Adiós USAID
Maria Ximena Abello-Hurtado
In this article, I argue that the six-decade presence of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in Colombia functioned less as a mechanism of peacebuilding than as a racialized technology of governance that reproduced colonial dependency, militarization, and neoliberal development at the expense of Afro-Colombian and Indigenous sovereignty. Despite the few moments of symbolic racial inclusion emerging in the early twenty-first century, often through external pressure from Black political Congress members in the United States, USAID’s general impact entrenched undeniable structural violence and undermined the transformative potential of the 2016 Colombian Peace Agreement’s Ethnic Chapter. In consequence, the abrupt elimination of the entire agency and its funds during the first half of 2025, beyond the crisis moment, uncovers an opportunity to confront aid dependency in a path for reimagined peace and sovereignty, privileging Afro-Colombian and Indigenous epistemologies.
Colombia’s contemporary political formation cannot be understood outside the longue durée of settler colonialism, chattel slavery, and racialized extraction imposed during Spanish rule. From the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, Indigenous, African, Afro-descendant, and criollo populations were subjected to regimes of dispossession that structured enduring hierarchies of race, land, and political power. Although independence movements in the early nineteenth century formally dismantled Spanish colonial governance, they did not dismantle coloniality itself. Instead, colonial structures were rearticulated within the emerging republics, including Colombia, which in 2025 commemorated 215 years as a formally sovereign state.
I examine the role of USAID in shaping racialized and hierarchical forms of governance, development, and peacebuilding, using Colombia as a case study over the last sixty years. I center Afro-Colombian and Indigenous experiences to sustain that USAID operated beyond a simple technical development institution. Undoubtedly, USAID moved as a racialized and racializing apparatus of governance situated within broader projects of US imperial power. I use dependency theory, anticolonial historiography, and political discourse analysis to provide the theoretical framework. As such, I explore how in the last sixty years, USAID interventions sustained and consistently supported colonial hierarchies and the extreme disproportional distribution of power, ultimately reinforcing Colombia’s incorporation into a global system of racial capitalism. By considering the lived consequences of development and peacebuilding initiatives, this study intervenes in ongoing debates on empire, development, and racialized state formation in the global majority.
I situate Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities as populations whose lives have been persistently rendered expendable under development and modernist paradigms that privilege colonial security, environmental extractivism, and market integration over human dignity, collective life, and territorial autonomy.1 Under this conceptual framework, development aid operates less as an opportune assistance for reducing and attacking inequality and more as a well-planned technology for managing and controlling historically racialized populations under the base of oppression and fungibility (particularly Indigenous and Black groups) while securing geopolitical interests.2
I begin by tracing the emergence of USAID linked to Cold War geopolitics and examining how early aid initiatives in Colombia reproduced the racist exclusion of the Indigenous and Afro-Colombian populations. Then, I offer an analysis of Plan Colombia as a paradigmatic case of militarized development, highlighting its disproportionate adverse effects on Afro-Colombian and Indigenous territories. Next, I offer an exploration of moments of conditional inclusion (particularly those achieved through pressure from African American members of the US Congress) while interrogating the limits of representational gains when redistribution is largely absent. I then turn to an assessment of the implementation of the 2016 Colombian Peace Agreement’s Ethnic Chapter and USAID’s role in its partial realization. In closing, I reflect on USAID’s unfolding and abrupt withdrawal early this year and argue that, beyond the end of aid and the exposition of the depth of dependency, Colombian ethnic groups should continue defending the possibility of reimagining sovereignty, peace, and development beyond imperial frameworks. This analysis is grounded in dependency theory in Latin America, which emphasizes the economic dependence of peripheral regions on centers of power. This theory is crucial for understanding how a class and racial system is reproduced, despite living in disadvantaged groups racialized as Black and Indigenous in the region. Although sometimes implicit, dependency theory serves as a critical, structural, and antisystemic framework. It examines how power dynamics create, maintain, and perpetuate inequality in countries like Colombia. Furthermore, in this analysis, race is not seen as a secondary axis of inequality. It is understood as constitutive of modern political economy. Building on Frantz Fanon’s conceptualization of the colonial economy and Raúl Prebisch’s center-periphery model, I analyze how and why Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities have been positioned as populations whose lives are rendered disposable within modern state and capitalist development regimes.3 Fanon’s formulation captures not only material deprivation but also the epistemic and political exclusion that defines racialized existence under colonial and postcolonial governance.4 Similarly, Prebisch explains that the global economy is fundamentally divided into industrialized center nations, which are developed countries, and raw-material-exporting peripheral nations, often referred to as developing or third-world countries. This division leads to structural inequality in which peripheral nations experience worsening trade conditions. As a result, wealth is systemically transferred to the economic centers of power, contributing to ongoing underdevelopment in the peripheral regions.5
When development aid in Latin America is understood as a practice that sustains and reproduces the racial division of labor and hierarchies while also disavowing responsibility for their persistence, we see what Aníbal Quijano conceptualizes in his work for the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean as a marginal pole.6 Quijano, linking dependency theory to urbanization, argues that rapid, dependent capitalist development caused structural marginalization in Latin America. He explains this as a marginal pole of the economy—a massive, underemployed urban workforce created by, rather than excluded from, the coloniality of power and capitalist expansion. Quijano later expands this critique, naming it “the coloniality of power,” in which he incorporates race as a foundational organizing principle of modern capitalism.7 From this vantage point, development appears not as a neutral or benevolent endeavor but as a mechanism through which racial capitalism is organized, managed, and rendered durable. USAID’s interventions in Colombia were, indeed, political practices designed to discipline populations, reorganize and co-opt territories, and privilege certain forms of life over others, not designed as innocent technical assistance.
Together, these theoretical perspectives allow for an analysis of USAID as a racialized technology of governance that undermines Afro-Colombian and Indigenous epistemologies of sovereignty and buen vivir. These epistemologies often challenge liberal state-centric notions of development by emphasizing territorial autonomy, collective life, and historical continuity. Rather than treating ethnic communities as mere beneficiaries of good-hearted aid, this framework recognizes them as political actors whose demands unsettle dominant models of peace and progress.
USAID, Cold War Aid, and Racialized Exclusion in Colombia
In many ways, the history of USAID is the history of Cold War geopolitics and the United States’ efforts to consolidate solid influence in the global majority. USAID was established by the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 under President John F. Kennedy.8 This agency centralized US foreign aid within a framework that explicitly linked economic development to the phantom of communism and to anticommunist containment. In Latin America, this strategy took institutional form through the Alliance for Progress, which promised social reform, economic growth, and democratic stability. Colombia emerged as one of USAID’s most consistent recipients, receiving US assistance continuously since 1961. The official technocratic discourse emphasized development, poverty alleviation, and modernization. It is not surprising that the historical analysis of aid distribution patterns reveals that a significant chunk of resources was frequently channeled toward stabilizing traditional political elites, strengthening security institutions, and protecting foreign economic interests. A clear example of this was the program loans granted to traditional Colombian parties by the United States within the framework of the Alliance for Progress. As economist Luis Eduardo Fajardo recalls in his analysis of the 1962 presidential elections:
“Program Loans,” as opposed to “project loans,” were not tied to any particular development or social project. Instead, they would simply give the Colombian government enough foreign currency to maintain the country’s foreign consumption levels and avoid a traumatic devaluation. For the first of many times, the US resorted to employing aid in Colombia to solve short-term political problems rather than promoting long-term social reform. Elections resulted in a triumph for National Front candidate Guillermo Valencia. On 7 June 1962, Kennedy’s Latin American Policy Committee met and produced the following recommendation: “that the US make every effort during the first six months of the new Valencia government to support and encourage it. The stability and political power of the Valencia government is a vital key to successful prosecution of such Alliance objectives as land and tax reform in Colombia.”9
With few exceptions, this pattern of economic intervention was consistent throughout USAID’s presence in Colombia. Notoriously, the adverse effects of this model were particularly pronounced on already historically marginalized communities (i.e., Afro-Colombian and Indigenous groups).
Social investment in predominantly Black and Indigenous regions remained minimal, while military and counterinsurgency spending expanded. Development projects that materialized (such as infrastructure investments linked to export-led economies) rarely translated into improved living conditions for local populations.
The Alliance for Progress resources essentially bypass Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities. USAID made the minimum effort to disrupt racialized and classist land concentration, but it did not address structural exclusion. Instead, it contributed to the consolidation of a development model in which predominantly Indigenous and Black inhabited territories were sites of extraction, militarization, and neglect.
Plan Colombia and the Intensification of Racialized Violence
The presidents of Colombia and the United States—respectively, Andrés Pastrana Arango and Bill Clinton—launched Plan Colombia in the late 1990s. This plan made the contradictions of the USAID development model of aid more brutal and accentuated. Plan Colombia was sold in the continent as a comprehensive strategy to support Colombia by combining counternarcotics, peacebuilding, and sustainable development.10 But in reality, Plan Colombia overwhelmingly prioritized the most brutal forms of military assistance. USAID resources were deeply entangled with military and security objectives, even though the cooperation agency did not directly lead the military counternarcotics section of Plan Colombia. Nonetheless, as scholars and analysts of drug policy in the region—such as Sandra Botero, Ricardo Vargas, Tom Blickman, and, more recently, the Colombian Commission for the Clarification of Truth—state, the USAID Alternative Development model never fully moved beyond militarized strategies to become part of broader rural development.11 Let’s remember that “in July 2000, the United States approved a $1.3 billion aid package for Colombia, 80% of which was to be allocated to strengthening the operational capacity of the security forces, and only 20% to economic and social assistance.”12 With that, the USAID Alternative Development Program was founded. The program aimed to create legal income and jobs for rural farmers, requiring them to eliminate illicit crops under a strict “zero-coca” condition, overlooking that, beyond what drug cartels have done with the illegal chemical processing of the plant, coca is an endemic plant in South America, deeply associated with a millennia-old ancestral tradition. Putumayo state (with a large presence of peasants, Indigenous, and Afro-Colombian populations) was used as a pilot, alongside military operations that advanced with extreme violence. Still, development efforts lagged behind eradication—a heavily militarized eradication. USAID upheld the zero-coca rule and promoted a more individualistic, market-oriented community model.13 USAID policy operated by supporting and reinforcing a counterinsurgency paradigm that treated large swaths of rural Colombia inhabited by Afro-Colombian and Indigenous populations as internal enemy territory. These two communities, as well as rural peasants, were disproportionately and devastatingly affected. Indigenous territories were consistently targeted with aerial fumigation (the use of glyphosate, a highly controversial herbicide, has been widespread) and military operations, despite constitutional protections and international norms recognizing collective land rights. Furthermore, these communities, particularly those living along or near the Pacific and Caribbean coasts, experienced mass uprooting, land dispossession, and paramilitary violence, being likewise affected by their hyperinvisibility in official policy narratives.
Andrés Pastrana Arango was succeeded by Álvaro Uribe during one of the most dramatic periods of rise in Colombian internal conflict, and the militarization supported by USAID intensified. USAID funds increasingly supported security sector reform and institutional strengthening aligned with US counterterrorism priorities (after the 9/11 attacks). Here, it is essential to remember the influence of the training of Colombian military personnel at US institutions such as the School of the Americas, alongside collaboration with foreign mercenary networks (like Israeli forces), further embedding international actors within Colombia’s architecture of violence. Moreover, paramilitary groups, many with documented ties to state forces, expanded their territorial control at this same period of time, committing systematic atrocities against civilian populations, largely rural, Indigenous, and Afro-Colombian. The Colombian Truth Commission has since documented how these dynamics produced disproportionate harm to these communities, including, but not limited to, massive exile, massacres, and the destruction of collective forms of life.14 We know clearly today that Plan Colombia did not merely fail to protect ethnic communities; it deepened the very conditions of disposability that racial justice frameworks seek to challenge. In the face of all this adversity, some Afro-Colombian and Indigenous organizations responded by strengthening sovereign governance structures (such as Indigenous guards and Afro-descendant territorial councils). These initiatives emerged despite, rather than because of, US-backed development strategies; Plan Colombia thus stands as a paradigmatic example of how militarized aid reproduces colonial patterns of control under the guise of drug cartel control, peace, and progress.
Conditional Inclusion and the Politics of Representation
The violent consequences of US-backed militarization in the country were devastating. We, the Colombians enduring this intensified conflict, can certainly attest to that. Still, the history of USAID in Colombia also includes particular moments of limited inclusion and representation in very neoliberal terms, especially during the mid-aughts. It is essential to describe in any analysis of Colombian-US aid history that these moments did not emerge organically from Washington’s development policy; this was primarily due to sustained pressure by African American members of US Congress, who, after meeting with Afro-Colombian leaders in exile, decided to respond in support of their advocacy. As the Colombian official government negotiated a free trade agreement with the United States during the presidency of Álvaro Uribe, Afro-Colombian activists, many of whom were in exile because of the violence in the Pacific region, mobilized transnational networks to expose racial exclusion within the Colombian state. Organizations such as the Asociación Nacional de Afrocolombianos Desplazados, supported by US-based groups including the TransAfrica Forum and the Washington Office on Latin America, met with members of the Congressional Black Caucus and asked them to condition their support for the trade agreement on concrete measures to address Afro-Colombian marginalization.15 The 2010 US-Colombia Action Plan on Racial and Ethnic Equality was a result of these interactions.16 This action plan focuses on the following key programs and initiatives: The Equal Employment Opportunity Initiative, launched by the Colombian-American Chamber of Commerce and the Pan-American Development Foundation, engaged companies (e.g., Citibank, Procter & Gamble) to promote diversity and eliminate discrimination in the workforce. The Fortifying and Reinforcing English Skills for Teachers Program targeted Afro-Colombian educators in Quibdó and Medellín to improve language proficiency and professional development. The College Horizons Program in Buenaventura provided two years of English instruction and test preparation for Afro-Colombian students aiming for university admission. Women’s entrepreneurship and leadership initiatives included training for Afro-Colombian and Indigenous women entrepreneurs, such as the 2011 pilot project in Buenaventura and 2014 seminars. Educational and cultural exchange programs included Fulbright Afro-Colombian Leaders and the Martin Luther King Jr. Fellows Program. Capacity building and technical assistance focused on exchanging best practices regarding land rights, environmental protection, and strengthening Afro-Colombian and Indigenous organizations. Security sector training included instruction for over 1,800 Afro-Colombian and Indigenous police officers. In light of this pressure, a series of symbolic and historically significant appointments were made, most notably the appointment of Paula Moreno as Colombia’s first Afro-Colombian minister of culture, the youngest minister ever appointed.
Additional appointments were also made, including Afro-Colombian representation within the national police and the creation of a presidential office focused on Afro-Colombian affairs. These few moments marked a superficial (rather cosmetic and not systemic) rupture within a political system historically monopolized by white and white-mestizo elites. However, these gains were deeply contested within Afro-Colombian communities.17 Representation at the highest levels of government carried undeniable symbolic power, but it did not translate into structural redistribution of resources or protection from state violence. The very function of these appointments, following the ideas of critical ethnic studies scholars, is to operate as a form of containment under racial liberalism; these public positions incorporate select Black elites in particular positions of middle power but leave intact, untouched, the underlying architecture and archetypes of racial capitalism, coercive violence, and militarized governance.18 Paula Moreno’s tenure illustrates this tension.
Undoubtedly, her work advanced important cultural legislation and expanded access to higher education for Afro-Colombian and Indigenous students; no other Colombian ministry of culture has advanced cultural programs for historically marginalized communities like hers.19 She focused on youth who have been disproportionately affected by the war. Nevertheless, these achievements get clouded when the issue of her prolonged silence regarding widespread human rights abuses during Uribe’s presidency appears. This pregnant silence still raises questions about the frontiers of inclusion in the absence of political accountability, unveiling that in social dimensions where recognition substitutes for redistribution, and representation is decoupled from material transformation, contradictions become more visible and tend to reflect a broader pattern in US-influenced development frameworks through aid that is implicitly or explicitly conditioned. It is essential to remember that former president Álvaro Uribe was still facing an investigation by the Colombian justice system in 2025.20
There is one more case that clearly exemplifies how USAID policies operated under the condition of neoliberal-style inclusion: the port city of Buenaventura, which also shows what Andre Gunder Frank terms “the development of underdevelopment,” or how integration into global markets generates growth while reproducing structural deprivation.21 Buenaventura, although Colombia’s principal Pacific port and a major recipient of international investment, remains among the country’s poorest and most violent cities. The Program of Alliances for Reconciliation, funded by USAID and ACDI/VOCA, promised to strengthen community resilience, promote historical memory, and foster a culture of peace across twenty municipalities, including this seaport city. Yet between 2018 and 2020, unemployment in the city exceeded 60 percent, violence intensified, and the program’s investment (around $56 million over four years across all municipalities) produced no discernible structural change. In this predominantly Black city, high-tech port operations continue largely insulated from the surrounding communities, where residents face persistent joblessness, inadequate basic services, and chronic insecurity. This pattern reflects how development under racial capitalism concentrates growth while withholding redistribution, reinforcing what Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes as “organized abandonment.”22 In Buenaventura, violence worsened in late 2020 and early 2021, as clashes between the National Liberation Army and dissident factions of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia spread across the city, with an increase in military deployments and alerts from the Ombudsman’s Office. Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities bore the brunt of these confrontations.
The 2016 Peace Agreement and the Ethnic Chapter
The signing of the Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia in 2016 marked a historic opportunity to address the structural causes of armed conflict, the war, and its aftermath.23 Afro-Colombian and Indigenous peoples were largely excluded from the formal negotiations in Havana, Cuba. Still, because of their mobilization and advocacy throughout the process, they took a momentary seat at the negotiation table. Only after sustained mobilization by Indigenous and Black organizations was an Ethnic Chapter (officially known as Chapter 6.2) incorporated into the final peace accord. Here it is important to remember that Black, Roma, and Indigenous communities are classified as ethnic groups in Colombia due to the 1991 constitution’s recognition of the nation as multiethnic and multicultural, formalizing rights for groups with distinct cultural identities, traditions, and ancestral ties to land. This legal status, cemented by Law 70 of 1993, grants them collective land rights and protects their unique heritage.24 For many Afro-Colombian and Indigenous leaders, the chapter represented an opportunity, a hard-won victory, and a fragile compromise. The peace implementation process following the agreement was in dire need of funding to move forward. USAID committed significant resources to rural development, reintegration programs, and support for ethnic communities.25 Between 2017 and 2024, US funding accounted for a substantial share of total international assistance for the peace process, including targeted initiatives for Afro-Colombian and Indigenous populations.
Despite these investments of around $60 million for ethnic communities, implementation remained very uneven. President Juan Manuel Santos was succeeded by Iván Duque, a right-wing politician who defeated the leftist Gustavo Petro in 2018. With Duque in the presidency, a key component of the peace accord stalled, while violence against social leaders, particularly in ethnic territories, intensified and protests arose. In this period, also marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, USAID-funded programs continued in operation. It is important to note that they were unable to offset the broader erosion of political will or the expansion of dissident armed actors into vacated territories. The resources and policies of USAID supported initiatives providing short-term grants and technical assistance, but they did not address structural drivers of violence, including land inequality, restitution or redistribution, extractive models of development, or state abandonment in territories racialized mainly as Black and Indigenous. Indigenous and Afro-Colombian organized groups recognized the symbolically decisive moment that the Ethnic Chapter of 2016 represents; despite this, the chapter remains largely unimplemented, revealing the constraints of relying on foreign aid to advance any layers of transformative justice.
Adiós USAID: Dependency, Sovereignty, and the Question of Aid
The initial February 2025 announcement of the suspension of USAID funds worldwide, and its later confirmation of a complete shutdown at the end of the year, unsettled the work of many community-based organizations operating in Afro-Colombian and Indigenous territories.26 Several programs, slowly advancing to address food security, land rights, and peacebuilding, were suspended with a single signature; this action exposed the extent to which civil society was depending on external funding streams. USAID, through ACDI/VOCA, channeled foreign assistance to Colombia’s ethnic communities, particularly Indigenous and Black communities, under the promise of helping them secure recognition, inclusion, and empowerment.27 On December 1, 2021, they launched a five-year initiative with a budget of $60 million USD. The Indigenous Peoples and Afro-Colombian Empowerment Activity was born. It partnered directly with Indigenous- and Black-led national and local organizations to strengthen their existing initiatives and expects to elevate their priorities on the national agenda to close racial disparities and promote ethnic pride, with the promise of resulting in a more inclusive Colombia. This initiative facilitated small agricultural projects, training, entrepreneurship initiatives, and microgrants. Indigenous organizations such as the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca, the Territorial Council of Cabildos, the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia, the National Organization of the Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon, and Black and Afro-Colombian organizations like the National Association of Displaced Afro-Colombians, Afro-Colombian Maroon Movement (Movimiento Afrocolombiano Cimarrón), the Major Community Council of the Comprehensive Peasants Association of the Atrato, the National Afro-Colombian Peace Council, National Conference of Afro-Colombian Organizations, and Process of Black Communities were part of this alliance. All these programs suffered a shock with the dismantling of USAID. Following the cuts, many technocratic USAID officials and NGO professionals framed the withdrawal as a humanitarian crisis.
I align with critical voices to state that this moment also invites a more profound reckoning with the political economy of aid dependency. As one of the major bilateral players in international cooperation, USAID, during a little more than six decades, sought to cultivate financial reliance and a colonial epistemic alignment in Colombian territories; the agency promoted models of development deeply rooted in neoliberal entrepreneurship, managerial governance principles, and donor-driven accountability. Under this rule, community organizations were increasingly trained to translate their historical, structural, and systemic demands into small project proposals, undermining their real political claims and, in addition, narrowing the horizon of struggle. This dynamic is underscored by several Afro-Colombian and Indigenous leaders I consulted for this article, as shown by the interview excerpts reproduced below:
Juana: At least now we won’t have to wait for the call for proposals from USAID or ACDI VOCA every two years just to submit a little project; the new Ministry of Equality should take charge of these programs and strive for true peace.
Cesar: There was always discontent among the residents of the vereda regarding the way those eradication programs were imposed. It always involved only a select few leaders and certain organizations; if you weren’t part of the inner circle, you didn’t receive the training. And if you didn’t get the training, you didn’t know how to write up what “they” wanted to read, which meant you didn’t receive any financial support. Sadly, the money is no longer available, but then again, those resources never actually reached the people they were supposed to reach anyway.
Yolis: USAID and the NGOs shouldn’t be the only source of funding for finding solutions to our problems. Why won’t the national government pay more attention to us? Why must we look abroad for what we could have right here at home?28
According to them, USAID made an effort to cultivate applicants for microgrants funded by international development agencies, who later became USAID adepts; this adoption, of course, came at the expense of autonomy in political community organizing. A central role in reframing collective struggles for land, life, and sovereignty as technocratic goals aligned with donor priorities rather than ancestral struggles for life and dignity lies with USAID and its boring aid discourse of development.
Recent events further highlight the fragility of sovereignty under aid dependency. A confrontation between the White House and Casa de Nariño uncovered the way in which the United States provided security equipment and assistance to protect the official residence and workplace of the president of Colombia, primarily under the justification to safeguard top government officials from persistent “terrorist threats” by rebel groups. This aid was part of the broader Plan Colombia and US counterterrorism initiatives in the early 2000s (after the attacks of 9/11). However, due to the significant and public discursive and political confrontations between Presidents Gustavo Petro and Donald Trump, the White House requested that the security equipment, mainly the armament provided, be returned in October of 2025.29 President Petro declared that the Casa de Nariño had effectively been disarmed, explaining that around 150 weapons (mostly rifles and even an antidrone system) used to guard the presidential palace did not belong to Colombia but to the United States.30 The US government sent a letter requesting the return of its weapons. Petro expressed that he did not know who made the decision to guard Colombia’s most important seat of government with foreign-owned armaments and described the situation as undignified, emphasizing that Colombia does not need them. He added that once the guns were withdrawn (to the US Embassy in Bogotá) as the official US letter indicated, the Colombian Presidential Guard Battalion took full responsibility for securing the Casa de Nariño using Colombian equipment, underscoring the importance of national sovereignty and dignity in matters of security. In a similar note, Petro said in early 2025 that the United States shouldn’t be funding public employees in his country and that hundreds of immigration officers (customs officers) were indeed paid with USAID funds.31 Petro added, “Trump is right. Take your money,” in the midst of USAID suspension.32 Petro and his vice president, the Afro-Colombian lawyer and environmental leader Francia Márquez, call for a government focused on change for life, aiming to transition the country away from a traditional, extractive-based economic model toward a more equitable, social-democratic, and environmentally sustainable system.33 The lesson in this tense moment in international relations, if any, is that national interest should not depend on foreign aid; our rooted, still-functioning colonial ties must be detected and cut by ourselves before these humiliating moments repeat themselves. From this perspective, sovereignty is a question not merely of state authority but of reclaiming political power from imperial structures. The aftermath of the USAID debacle exposes the costs of dependency, but, most importantly, it reminds us that we still have enormous possibilities for reimagining peace and justice beyond external colonial frameworks.
Beyond Aid, Toward Racial Justice and Sovereignty
The presence of USAID in Colombia for more than sixty years functioned as a racialized technology of governance rooted in colonial and Cold War logics. USAID did not promote mechanisms for racial justice or peacebuilding, as many suggest. During sixty years of USAID relations, there were a few moments of inclusion that emerged under pressure from Black political actors in the United States; these gains remained limited and structurally constrained. USAID prioritized militarization, extractivism, and elite stabilization over the territorial autonomy and collective rights of Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities. The 2016 last-minute Ethnic Chapter of the Peace Agreement forced the country to recognize the powerful mobilization of Black and Indigenous communities but also uncovered the flaws of external-aid-dependent transformation. In 2026, all populations living in Colombia are facing a crucial moment. In the presidential elections of May 2026, the country’s voters will decide whether to elect another leftist candidate as the new president or to return to a candidate from the right-wing elites that have governed the country for centuries and that already are making political campaigns promising to cut every program established by the Left. The creative and, in some instances, effective use of USAID resources in the hands of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, along with their abrupt withdrawal in 2025, presents us with a unique opportunity to evaluate the Colombian racial history of foreign aid and simultaneously invites us to strengthen local governance and economies that are not too tied to Washington-centered desires. We must understand the elimination of USAID and transcend the moments of mourning that come with the still-recent rupture. It could be more nurturing, as the case of Afro-Colombian and Indigenous organizations demonstrates, by exploring the urgency of confronting dependency and reclaiming sovereignty on terms defined by communities themselves. Ultimately, the Colombian case underscores the need for critical ethnic scholars to continue interrogating international aid and development as a site where race, empire, gender, sexuality, and political economy, among other things, uniquely converge. Saying adiós to USAID constitutes an unexpected invitation to imagine decolonial connectivities beyond dependency; it is indeed an open hole to propose and build new models of peace and governance (without a patron). We also see hope for justice and land redistribution that center Indigenous and Afro-Colombian ontologies that refuse disposability and insist on life.
Maria Ximena Abello-Hurtado is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the Department of Critical Race and Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College. She is currently working on her book manuscript titled “Narratives of Enslaved Women and the Black Female Epistolary Tradition.” Her essays have been published in The Black Scholar, the 1st Edition of The Routledge Companion to Girls’ Studies, and the award-winning collection Demando mi libertad: Mujeres negras y sus estrategias de resistencia en la Nueva Granada, Venezuela y Cuba, 1700–1800.
Notes
I want to express my sincere gratitude to Iyko Day, Aisha Matthews, and Neel Ahuja for their guidance and encouragement throughout the elaboration of this document. I am also grateful to my peers in different Afro-Colombian organizations and to my colleagues for their thoughtful feedback on early drafts. Special thanks to Castriela Hernández-Reyes, Dario Vasquez-Padilla, Jonathan Torres-Sandoval, and Rossih Martinez Sinisterra.
1. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton University Press, 1995).
2. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997).
3. Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL), “Raúl Prebisch y los desafíos del Siglo XXI,” Biblioguías: Biblioteca de la CEPAL, last updated May 28, 2025, https://biblioguias.cepal.org/portalprebisch/SXXI; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (Grove Press, 1967).
4. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Grove Press, 1963).
5. Raúl Prebisch, The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems (United Nations Department of Economic Affairs, 1950), https://repositorio.cepal.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/08ac817a-864c-4df6-961c-7745a3b2fae9/content.
6. Aníbal Quijano, Dependencia, cambio social y urbanización en Latinoamérica (ILPES, 1976), https://www.cepal.org/es/publicaciones/33675-dependencia-cambio-social-urbanizacion-latinoamerica.
7. Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–80.
8. Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, Pub. L. 87–195, 75 Stat. 424–2 (1961).
9. Luis Eduardo Fajardo, “From the Alliance for Progress to the Plan Colombia: A Retrospective Look at U.S. Aid to Colombia,” Crisis States Research Centre Working Papers 1, no. 28 (2003): 10–11, https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/28249/.
10.Plan Colombia: Fact Sheets and Historical Overview (United States Department of State, 2001).
11. Ricardo Vargas, “The Anti-Drug Policy: Aerial Spraying of Illicit Crops and Their Social, Environmental and Political Impacts in Colombia,” Journal of Drug Issues 32, no. 1 (2002): 11–60; Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad, la Convivencia y la No Repetición, ¡Hay futuro si hay verdad! Informe Final (Comisión de la Verdad, 2022), https://www.comisiondelaverdad.co/english; Sandra Botero, Paz y opinión pública en Colombia (Ediciones Uniandes, 2024); Tom Blickman and Martin Jelsma, “Drug Policy Reform in Practice: Experiences with Alternatives in Europe and the US,” Nueva Sociedad 222 (July–August 2009): https://www.tni.org/en/publication/drug-policy-reform-in-practice.
12. US Department of State, Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, “United States Support for Colombia,” fact sheet, July 14, 2000, https://1997-2001.state.gov/regions/wha/colombia/fs_000714_americans.html; Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad, la Convivencia y la No Repetición, “El Plan Colombia,” en Hay futuro si hay verdad: Informe final (CEV, 2022), https://www.comisiondelaverdad.co/el-plan-colombia.
13. Ricardo Vargas Meza, La política de desarrollo alternativo de USAID en Colombia: Un análisis crítico (Transnational Institute, 2011).
14.Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad, la Convivencia y la No Repetición, Hay futuro si hay verdad: Informe final (Comisión de la Verdad, 2022).
15. Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli and Marino Cordoba, “Afro-Colombians in the United States and Colombia International Relations,” Washington Office on Latin America, February 1, 2016, https://www.wola.org/analysis/afro-colombians-in-the-united-states-and-colombia-international-relations/.
16. US Department of State, “U.S.-Colombia Action Plan on Racial and Ethnic Equality,” accessed March 2, 2026, https://www.state.gov/u-s-colombia-action-plan-on-racial-and-ethnic-equality.
17. ILEX Acción Jurídica, ¿Dónde están las personas afrocolombianas en el Estado? Un balance de la representación afrocolombiana en el nivel nacional de la rama ejecutiva del poder público en Colombia (ILEX Acción Jurídica, 2025), https://ilexaccionjuridica.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Doumento-Cargos-Publicos-ILEX_IMPRESO-2.pdf.
18. Jodi Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” Social Text 24, no. 4 (2006): 1–24; bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (South End Press, 1992).
19. Catalina Oquendo, “Paula Moreno: ‘La cultura y la tecnología son claves para la equidad racial,’” El País, November 27, 2024, https://elpais.com/america/2024-11-28/paula-moreno-la-cultura-y-la-tecnologia-son-claves-para-la-equidad-racial.html; Corporación Manos Visibles Colombia, https://manosvisibles.org/en/.
20.“La Fiscalía de Colombia abre una investigación contra el expresidente Uribe por presuntos vínculos con paramilitares y dos masacres de los 90,” BBC News Mundo, June 19, 2026, https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/c20y1jk8xy4o; Diego Stacey, “El caso contra Álvaro Uribe, paso a paso: de la acusación de paramilitarismo a la absolución por soborno a testigos y fraude procesal,” El País América Colombia, October 21, 2025, https://elpais.com/america-colombia/2025-10-21/el-caso-contra-alvaro-uribe-paso-a-paso-de-la-acusacion-de-paramilitarismo-a-la-condena-por-soborno-a-testigos-y-fraude-procesal.html.
21. Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil (Monthly Review Press, 1967).
22. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007).
23.Acuerdo Final para la Terminación del Conflicto y la Construcción de una Paz Estable y Duradera (Gobierno de Colombia y FARC-EP, 2016), https://www.jep.gov.co/Documents/Acuerdo%20Final/Acuerdo%20Final%20Firmado.pdf.
24. Colombia, Congreso de la República, Ley 70 de 1993, “por la cual se desarrolla el artículo transitorio 55 de la Constitución Política,” Diario Oficial No. 41.013, August 31, 1993.
25. See various years of United States Agency for International Development, Colombia Peace Agreement Support Overview; US Agency for International Development, Office of Inspector General, USAID Complied With U.S. Laws Limiting Assistance but Could Strengthen Internal Management Activities (USAID, 2025), https://oig.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/2025-05/Final%20Report_Colombia_USAID%20Complied%20With%20US%20Laws%20Limiting%20Assistance%20but%20Could%20Strengthen%20Internal%20Management%20Activities_0.pdf.
26. Exec. Order No. 14169, Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid, January 20, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/reevaluating-and-realigning-united-states-foreign-aid/; Emily M. McCabe, U.S. Agency for International Development: An Overview (Congressional Research Service, 2025), https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF10261.
27. “A Look at USAID’s Indigenous Peoples & Afro-Colombian Empowerment Activity,” ACDI/VOCA, November 10, 2022, https://www.acdivoca.org/2022/11/a-look-at-usaids-indigenous-peoples-afro-colombian-empowerment-activity/.
28. Interview by author, August 12, 2025. To ensure their privacy and security, all interviewees’ names have been altered.
29. Jesús Antonio Blanquicet, “Presidente Petro dice que EE. UU. retiró 150 armas que estaban en comodato en Colombia para custodiar la Casa de Nariño,”El Tiempo, October 3, 2025, https://www.eltiempo.com/justicia/conflicto-y-narcotrafico/presidente-petro-dice-que-ee-uu-retiro-150-armas-en-comodato-que-custodiaban-la-casa-de-narino-3496687.
30.“Presidente Petro reveló que armas de la Policía que custodian la Casa de Nariño no son de Colombia,” Presidencia de la República de Colombia, October 3, 2025, https://www.presidencia.gov.co/prensa/Paginas/Presidente-Petro-revelo-que-armas-de-la-Policia-que-custodian-la-Casa-de-Narino-no-son-de-Colombia-251003.aspx.
31. Redacción Politica, “‘USAID no puede pagar a nuestros funcionarios’: Petro por decisiones de Donald Trump,”El Espectador, February 4, 2025, https://www.elespectador.com/politica/usaid-no-puede-pagar-nuestros-funcionarios-petro-por-decisiones-de-donald-trump-consejo-de-ministros-noticias-hoy/.
32. Presidencia de la República—Colombia, “Alocución del Presidente de la República, Gustavo Petro Urrego—4 de febrero de 2025,” February 4, 2025, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zib9LUq2u2o&t=4036s.
33. Gustavo Petro Urrego, “Palabras del Presidente de la República, Gustavo Petro Urrego, al tomar posesión como Jefe de Estado,” speech given in Bogotá, August 7, 2022, Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Colombia (Cancillería), https://www.cancilleria.gov.co/sites/default/files/FOTOS2020/Discurso%20Posesion.pdf.