• @gAlienLifeform
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    4 months ago

    In the first report (the one from the GAO), it says that the DOD provided equipment to countries between 2018 and 2021

    Letter from a lawmaker in the fall of 2022 complaining about another transfer of military equipment and pointing out that these problems haven’t been addressed - https://web.archive.org/web/20221111005914/https://torres.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/rep-torres-demands-action-secretaries-austin-blinken-following-continued

    The report makes 5 recommendations to the defense secretary, 3 of which

    The DOD agreed were a good idea, there’s no indication they actually followed them. The remaining two they straight up refused.

    The second reference, if I understand it correctly, tries to analyze the efficiency of US military aid

    That’s something it mentions in passing, but it mainly focuses on how Presidents like military aid schemes because a) they have a ton of control over how the money Congress gives them for these things is actually spent (i.e. they can point out human rights abuses by the government Congress wants to aid or other foreign policy considerations and pause the spending if they care to do so) b) it’s an incredibly obscure and bureaucratic system of funds and equipment inventories and inter-agency task forces and such that’s difficult for journalists to follow and most Americans won’t care about anyway most of the time

    The last reference is a book on Amazon that I can’t read nor browse.

    Unfortunately I’m not a skilled enough pirate to have a good answer for that problem, but maybe find a copy through a library or something. It’s a MacArthur genius grant receiving anthropologist’s years long study of migrants and guides where he interviews a ton of them and immigration enforcers in all the different countries and comes across a bunch of different stories of human rights abuses carried out by Mexican and Central American authorities.