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About 43 percent of all aid flowing into Latin America comes from the countries of the European Union. The figure rises to 53 percent if the aid channeled through EU institutions is included. This compares to only 17 percent from the United States (Freres 1998). An increasing amount of European aid, especially to Latin America, is directed through nongovernmental organizations. Since 1992, more than 40 percent of the aid projects cofinanced between the EU and NGOs have been in Latin America. NGOs, therefore, are gaining influence in shaping the European aid regime for Latin America, and European NGOs are key external actors playing an increasingly pivotal role in Latin America. Yet the nature of their activities and their priorities for action in the region remain poorly understood. The intention of this article is to go some way toward addressing this omission.
European NGOs active in Latin America differ from their U.S. counterparts in a number of respects. With the exception of a few large foundations, such as Amnesty International, the U.K.-based OXFAM, and the Dutch semipublic foundation NOVIB, most European NGOs are smaller than those in the United States. As a result, funding is frequently an urgent issue and, in many countries, NGOs must rely on the state to survive. Many therefore lack the self-confidence that may characterize prominent U.S. NGOs.
U.S. NGOs can channel some of their activities through a number of national and interamerican institutions. For example, U.S. NGOs that took up the cause of human rights were able to operate through and strengthen the Inter-American Committee on Human Rights. As Keck and Sikkink argue, the link to government can also sometimes prove powerful and effective in shaping policy (1998,102-3; see also Martin and Sikkink 1993). European NGOs do not generally enjoy similar institutional linkages. Finally, if U.S. NGOs have overwhelmingly been motivated by liberal concerns about human rights, understood broadly, European NGOs have, in contrast, been concerned with issues of development and economic entitlements and have, rather more recently, incorporated human rights and democracy into an agenda influenced ideologically by a critique of the spread of capitalism and the inequity of the North-South divide.
The role European NGOs play in Latin America has undergone a number of important changes since the beginning...