#development things

It is important, therefore, to remind ourselves, when we see images of floods in Bengal, that what we are looking at is not just the result of weather events: it is also the product of a project of terraforming that began in colonial times and has continued until the present day. It is a telling fact that, even after decolonisation, the governments of both East Pakistan and its successor state, Bangladesh, sought the advice of Dutch experts in these matters. Extrapolating from the experience of the Netherlands, these experts advocated the building of polders – low-lying tracts of land enclosed by dykes – on their native model.

The Dutch are justly famed for their prowess in managing the waters of their own country. But the Rhine delta of the Netherlands receives only 1% of the silt that the Bengal delta does. To expect lessons from the former to apply directly to the latter is not just unrealistic; it ultimately rests on a blind faith in the belief that the historical experience of Europe prefigures that of the rest of the world.

Unsurprisingly, the polders have also had mixed results, exacerbating the problems created by embankments in some areas and bringing about the subsidence of land in others. Bengali activists and environmentalists have forcefully pushed back against these interventions. Dewan quotes one local scientist as saying: “Do not relate everything to climate change, it blinds against the role played by embankments and the environment.”

Yet the weight of aid money often allows Western experts to ignore or silence indigenous voices. When local authorities try to prevent the building of embankments, they are often simply brushed aside. Faculty members of Bangladesh’s Institute of Water and Flood Management “rarely if ever have funding for implementing independent research of their own design and conception”, Kasia Paprocki notes in her study of climate change adaptation projects. The terms of reference of at least one Western-funded project explicitly required hiring international consulting firms, thereby excluding local experts.

As for the Bengali consultants who work with foreign agencies, they are all too aware of who pays for their salaries and contracts, so they rarely voice objections to the plans proposed by Western experts, even when they know that those proposals will not work. Knowing that global warming is a major concern for Western aid agencies, they now routinely add ‘climate’ to their proposals, whether it is relevant or not.

“Climate change shobche darun masala [is the most amazing spice]” for boosting a proposal, one tells Dewan. “Add climate change, poverty alleviation and gender and you will have a recipe for success for your [funding application].”

This pattern, in which interventions spearheaded by foreign officials and experts end up by compounding problems on the ground, has repeated itself over and over again in coastal Bengal. Of these, none has been more destructive than the introduction of prawn and shrimp farming.

The idea that shrimp farming might be a good way for farmers to earn some extra money was first suggested by Western experts in the 1960s, and the initiative was taken up enthusiastically by USAID 20 years later. Initially intended as an income-generation plan, in recent decades shrimp farming has also been strongly advocated by experts and aid agencies as a ‘climate solution’. The thinking behind it, as explained to Dewan by a Western development professional, was this: “Climate change is a fact. [All of] Bangladesh will become saline; it is inevitable. Bangladesh should accept this and focus on cultivating saline-tolerant species such as tiger prawn… ”

With the forceful championing of aid agencies and government officials, shrimp farming has expanded rapidly across coastal Bengal. Since this kind of aquaculture does indeed generate significant profits for those who have the capital to invest in the industry, it has been eagerly seized upon by moneyed interests and politicians, some of whom do not hesitate to use muscle power and violence to promote their own interests. Prawn and shrimp are now Bangladesh’s second most lucrative export.

But the ethnographic record makes it amply evident that the large-scale adoption of shrimp farming has caused an ecological and social disaster in the Bengal delta, blighting once-fertile land and further impoverishing the poor and landless. This is largely because the species that was chosen for farming in Bengal is a saltwater variety preferred by Western consumers: tiger shrimp (Penaeus monodon, or ‘bagda chingri’); Bengalis generally prefer a variety of freshwater prawn called Macrobrachium rosenbergii, or ‘golda chingri’.

Saltwater ponds for tiger shrimp aquaculture are often dug on agricultural land that is otherwise used to grow rice, fruit and vegetables. Over time, water from these ponds seeps into nearby fields and aquifers, salinising the soil until it can no longer support rice or any other crop. Then fruit trees and orchards begin to wither, and even the grass disappears, making it difficult to keep livestock. Soon, once-fertile stretches of land dotted with trees, market gardens and rice fields do indeed become, to use Paprocki’s words, ‘threatening dystopias’. ...

The social consequences of shrimp farming are no less ruinous than its environmental impacts, because it requires only a fraction of the labour needed to cultivate rice. So when rice fields are converted into saltwater ponds, the poor and landless lose their main source of income, and are left with no recourse but to migrate to urban shanty-towns to eke out a precarious living. This outcome is actually welcomed by some development professionals, because they take a dim view of subsistence farming in general, and see proletarianisation as a step up on the ladder of ‘progress’. Similarly, experts who advocate managed retreat as the most practical response to sea-level rise also regard migration away from the coast in a generally favourable light.

Of the many dark-red blotches in USAID’s record, none compares to the agency’s Office of Public Safety (OPS) program — and its most notorious official, Dan Mitrione.

USAID grew out of programs like the Marshall Plan, but the agency itself wasn’t established until 1961 under President Kennedy. Under Kennedy’s reorganization, a police training program set up under President Eisenhower, the Office of Public Safety (OPS), was placed under USAID’s authority. The OPS had been set up in 1957 to train friendly overseas police forces how to be more professional, more democratic, less corrupt, more like us — but in reality, the OPS was essentially a CIA proxy, headed by an agent named Byron Engle, its ranks covertly sprinkled with CIA spooks in hotspots across the globe.

Former New York Times correspondent A. J. Langguth wrote that the “the two primary functions” of the USAID police training program were to allow the CIA to “plant men with local police in sensitive places around the world,” and to bring to the United States “prime candidates for enrollment as CIA employees.” [“Police Program is Called CIA Cover,” New York Times, May 7, 1978]

Dan Mitrione wasn’t a CIA man himself. Mitrione was a small-town cop and a family man from Richmond, Indiana, who joined the FBI, and was sent to Brazil in the early 1960s under USAID’s Office of Public Safety to train the fledging democratic government’s police force. A few years later, in 1964, a US-backed coup overthrew Brazil’s democratically-elected president Joao Goulart, and installed a right-wing military dictatorship that ruled for the next two decades, with largesse from USAID’s coffers, and vital training and equipment supplied by USAID officials like Mitrione.

By the end of the 1960s, when Mitrione left for Uruguay, USAID had trained over 100,000 of Brazil’s police in the dark arts of rule-by-terror; another 600 Brazilian police were brought to the US for special USAID training in explosives and interrogation techniques.

Brazil’s military dictatorship murdered or disappeared hundreds of dissidents, and tortured and jailed thousands more. Among those tortured: a Marxist student named Dilma Rousseff, arrested in 1970 and subjected to beatings to her face that distorted her dental ridge, and electrical shocks from car batteries, resulting in the hemorrhaging of her uterus. Today, Rousseff is Brazil's president — and she's not too happy about the NSA tapping her phones.

The junta also murdered one ex-president in a staged car accident in 1976. Another ex-president who allegedly died of a heart attack in 1978 is now believed to have been poisoned.

Once satisfied, Mitrione began teaching human anatomy and the human nervous system to the elite Uruguayan police officials hand-picked by USAID for counter-insurgency training in America. Then — according to a CIA double-agent secretly working for Cuba, Manuel Hevia, and corroborated by journalist A. J. Langguth — Mitrione began performing gruesome live torture demonstrations on homeless beggars plucked off the streets of Montevideo. Four of Mitrione's human guinea pigs were tortured to death, including one woman — according to Hevia, testing on street beggars was something Mitrione learned to do while training Brazil's police.

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Mitrione took over the USAID police training program in Uruguay in 1969, and within months, the country was racked by allegations of widespread torture and police abuses. In 1970, Uruguay’s Senate opened an investigation and heard testimony from tortured men and women who’d been subjected to electrocutions, genital mutilation and psychological torture.

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A few more examples of other USAID police training ventures through the Office of Public Safety:

— The Vietnam War: USAID trained police and ran civilian jails. USAID also participated in the “soft” side of the Phoenix Program — funding the failed “Land to the Tillers” program granting peasants small plots of land, a program that has a poor track record, but serves some important foreign policy/propaganda purpose every time it’s rolled out because it remains one of the most enduring boondoggles in the USAID kit.

-- Laos: In 1967, USAID Co-funded with the CIA a suspected private opium airliner, Xieng Khouang Air Transport. Later, as the CIA-backed Hmong were under attack from Lao Marxist rebels and North Vietnamese forces, USAID forcibly resettled Hmong families in the line of their advance to protect the pro-US government in Vientaine.

—Guatemala: By 1970, USAID trained over 30,000 Guatemalan police to suppress local leftists, according to William Blum’s book “Killing Hope.” Just over a decade later, Guatemalan death squads under US-backed dictator Rios Montt unleashed a genocide on the Mayan peasants.

According to Victoria Sanford's "Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala," USAID programs supported the death squads as they carried out the genocide.

—El Salvador: According to NYU historian Greg Grandin, in El Salvador, where 75,000 were killed between 1979 and 1992.