The suspension of USAID funding by the Donald Trump administration has dealt a new blow to the functioning of civil society organizations, a situation that, together with anti-NGO laws, has serious global repercussions. Old and new controversies surrounding this source of resources are the order of the day. But regardless of the position taken in this debate, it is undeniable that part of civil society action in the Global South depended considerably on this source, which raises urgent discussions on how to strengthen the resilience of civil society in the future.  

Civil society is a network of associations that take the problems that arise in everyday life, give them resonance and bring them spontaneously to the public space. Since they are not state organizations and do not belong to economic groups, they use cooperation and philanthropy as their main source to guarantee their independence. On the other hand, following professors Gerardo Munck and Sebastián Mazzuca, it would seem that Latin America is trapped in an institutional trap of average quality, in which a State with low institutional capacity to guarantee the provision of public goods and an imperfect democracy with problems of corruption, clientelism, among other weaknesses, coexist. Therefore, this type of State has serious difficulties in reaching its entire territory. At the subnational level, these difficulties increase since, in some cases, the States lack the essential technical and financial capacity to mobilize part of their capacities, and therefore have needed what cooperation offers.

In the case of Colombia and Mexico, cooperation resources, particularly those coming from the United States, have generated a dynamic of unequal relations and dependency at the subnational level, in which such aid has been marked by the interests of that country. This issue of the Newsletter prepared by the Regionalization team at Dejusticia addresses the different aspects of this debate based on the analysis of two critical cases in the Latin American context: Colombia and Mexico. Both are countries that have recently experienced tensions in their diplomatic relations with the United States, and in this context the position of their governments has taken a certain critical independence from some decisions. However, as regards the vacuum left by these resources, the discourse has not been matched by more decisive plans to strengthen local capacities in other ways. 

In the first article “Trump and USAID: an Opportunity to Integrate a Horizontal Treatment in International Cooperation Relations between Colombia and Other Countries?“, a critical view is presented on how US cooperation resources have been crossed by dynamics of subordination, in which global interests are prioritized over territorial ones. And, in the second article “Cooperation or dependency? Mexico’s Dilemma in the Face of USAID Funding Freeze”, Luisa Guerra describes some historical events that explain the tense relationship between Mexico and the United States, characterized by colonial and expansionist logics that the current president Claudia Sheinbaum seeks to curb. Such a decision will imply important challenges to implement public policies for social development and to guarantee its independence. 

These articles advocate the need to opt for a path of strengthening civil society and the states of the Global South in response to this suspension of resources. We view this crisis as a transformative opportunity for the countries of the South to rethink more horizontal international cooperation relations that have an impact on the needs of the recipient country, especially at the subnational level. This is an opportunity to make substantial changes that imply at least two things: i) strengthen tax collection at the subnational level to have more resources directed to materialize social rights; and ii) promote more horizontal relations, avoid paternalistic actions, and strengthen the agency capacity of the organizations. Transforming assistance into funding that contributes to capacity building is more costly and time-consuming, but it is more sustainable in the long term. If the purpose is to help, the path must be to strengthen capacities. This implies that international cooperation should have a long-term vision through a logic that prioritizes the needs of the communities and the territory and contributes to a vision of regional economic growth.