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The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development will deliver a major blow to efforts including humanitarian assistance in Colombia, conservation efforts in the Brazilian Amazon, and coca eradication in PeruSouth American countries that have been a priority for the support. Even if some foreign aid resumes after the 90-day suspension ordered by President Donald Trump, many USAID-backed projects focus on areas he has derided as ideological: climate change, biodiversity, and minority and women’s rights, so several recipients fear their projects are now dead. Colombia has long been the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance in South America. Recent USAID money has supported emergency humanitarian aid to more than 2.8 million Venezuelans who fled economic crisis. In 2024 alone, the agency transferred some $45 million to the U.N. World Food Programme, mostly to assist them. The end of U.S. humanitarian assistance in Colombia, Brazil, and other Latin American countries is another huge setback for Venezuelans abroad. Last week, the Trump administration also revoked a temporary immigration status that has allowed roughly 600,000 people from Venezuela to stay in the U.S. The first large group could be deported in about two months. Trumps cuts will hit Latin Americas most vulnerable populations, including millions of Venezuelan migrants and refugees, as grassroots organizations providing essential care, guidance, and food are left without funding, Bram Ebus, a Bogota-based consultant at the International Crisis Group, told the Associated Press. Migrant populations are targeted by organized crime and armed groups. If aid projects are not resumed quickly, it will allow these groups to abuse and exploit vulnerable migrants. Despite the fact that the U.S. is the largest source of aid to Colombia, President Gustavo Petro said some of this help is not welcome and has to go. Hundreds of immigration officials who guard our borders were paid by the United States. This aid is poison,” he said during a cabinet meeting Monday. That should never be allowed. We are going to pay with our money. In 2024, the agency paid nearly $385 million to Colombia. Trump told reporters Monday that shutting down USAID should have been done a long time ago. Billionaire Elon Musk, who is leading government cost reduction in the new administration, said the agency was run by radical left lunatics. In Brazil, USAID’s largest initiative is the Partnership for the Conservation of Amazon Biodiversity, which focuses on conservation and improving livelihoods for Indigenous peoples and other forest communities. About two-thirds of the world’s largest rainforest is in Brazil. One Brazilian organization USAID has supported is the Amazon-based Roraima Indigenous Council, which operates in 35 areas including the territory of the Yanomami tribe, totaling some 157,000 square kilometers (60,600 square miles), larger than Greece. This direct support is representative of a shift at USAID over the past few years to prioritize funding grassroots organizations. In a region vulnerable to illegal gold mining and drug-trafficking, the Roraima Indigenous Council is using the money for improved family farming, adapting to climate change, and income generation for women. Now everything is at risk, Edinho Macuxi, the tuxaua (leader) of the Indigenous Council, told the AP. In recent weeks, his organization, which represents some 60,000 people, laid off workers and canceled activities due to lack of funds. The partnership with USAID has existed for seven years. If the decision is to end it, this will shake our organizational structure and projects that are very important for strengthening the economy and autonomy of Indigenous peoples,” he said. Our message to President Trump is that he should maintain the resources not only for Brazil but for other countries as well. In Brazil, Indigenous peoples who access this funding are the ones who effectively keep most of the forest standing, ensuring life not just for people in Brazil, but also the world, Macuxi said. In recent years, USAID also supported arguably the most successful sustainable resource effort in the Amazon, the managed fishing of pirarucu, the region’s famously giant fish. The U.S. funds built a slaughterhouse where fishers could work during the legal catch. Indigenous and riverine communities helped recover what was an endangered species, at the same time getting income and food. In 2024, USAID disbursed $22.6 million to Brazil. Over half, close to $14 million, went to general environmental protection, with the Amazon, which stores crucial amounts of carbon from the atmosphere, as a top priority. For Peru, the humanitarian agency disbursed some $135 million in 2024. Part of it is to control cocaine production by financing alternatives such as coffee and cacao. Those efforts date back to the early 1980s. Peru is the world’s second-largest cocaine producer after Colombia, which runs similar programs financed with American assistance. In a statement, Perus Premier Gustavo Adrianzén said his government will continue the crop substitution program without U.S. funding. The Peruvian National Commission for Development and Life Without Drugs, known as DEVIDA, declined to comment on the new U.S. administration’s freeze. A former DEVIDA chief, Ricardo Soberón, said that USAID’s pause is an opportunity to review a partnership that has not been effective. It has always been conditional assistance, with politics involved. It has been minimal, often delayed, and not integrated with the actions of the Peruvian state, he told AP. Soberón said that neighboring Bolivia, which expelled the U.S. agency in 2013, has achieved better results in controlling cocaine production since then. Despite its problems and external limitations (the economic and political crisis), the withdrawal of USAID has provided Bolivia with a high degree of autonomy to develop social control policies, which have been much more efficient. ______ The Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find APs standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org. Fabiano Maisonnave, Associated Press
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The website of the Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek, whose chatbot became the most downloaded app in the United States, has computer code that could send some user login information to a Chinese state-owned telecommunications company that has been barred from operating in the United States, security researchers say.The web login page of DeepSeek’s chatbot contains heavily obfuscated computer script that when deciphered shows connections to computer infrastructure owned by China Mobile, a state-owned telecommunications company. The code appears to be part of the account creation and user login process for DeepSeek.In its privacy policy, DeepSeek acknowledged storing data on servers inside the People’s Republic of China. But its chatbot appears more directly tied to the Chinese state than previously known through the link revealed by researchers to China Mobile. The U.S. has claimed there are close ties between China Mobile and the Chinese military as justification for placing limited sanctions on the company. DeepSeek and China Mobile did not respond to emails seeking comment.The growth of Chinese-controlled digital services has become a major topic of concern for U.S. national security officials. Lawmakers in Congress last year on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis voted to force the Chinese parent company of the popular video-sharing app TikTok to divest or face a nationwide ban though the app has since received a 75-day reprieve from President Donald Trump, who is hoping to work out a sale.The code linking DeepSeek to one of China’s leading mobile phone providers was first discovered by Feroot Security, a Canadian cybersecurity company, which shared its findings with the Associated Press. The AP took Feroot’s findings to a second set of computer experts, who independently confirmed that China Mobile code is present. Neither Feroot nor the other researchers observed data transferred to China Mobile when testing logins in North America, but they could not rule out that data for some users was being transferred to the Chinese telecom.The analysis only applies to the web version of DeepSeek. They did not analyze the mobile version, which remains one of the most downloaded pieces of software on both the Apple and the Google app stores.The U.S. Federal Communications Commission unanimously denied China Mobile authority to operate in the United States in 2019, citing “substantial” national security concerns about links between the company and the Chinese state. In 2021, the Biden administration also issued sanctions limiting the ability of Americans to invest in China Mobile after the Pentagon linked it to the Chinese military.“It’s mind-boggling that we are unknowingly allowing China to survey Americans and we’re doing nothing about it,” said Ivan Tsarynny, CEO of Feroot.“It’s hard to believe that something like this was accidental. There are so many unusual things to this. You know that saying ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire’? In this instance, there’s a lot of smoke,” Tsarynny said.Stewart Baker, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer and consultant who has previously served as a top official at the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency, said DeepSeek “raises all of the TikTok concerns plus you’re talking about information that is highly likely to be of more national security and personal significance than anything people do on TikTok,” one of the world’s most popular social media platforms.Users are increasingly putting sensitive data into generative AI systemseverything from confidential business information to highly personal details about themselves. People are using generative AI systems for spell-checking, research, and even highly personal queries and conversations. The data security risks of such technology are magnified when the platform is owned by a geopolitical adversary and could represent an intelligence goldmine for a country, experts warn.“The implications of this are significantly larger because personal and proprietary information could be exposed. It’s like TikTok but at a much grander scale and with more precision. It’s not just sharing entertainment videos. It’s sharing queries and information that could include highly personal and sensitive business information,” said Tsarynny, of Feroot.Feroot, which specializes in identifying threats on the web, identified computer code that is downloaded and triggered when a user logs into DeepSeek. According to the company’s analysis, the code appears to capture detailed information about the device a user logs in froma process called fingerprinting. Such techniques are widely used by tech companies around the world for security, verification, and ad targeting.The company’s analysis of the code determined that there were links in that code pointing to China Mobile authentication and identity management computer systems, meaning it could be part of the login process for some users accessing DeepSeek.The AP asked two academic cybersecurity expertsJoel Reardon of the University of Calgary and Serge Egelman of the University of California, Berkeleyto verify Feroot’s findings. In their independent analysis of the DeepSeek code, they confirmed there were links between the chatbot’s login system and China Mobile.“It’s clear that China Mobile is somehow involved in registering for DeepSeek,” said Reardon. He didn’t see data being transferred in his testing but concluded that it is likely being activated for some users or in some login methods. Contact the AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/. Byron Tau, Associated Press
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The Trump administration said Tuesday that it is pulling almost all U.S. Agency for International Development workers off the job and out of the field worldwide, moving to all but end a six-decade mission to shore up American security by fighting starvation, funding education, and working to end epidemics.The administration notified USAID workers in emails and a notice posted online, the latest in a sudden dismantling of the aid agency by returning political appointees from President Donald Trump’s first term and billionaire Elon Musk’s government-efficiency teams who call much of the spending on programs overseas wasteful.The order takes effect just before midnight Friday and gives direct hires of the agency overseasmany of whom have been frantically packing up households in expectation of the announcement30 days to return home unless they are deemed essential. Contractors not determined to be essential also would be fired, the notice said.The move had been rumored for several days and was the most extreme of several proposals considered for consolidating the agency into the State Department. Other options had included closures of smaller USAID missions and partial closures of larger ones.Thousands of USAID employees already had been laid off and programs worldwide shut down after Trump, a Republican, imposed a sweeping freeze on foreign assistance. Despite outcry from Democratic lawmakers, the aid agency has been a special target as the new administration and Musk’s budget-slashing Department of Government Efficiency look to shrink the federal government.They have ordered a spending stop that has paralyzed U.S.-funded aid and development work around the world, gutted the senior leadership and workforce with furloughs and firings, and closed Washington headquarters to staffers Monday. Lawmakers said the agency’s computer servers were carted away.“Spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk boasted on X.The mass removal of thousands of staffers overseas and in Washington would doom billions of dollars in projects in some 120 countries, including security assistance to partners such as Ukraine as well as development work for clean water, job training and education, including for schoolgirls under Taliban rule in Afghanistan.The U.S. is the world’s largest humanitarian donor by far. It spends less than 1% of its budget on foreign assistance, a smaller share of its budget than some countries.Health programs like those credited with helping end polio and smallpox epidemics and an acclaimed HIV/AIDS program that saved more than 20 million lives in Africa already have stopped. So have monitoring and deployments of rapid-response teams for contagious diseases such as an Ebola outbreak in Uganda.Hundreds of millions of dollars of food and medication already delivered by U.S. companies are sitting in ports because of the administration’s sudden shutdown of the agency.Democratic lawmakers and others say the USAID is enshrined in legislation as an independent agency, and cannot be shut down without congressional approval. Supporters of USAID from both political parties say its work overseas is essential to countering the influence of Russia, China, and other adversaries and rivals abroad, and to cementing alliances and partnerships.The decision to withdraw direct-hire staff and their families earlier than their planned departures will likely cost the government tens of millions of dollars in travel and relocation costs.Staff being placed on leave include both foreign and civil service officers who have legal protection against arbitrary dismissal and being placed on leave without reason.The American Foreign Service Association, the union which represents U.S. diplomats, sent a notice to its members denouncing the decision and saying it was preparing legal action to counter or halt it.Locally employed USAID staff, however, do not have much recourse and were excluded from the federal government’s voluntary buyout offer.USAID staffers and families faced wrenching decisions as the rumored order loomed, including whether to pull children out of school midyear. Some gave away pet cats and dogs, fearing the Trump administration would not give them time to complete the paperwork to bring the animals with them.Tuesday’s notice said it would consider case-by-case exceptions for those needing more time. But with most of the agency’s staff soon off the job, it was unclear who would process such claims or other paperwork needed for the mass removal of thousands of overseas staffers.Musk’s teams had taken USAID’s website offline over the weekend and it came back online Tuesday night, with the notice of recall or termination for global staffers its sole post.The announcement came as Secretary of State Marco Rubio was on a five-nation tour of Central America and met with embassy and USAID staff at two of the region’s largest USAID missions: El Salvador and Guatemala on Monday and Tuesday.Journalists accompanying Rubio were not allowed to witness the so-called “meet and greet” sessions in those two countries, but had been allowed in for a similar event in Panama on Sunday in which Rubio praised employees, particularly locals, for their dedication and service.At a news conference earlier Tuesday, Rubio said he has “long supported foreign aid. I continue to support foreign aid. But foreign aid is not charity.” He noted that every dollar the U.S. spends must advance its national interests.The online notice says those who will be exempted from leave include staffers responsible for “mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs” and would be informed by Thursday afternoon.“Thank you for your service,” the notice concluded. Lee reported from Guatemala City. Elen Knickmeyer and Matthew Lee, Associated Press
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