Pablo Cambronero is a member of the National Police Corps and was a Member of Parliament in two legislatures, from 2019 to 2023, first as part of the political party Ciudadanos and then in the Mixed Group. He is the author of two books: La dictadura de la apatía (The dictatorship of apathy) and Una hormiga contra el sistema (An ant against the system).
Throughout his political career and continuing to the present, Cambronero has conducted extensive research into how public funds managed by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) have been used, uncovering a scandal strikingly similar to the one currently unfolding at USAID.
You started requesting information on money spent on development aid as an MP.
Yes, during the last phase of the legislature, I started to touch on foreign affairs and international development cooperation. I got into the committee on these issues and started to find out what AECID was doing. In September of last year, I started with the analysis from 2020 to 2024, checking one by one all the grants. We are talking about more than 7,000 grants, dozens of countries, etc. I uploaded all this to Twitter/X so that people would be aware of what was going on with international collaboration and the general lack of control over what is being done with our public money.
Once it leaves Spain, the money flows without any kind of control. The AECID is in charge of controlling the destination, but what you find is opacity and difficulties in finding out what happens with that money, and that is the object of the investigation we started.
This is the same thing that has happened with USAID.
It is exactly the same. Everything that is coming out of USAID can be found in AECID. Obviously, there is less money, but the aims are the same: buying media and spreading woke ideology.
Public money is being handed out and we don’t know for what objectives or purposes, and in many cases, the purposes are reprehensible, as has happened with UNWRA, whose link to Hamas has been proven by Israel, and to which we have already given €18 million and whose funding is not suspended because there is no control or accountability whatsoever.
Is there no control over the money?
No, there are no responsible parties. AECID requests the subsidy from the state; the treasury publishes it and, when it reaches its destination, there is an entity that receives the aid—and we don’t know what it does or doesn’t do, because it publishes absolutely nothing that could link the money from Spain to a specific project. There is no transparency and, as Elon Musk has said about USAID, it reeks of an international network of favours.
Some of the aid projects seem like a bad joke, such as the grant for “gender-sensitive coffee production in Ethiopia.”
This is not one of the worst cases, there are much more absurd ones. For example, I remember a grant to an NGO that gives out stickers and condoms in Haiti. We could talk for hours about all kinds of nonsense. Keep in mind that there are thousands and thousands of grants which—95% of them—contain woke ideology and words like “gender perspective,” “sustainability,” “resilience,” and “LGTBIQ+ rights.” When you ask, there is some doubt about what has happened to the money, but at the same time, there is also a lot of fear of ending international collaboration. There are people who profit from this money and distribute it in the destination areas, and they don’t want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
How much money are we talking about?
From 2020 to 31 December 2024 we are talking about €1,862 million in cash grants without consideration, i.e., there is no need to justify anything. Within the AECID there is a mechanism called FONPRODE (Fund for the Promotion of Development) that grants credits and invests in investment funds and NGOs dedicated to humanitarian aid. It distributes around €600 million annually, so from 2020, we are talking about an additional €2,400 million. This brings the total to €4,200 million.
But then a law is passed to treat ALS patients and the government does not implement it because there is no money.
Yes, and we are talking about a cost of around €80 million. That is an insidious case, but there are many more. The necessary work that would have prevented the latest tragedy in Valencia cost €200 million and was not funded. A fortnight ago, however, the council of ministers approved the sending of €220 million to Egypt to finance a metro on line 1 in Cairo. The examples are endless, and then medicines against childhood cancer, which the Spanish and European Medicines Agency says are essential, are not financed because they are too expensive.
Have any political parties taken an interest in this issue?
As a result of what happened in the United States with the USAID audit, our work is having a greater impact. For the moment, the only ones who have taken an interest in this issue, albeit still in a limited way, have been several VOX deputies. Of course, what we have published is scandalous, but I understand that there is a fear of touching something like international development cooperation. In an ideal world, such cooperation is humanitarian aid to countries that need it to improve the lives of their citizens, and is a moral obligation of developed countries, but the lack of control has turned it into an ideological woke project. I think political parties are afraid to talk about this for fear of being labelled as unsupportive, inhumane, etc.
In The Dictatorship of Apathy, you talk about the woke movement. Do you think that the arrival of Donald Trump will mean the death of wokism or its conversion into a marginal movement?
Unfortunately, many people have internalised Wokism as a universal truth and it will take several years to dismantle all that. Of course, with the arrival of Trump, we have a golden opportunity to do away with the woke mantras. Trump’s histrionics may not be liked, but his show, like Milei’s or Bukele’s, has behind it palpable economic and cultural realities that have put wokism on the ropes.
