US initiatives are regarded with suspicion in Latin America as their seemingly sound agendas typically disguise attempts to dictate to partners, to coerce them into accepting Washington's rules of the game, or to install puppet governments in the continent's countries. The Open Government Partnership was born within the US Department of State. US Secretary of State H. Clinton announced a plan for it in July, 2011, and in September, 2011 President Obama unveiled the project at the UN General Assembly. Partnership members voluntarily assume serious commitments to increase the transparency and to improve the quality of national governance while allowing greater civil control for the purposes. In the long run, the steps must help strengthen democracy, guarantee human rights, and beat corruption.

The involvement of Brazil in the Open Government Partnership which was, in fact, originally rolled out as a joint US-Brazilian initiative, sent to many of the Latin American governments the message that participation in it would not expose them to the usual risks. Indeed, Brazil's Dilma Rousseff is not the type of character who would bow to Obama's Administration and in any way sacrifice the interests of her own country. The array of countries which helped Washington launch the partnership project at its early phase comprises Indonesia, Norway, the Philippines, South Africa, Great Britain, and Mexico. Speaking of the latter, it must be noted that by the time the level of respect for it in Latin America sank unprecedentedly low, considering that Mexico is dependent on the US economically, financially, and militarily to the point of being occasionally described as an occupied country. The lack of esteem for Mexico on the continent must be the reason why the US chose not to rely on it in selling the Open Government Partnership in Latin America and had to negotiate with Brazil, possibly also in the hope that in the foreseeable future the country would use its leverage over the ALBA peers to draw them into the Partnership's orbit. At the moment, the list of other Latin American countries logged into the Partnership counts Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, Columbia, Costa Rica, Chile, Uruguay, the Dominican Republic, and Paraguay.

The reasoning behind the reservations shared by the ALBA countries concerning the Open Government Partnership is easily explainable: civil society activists and NGOs in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua are routinely employed by the US intelligence community to undermine the countries. It has long become known from experience that chances for a serious dialog with the forces are nonexistent, and it only takes a glimpse of the cohort of civil society leaders who prepared the Brazil conference to realize that the ALBA governments' negativism towards the partnership reflects completely realistic concerns.

The published list of civil society representatives whose costs of participation in the forum in Brazil are going to be fully covered includes Brazil's Paula Martins (Articulo 19), Daniela B. Silva and Pedro Markun (Transparência Hacker), Carina Costa (Programa Leyes y Medio Ambiente PDMA), Honduras' Carlos Hernández (Asociación por una Sociedad Civil Más Justa), Columbia's Elisabeth Ungar (Transparencia), Mexico's Eduardo Bohórquez (Transparencia), Peruvia's Samuel Rotta (Proética), Chile's José Manuel de Ferrari (Participa), and Uruguay's Edison Lanza (CAInfo). Neither of the above are strangers to the Washington-based influencers or show any inclination to defy the US control. Contacts between many of the activists and their US curators are no secret, and their acting as partners of the ALBA countries' governments which would have to deal with the individuals on sensitive issues like governance, openness, accountability norms, and public involvement is mostly out of question.

As planned by the US Department of State, the governments signing in for the Open Government Partnership would submit to annual screening to be performed by “independent” experts and consultants. Those will no doubt be appointed under US oversight and will therefore be serially dishing out politically motivated conclusions. The bias in the US State Department's annual reports on the struggle against human and drug trafficking, human rights, and freedom of speech is fairly explicit when the regimes unfriendly to Washington are scrutinized, making it clear that the assessments issued by the partnership's “experts” watching over them would be similarly unfair.

In March, 2012, Mexico hosted a regional Open Government conference. The country's President Commissioner of the Federal Institute for Access to Public Information Jacqueline Peschard suggested that a concert of the Western Hemisphere countries should develop a comprehensive transparency program and cited Europe where members were actively preparing for the upcoming forum. Her point was amplified in the speeches given by US ambassador to Mexico Anthony Wayne, the Organization of American States envoys, and other members of the far from random crew uniformly convinced in the timeliness of the Open Government concept.

Head of the Regional Alliance on Access to Information, Argentinian Karina Banfi is instrumental in spinning off the partnership project. A lawyer by training, she worked for the Organization of American States as a consultant of the Trust for the Americas foundation and studied declassified documents of the US Department of State dating back to the epoch of the military dictatorship in Argentine. Banfi's role in the investigation of the violations perpetrated by Argentinian agencies during the lengthy probe into the 1994 AMIA (Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina) bombing was appreciated in Washington and Tel Aviv, and currently the energetic and highly successful lady who permanently stays in the media spotlight resides in the US and focuses on cultivating the Open Government Partnership.

It is impossible to overlook the fact that no human rights activists and journalists with views on international relations, government openness, and corruption different from what the US Department of State believes in are invited to the partnership project. Otherwise, one could, for example, expect to see on its board people like Piedad Esneda Córdoba Ruiz, Columbia's former liberal senator who contributed to the release of hostages held by FARC guerrillas, or Eva Golinger who often risks her life for free speech and honest reporting in Latin America. Apparently, neither fits with the Open Government Partnership due to their independent thinking and conduct.

There is a strong tendency in Latin America to interpret the advancement of the Open Government Partnership as a subversive operation leading to the infiltration of government agencies across the continent by Washington's NGO “experts” and, ultimately, to the formation of parallel administrations in Latin American countries. In the countries subscribing to the project, the agents will be given the right to influence the official decision-making, to reorient national policies, and to press for appointments of their candidates to government posts. At the bottom line of the Open Government Partnership, the affected nations will see the governance functions in their countries withdrawn from legitimate authorities and passed to the global centers of control.
 

Nominally, the Open Government Partnership came into being as a joint US-Brazilian initiative, but the truth that it was invented in Washington and is now pushily offered by the U.S. worldwide is not deeply hidden. The eagerness with which countries like Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Ukraine rushed to blend in – and the pressure to join exerted on Russia – invite serious questions. Does it necessarily take a membership in the Open Government Partnership to let the citizens of a country grasp how taxpayers' money is spent and is it right that Kyiv, Moscow or Baku are unable to "implement the highest standards of professional integrity throughout national administrations" unless Washington lends them a hand?

No doubt, in all epochs corruption and untamed lobbing used to be the side effects of democracy, and it is completely natural that the advent of the Internet led people to demand on-line government accountability and maximal quantities of the pertinent information posted on the web. Still, there has to be an explanation why the problem recently jumped to the top of Washington's list of priorities. At least a few reasons are on the surface.

It should be borne in mind that President Obama won the race to the White House as a vociferous critic of the former Administration, which was widely seen in the U.S. as responsible for shocking incompetence, corruption, and unfair military campaigns unleashed to gain control over the natural resources across the world and to enrich the U.S. military-industrial complex. Reacting to the expectations of the constituency, on the first day of his presidency Obama signed the Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies [2] stressing that the new Administration "was committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government" and would "work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration". In a couple of months, Obama introduced the post of a Chief Technology Officer charged with the mission of "using applied technology to help create jobs, reduce the costs of health care and help keep the nation secure" [3]. The latter aspect deserves particular attention. Aneesh Chopra, the tech guru till March, 2012, did a decent job equipping the sites of government agencies with efficient search engines and otherwise facilitating the interactions between citizens and the government, but the signs of public appreciation for the efforts were almost completely missing. At the moment, concerns like the lack of new jobs and affordable medical care tend to overshadow the theme of government openness in the minds of most Americans. Customarily, the U.S. Administration compensates for the sluggishness of progress in domestic affairs by making things look as if the whole world admires the U.S. internal policies and can't wait to follow the lead. This, in part, may be the motivation behind Obama's floating the Open Government initiative in his 2010 UN General Assembly talk and casting it, with the assistance from a crew of hastily picked trustees, into a full-scale international partnership. The world's problem however, is that – "to keep the nation secure" – the U.S. Administration simply can't but put a potentially reasonable idea to work to undermine other countries. Acquiring leverage over other nations' administrations is known to be the key element of the U.S. soft power strategy.

Anyone who bothers to read the accompanying documents in addition to the Open Government Partnership's declaration gets an impression that the whole project is in many regards similar to a useful piece of software infected with a virus meant to hack the computer on which it is installed. The countries which join the partnership and subscribe to what might be perceived as completely rational commitments to fight corruption and to empower the civil society vis-a-vis the bureaucracy unwittingly end up being controlled or heavily influenced by the organizations with the reputations of U.S. “soft power” instruments. The organizations have on multiple occasions been spotted behind transitions like color revolutions or the Arab Spring, which imminently trigger bloodshed and strengthen the U.S. grip on the natural resources of the countries transformed.

Samantha Power

It is anything but a coincidence that Samantha Power and Alec Ross are the main ideologists of the Open Government Partnership. The former is a Special Assistant to President Barack Obama and also runs the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights as Senior Director of Multilateral Affairs on the Staff of the National Security Council. In the U.S., Mrs. Power's ardent advocacy of humanitarian interventions supposed to stop alleged genocides – in the former Yugoslavia, Kosovo, and Iraq – earned her the title of "a humanitarian hawk". She took a role of the same nature in the case of Libya, causing U.S. experts to attribute to her influence Obama's eventual decision to use force against the country looted by Western corporations and to back the Islamists who currently enjoy full triumph over its crumbling statehood [3].

Alec Ross

Mrs. Power projected in a 2002 interview that the XXI century would be an era of failed states and countries suffering from poor governance, admitting that, therefore, she favored James Bond-type politicians acting as nation-builders [4]. It largely explains the U.S. interest in nation-builders that Washington serially pushes countries off the brink and then dispatches the James Bond-type characters to handle the resulting armed conflicts.

In contrast to Mrs. Power, U.S. Secretary of State H. Clinton's Senior Advisor for Innovation Alec Ross, another outspoken apologist of humanitarian interventions and revolutions driven by social media in North Africa and the Middle East, gained international acclaim only a short time ago. In October, 2011, he spoke in Kyiv at a meeting with civil society representatives, which was organized by the U.S. ambassador, and expressed deep satisfaction that governments unable to figure out who had masterminded the Arab Spring were helpless against Facebook and Twitter.

Considering that Power and Ross are U.S. government employees, it makes no sense to blame them for in every way advancing the interests of Washington which traditionally believes in offensives as the best approach to "keeping the nation secure". There is more logic, though, in examining carefully the roles the White House assigned to the NGOs within the Open Government Partnership. Profound conclusions can be drawn from the fact that Julie McCarthy was appointed by the group's founders as the director of its support unit. At an early phase of her career, McCarthy served in the U.S. national security sphere as a research associate with the Institute for Defense and Strategic Studies in Singapore. In the long run, the U.S. policy in the Asia Pacific region, along with that in the Middle East, grew into a permanent part of her occupation. Later on, McCarthy directed the Open Society Institute’s (OSI) Revenue Watch Program monitoring Iraq's compliance with terms of the Oil-for-Food Programme until the country's natural resources were seized by the U.S.. Then McCarthy became the Director of Soros's Revenue Watch Institute (RWI), an organization with the stated objective of promoting "the effective, transparent and accountable management of oil, gas and mineral resources for the public good" [5]. Since, as noted on the RWI site, the countries sitting on vast mineral riches also happen to be the ones "where poverty, corruption and armed conflict too often converge", Soros's institute is ready to promote in them "effective, transparent and accountable management", leaving it unclear which countries stand to benefit from the assistance [6]. Julie McCarthy further worked as the Adviser for the U.S. mission to the UN and a senior adviser to the Transparency and Accountability Initiative which combines funding from the US Department for International Development with that from the same G. Soros.

D.McCarthy

The list of civil society bodies involved with any US initiative has to be studied under X-rays as it transpires now and then that the conglomerate of projects, programs, and institutes boils down to a single "humanitarian" heavyweight – the omnipresent Soros Foundation. Predictably, the above applies absolutely to the Open Government Partnership. If, rather than just skim through its web site http://www.opengovpartnership.org/governance-staff-donors, you make a real effort to figure out the hierarchy of affiliations linking the participating institutes and NGOs, the centrality of G. Soros to the picture becomes impossible to overlook. The pattern is just as easily discerned in the list of the 35 civil society representatives whom the committee of the Brazil forum suggests as candidates to the support unit of the partnership [7] – it appears that all of the people are in various ways linked to Soros's programs. Chances are that the participating countries will at the last moment become aware of the problem.

As usual, the devil is in the details. The declaration originally released by the partnership founders said that every government would be deciding independently what should be done and how, since the "goal is to foster innovation and spur progress, and not to define standards to be used as a precondition for cooperation or assistance or to rank countries". However, the partnership's trailing Minimum Eligibility Criteria carried a passage which read that "in order to participate in OGP, governments must exhibit a demonstrated commitment to open government in four key areas, as measured by objective indicators and validated by independent experts" [8] and, moreover, that all national governments would, on the basis of the “objective indicators”, be given points for the steps taken. The "key areas" are the taxation system's transparency, the availability of information, the disclosure of assets and income information by senior officials and elected figures, and citizens' participation in policy design and implementation. Nothing in the list sounds objectionable, and, in fact, that is what most societies have long been pressing for, but the right to arbitration exercised by "independent experts" armed with their own indicators evokes suspicion.

The main roadblock is not that countries would have to air internationally the stuff like budgetary data, procurement plans, etc. or that spills of potentially sensitive information can make government officials vulnerable to blackmail, which is what agents of every intelligence service in the world dream of. The Partnership's documents, by the way, contain provisions for the protection of the identities of those who would contribute the information which the people in CIS countries, where the national law-enforcement agencies' credibility levels are notoriously low, would surely be supplying. The worst of all, governments in partner-countries risk becoming dependent on the "civil society representatives" delegated by Soros's people to the Partnership board and thus authorized to supervise their respective countries. The records of the Freedom House, Amnesty International, OSCE, etc. leave no illusions as to the agendas of the "independent experts" and the "objective indicators" they rely on.

Consequently, the governments opting for the Open Government Partnership automatically agree to the hacking of control over their countries and to the arrangement under which they would have to compete for points handed out by outside referees. It renders further comments superfluous that the points are, as a general rule, dispensed in line with Washington's preferences.

1.http://www.opengovpartnership.org/open-government-declaration
2.http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment
3.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samantha_Power, http://keywiki.org/index.php/Samantha_Power.
4. http://wn.com/Conversations_With_History__Samantha_Power
5. http://www.revenuewatch.org/
6. Ibid.
7.http://www.opengovpartnership.org/news/ogp-funding-decisions-civil-society-groups-attend-ogp-annual-meeting-2012
8. http://www.opengovpartnership.org/eligibility