How come the Bolivian government would throw out the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) after the country had received, over a time span of 70 years, more than $4.6 billion of U.S. foreign assistance? The decision to expel USAID, announced by Bolivian president Evo Morales in 2013, is the starting point of Lawrence Heilman’s comprehensive study of USAID’s history in Bolivia.
Heilman, a longtime foreign service officer with USAID and a research associate in the Anthropology Department at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, aims at making sense of Morales’s decision by studying the evolution of U.S. development assistance in Bolivia since its emergence during World War II. To anticipate the overall assessment of the book under review, the question is never explicitly answered, but the study is nonetheless illuminating in many regards. It not only offers a detailed reconstruction of how U.S. development assistance in Bolivia has emerged and evolved, it also presents a case study of a more general phenomenon: the history of U.S. development policy in the context of changing strategic priorities and an evolving global development discourse.
In line with the author’s overall aim to tell the story of USAID in Bolivia, the book basically presents a chronological narrative. The empirical core of USAID in Bolivia is constituted by 11 chapters that systematically review the U.S. foreign aid program for the successive U.S. administrations, starting with the antecedents to the U.S. development mission in Bolivia under President Franklin Roosevelt (1933–45) and ending with the first administration of Barack Obama (2009–13), which coincided with the final act of USAID’s presence in the country. Each of these chapters follows the same three steps: for each administration, the overall context conditions and features of U.S. development assistance are summarized; the political and economic setting in Bolivia is described; and the main part analyzes the organizational development of the USAID mission in Bolivia, as well as its key projects. In addition to these empirical chapters, an introduction describes general features that characterize Bolivia’s geography and society, and a brief conclusion presents some overarching findings and thoughts.
This is not the kind of book that includes a theoretical framework or that offers an explicit explanation. But, if implicitly, from the history of USAID’s involvement in Bolivia as told by Heilman emerges a clear dynamic of U.S. development policy in which three basic rationales interact. A predominant foreign policy logic is shaped by what the U.S. government, at any specific point in time, considers its key national interests. Most notably, these U.S. foreign policy interests in Bolivia are shaped by changing logics of war, from World War II to the Cold War to the War on Drugs. Development thinking evolves overall, both in Washington and globally, from a modernization-type attempt to copy the U.S. model to a basic human needs strategy to a neoliberal agenda. And the operational logic of the U.S. foreign assistance apparatus combines bureaucratic politics, interagency rivalries, and organizational self-interests with a genuine orientation toward the mission to promote socioeconomic development. These three rationales ultimately do not interact in a vacuum but are shaped by the local context in which they play out. In fact, as Heilman summarizes, “the Bolivian historical context was the dominating factor affecting the pace and nature of the development interventions sponsored by the U.S. government” (2).
Heilman’s overall assessment of the USAID legacy in Bolivia is decidedly ambivalent. On the one hand, while acknowledging that it is impossible to clearly identify “the impact of nearly seventy years . . . of U.S. economic and humanitarian assistance” in the country (291), he identifies “major accomplishments in each development sector receiving U.S. governance assistance” (292). On the other hand, his analysis clearly reveals the many limitations and outright contradictions that have characterized U.S. development assistance in the country, not least of which is the very expulsion of USAID in 2013.
That move, according to Heilman, resulted from the same contradictory combination of success and failure. With Evo Morales, “the U.S. foreign assistance program was ended by the type of leader that the U.S. government wanted to emerge— one who was elected in the most democratic elections ever held in Bolivia, who emerged from the majority indigenous community, and who typically pursued the hopes and needs of the poorest of the poor” (283).
Heilman’s history of USAID in Bolivia is full of such unintended consequences. For instance, “the physical infrastructure being supported with U.S. tax dollars” in the Chapare region in Cochabamba in the 1960s would later “serve so splendidly the interests of coca bush farmers and narco-traffickers” (163). And it was in the context of the austerity measures and the neoliberal privatization agenda of Bolivia’s New Economic Policy, which the United States enthusiastically supported, that “the illicit coca/cocaine operation in Bolivia proved to be one of the most robust local businesses to support the safety net for Bolivia’s poor” (180).
The book is based on a wealth of primary documents, as well as interviews with USAID mission personnel and instances of participant observation. On this basis, the author systematically analyzes, for each U.S. administration, the key priorities and strategies, the design of the programs and projects, the implementation of the activities, the problems that emerged in the process, and (as far as possible) the results that can be identified. A particular emphasis is put on the question of evaluation. A series of tables in the appendix and a chronology of events offer additional data.
With all this, the book is a very useful resource for all those interested in the long-term evolution of U.S. foreign assistance in general and in Bolivia in particular. Yet it is also important to highlight two crucial limitations. While Bolivian perspectives are taken into account, and the author emphasizes that he has “informally interviewed a couple of hundred Bolivians of all social classes” (294), the book is decidedly written from a U.S. perspective. Also, although the evolution of U.S. aid policies is systematically analyzed in the context of broader U.S. foreign policy strategies (be it the fight against communism or the War on Drugs), the study of U.S. policies in and toward Bolivia is very much focused on USAID.
It is probably because of these two limitations that even the comprehensive and detailed reconstruction of USAID’s history in Bolivia, in the end, helps little when it comes to answering the initial question. Understanding why the Bolivian government expelled USAID in 2013 would have required digging much deeper into the widespread mistrust, if not open rejection, of USAID’s presence in the country among significant parts of the Bolivian population. And doing so would have required a more serious engagement with the (diverse) Bolivian perspectives on, and experiences with, USAID, as well as a broader perspective that would situate USAID’s activities in the general context of the bilateral relations between Bolivia and the United States.
