U.S. Aid Is Crucial to Defending Democracy in Latin America

"Why are there never coup attempts inside the United States?" an old joke among left-wing activists in Latin America goes. "Because there is no U.S. embassy there."
It's a reference to U.S. actions during the Cold War to undermine democratically elected governments across the region, including Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in the 1950s and Chilean President Salvador Allende in the 1970s. Under the auspices of fighting communism, Washington backed right-wing military coups and dictatorships throughout the hemisphere.
As late as the 1980s, Jeanne Kirkpatrick - a foreign policy adviser to then-President Ronald Reagan who later served as his ambassador to the United Nations - issued a defense of authoritarian regimes that she believed helped to protect their populations from even worse revolutionary ideologies.
But the joke was outdated even before January 2021, when then-U.S. President Donald Trump tried to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. In fact, over recent decades, the view of the United States as a defender of authoritarianism, at least in Latin America, has become an anachronism. Eventually, Washington lent support to the Concertacion coalition that defeated then-dictator Augusto Pinochet at the polls and led to the reestablishment of democracy in Chile in 1990.
And in 2001, the U.S. backed the Inter-American Democratic Charter, which clearly states in its opening that "[t]he peoples of the Americas have a right to democracy and their governments have an obligation to promote and defend it," while promising to remove nondemocratic governments from various hemispheric institutions.
More recently, perhaps the top three achievements of former President Joe Biden's policies in Latin America all came in defense of democracy. His administration supported a democratic transition in Honduras in 2021 after Xiomara Castro defeated the ruling National Party's candidate in the country's presidential election that year.
Washington then had outgoing President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who had stolen Honduras' 2017 presidential election, extradited on drug-trafficking charges so he could no longer interfere in domestic politics. A year later, Biden's team pressured Brazil's military leadership to stay clear of a coup attempt led by outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro after Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won that country's presidential election in 2022.
And the Biden team safeguarded an incredibly difficult presidential transition in Guatemala at the end of 2023 to ensure that President Bernardo Arevalo took office, overcoming the efforts of that country's corrupt elites to keep him from power.
The U.S. record is far from perfect, and this column will no doubt provoke responses detailing the many wrongs Washington has committed in the region in recent years. But the U.S. really did shift toward a more pro-democracy stance in Latin America since the end of the Cold War. As part of that shift, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, funded numerous local NGOs that promoted human rights and anti-corruption efforts.
The National Endowment for Democracy - a government-funded semi-autonomous organization - backed training for political parties and civil society that contributed to grassroots civic activism at the heart of democratic values, winning NED the hatred of authoritarian leaders who viewed those efforts as a violation of their sovereignty. Various other U.S. agencies also provide grants for research and think tank work that is critical to policy debates in the region.
All those efforts go beyond the specific episodes, such as those by the Biden administration, when the U.S. government backed a democratic movement at a critical moment. They were cooked into U.S. policy in nearly every country.
That is not to say that U.S. support is the only thing sustaining democracy in Latin America. Democracy can't be imposed from abroad. The biggest efforts come from the people of Latin America, who work to impr...