Give $1 billion to the Northern Triangle - no strings attached

As I mentioned the other day, Hermano Juancito was on campus to speak to students about his missionary work in Honduras. In his talk "Accompanying the Poor in Honduras," he provided students, staff, and faculty a list of best practices for short- and longer-term immersion trips. While his talk was much more complicated, it boiled down to "open your heart," "open your eyes," "open your ears," and "shut your mouth." That's not entirely fair but the lesson was not to go into a community for a few days, months or years, telling the people how things should be done or how you would do things differently.

The poor are remarkable people with exceptional skills who have figured out how to accomplish a great deal with very little. I think that reflects some of the reasons why so many relatively poor Latin American countries wind up scoring rather well on the world's most happiest countries lists.

Several other thoughts emerged, for me, during his talk. One question that came up several times related to the proposed $1 billion aid package to Central America. Will it help? I think so. Is it enough? Obviously, not. However, what I was thinking about was whether or not the US should have any say in how the money is spent. We seem to have pretty good evidence that governments giving poor people cash without any strings attached has helped improve a number of socio-economic indicators. Why not pursue the same principle in this case?

Skip the government and give money directly to the people. Now the US is not actually giving $1 billion dollars in cash. Much is the value of the services we are currently support or intend to increase. Another problem is that we are only proposing approximately $33 per person in the Northern Triangle for the entire year. That's not much. Even if we only provide assistance to half the region that falls below the poverty line we are only thinking about $66 per person which is only $5 per month.

I'd also like to see an extension of programs such as the one involving Walmart, the Asociación de Pescadores Artesanales de la Playa El Cuco (Aspescu), an USAID. They worked for two years to satisfy the sanitary and legal requirements needed for Aspescu to sell their fish to the transnational Walmart. Help Salvadoran, Honduran and Guatemalan cooperatives and small-producers gain access to US corporations in their countries and regionally. Coffee, fish, it's all good.

It was a great turnout for John's talk. We had about 100 students, faculty, and staff in the audience. That's great for our Latin American Studies program. However, hours earlier the administration retracted its support for a Fulbright Scholar that we had successfully worked to bring to Scranton from Mexico.