

The announced budget for Obama’s Global Health Initiative last week left many AIDS activists critical of the lack of a significant boost in funding.

An article in the New York Times pointed to one of Obama’s health advisors, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Obama chief of staff Rahm, as a possible source for the notion of flatlining of resources directed at the effective but nearly bankrupt Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and other HIV/AIDS-oriented projects, such as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

“The plan appears to closely reflect the thinking of Dr. Emanuel,” wrote Sheryl Gay Stolberg in the Times, referring to a 2008 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association co-authored by Emanuel which “argued for a broader global public health approach.”

“By extending funds to simple but more deadly diseases, such as respiratory illnesses and diarrheal illnesses, the U.S. government could save more lives – especially young lives – at substantially lower cost,” wrote Emanuel.

Excerpt: