By Diana Cariboni*

Photo: Presentes Archive/Paraguay

Regardless of the outcome of the US elections, religious and conservative sectors that have forged close alliances with Donald Trump's administration will continue to use influence and money abroad to change laws and policies they see as threats to their worldview.

“We cannot allow regions like Africa, Latin America, or Eastern Europe to become secularized. We must ensure… bastions of the culture of life, family, and religious freedom in those regions. We do not live in a separate world. What we do abroad will help us here in the United States.” This was stated in March of last year by anti-abortion Christian activist Alfonso Aguilar at a meeting of ultraconservative Hispanics in the United States.

Aguilar, a fervent Trump supporter, was then a member of the board of the powerful Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), in addition to chairing the International Human Rights Group.

These are two of the 28 US entities that, according to research we published on openDemocracy last week, sent at least $280 million to different regions of the world over the past decade to promote their strict vision of the traditional family, which opposes abortion, sex education, and equality for LGBTI people.

Trump's lawyer

Over the past 10 days, Polish women have taken to the streets en masse to protest the Constitutional Court's decision to ban abortion even in cases of severe fetal malformations (the cause of the vast majority of legal abortions performed in that country until now).

One of the groups promoting this ruling in Poland is the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), led by Trump's personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, who defended the president in the impeachment trial and is coordinating legal challenges to the US election with Rudy Giuliani.

What does a Trump lawyer have to do with Polish women's uteruses?

The European branch of the ACLJ intervened before the Constitutional Court and presented legal arguments to prohibit abortion for fetal abnormalities.

Mónika, a Polish woman who asked not to be named, commented that if this ruling had been issued six months earlier, it would have put her in the "tragic situation" of having to carry her pregnancy to term, despite a diagnosis of a fetal abnormality incompatible with life. Mónika had a legal abortion in February.

The ACLJ's European branch is defending the Polish government before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in another case brought by a citizen who alleged the denial of an abortion despite a diagnosis of serious fetal problems. The woman claimed she was forced to give birth and witness the suffering and death of her child.

Sekulow's group has also defended numerous Polish municipalities that declared themselves "LGBTI ideology-free zones," putting the country at odds with the European Union, whose charter of fundamental rights prohibits discrimination against people based on their sexual orientation.

The ACLJ has spent more than $14 million in Europe since 2007, while the ADF has allocated $15 million to the continent, almost all of it since 2015.

ADF International, whose members have held senior positions in the Trump administration, claims 18 victories at the ECHR since 2010. Among the cases it has intervened in as an ally of other groups is the defense of a Norwegian doctor who refused to provide intrauterine devices to her patients for birth control, arguing that it violated her religious beliefs.

The two groups also participated in the defense of the Italian state, which has been denounced several times before the ECHR for denying homosexual couples the right to marriage and civil unions.

Opacity, disinformation and attacks

This is the first time the scale of these groups' international spending has been revealed, through a review of thousands of pages of financial disclosures filed with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service since 2007. By region, spending in dollars is broken down as follows:

• Europe: 88.7 million
• Africa: 54 million
• Asia: 49.2 million
• Latin America: 44.2 million
• Mexico and Canada: 20.6 million
• Eurasia/Russia: 12 million
• Middle East and North Africa: 9.1 million.

This analysis, however, underestimates the true financial strength of these groups for two reasons. First, they do not disclose how they spend this money; they do not identify their recipients or donors. Furthermore, funds sent through churches or church branches are not included because these entities are not required to report their expenses.

The journalistic investigation allowed us to trace the connections between that money and the operations these groups carry out around the world.

In our region , where 20 groups distributed $44.2 million, we found a network of misinformation and emotional manipulation targeting women to discourage abortions; attacks with the White House on the regional human rights system; funding cuts to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR); and campaigns against progressive commissioners.

The aforementioned figure, Alfonso Aguilar, led an attempt by US anti-abortion groups last year to boycott Luis Almagro's reelection to the OAS, claiming that he "frequently used his position as secretary general to promote abortion."

The initiative failed, but it served as a deterrent. Almagro (who just a year earlier declared herself a " radical feminist ") met with these groups thanks to the State Department's efforts virtual meeting of ADF and the Ibero-American Congress for Life and Family (the platform of evangelical pastors and politicians that met two years ago in Punta del Este, Uruguay).

With the pandemic already engulfing Latin America, six of these groups spread disinformation about the origin of the virus, anti-China propaganda, and actions to discredit the World Health Organization.

We also uncovered more sophisticated schemes , such as a fertility monitoring app

Power that kills

Gaining access to the White House was crucial for these groups to redesign a conservative-majority Supreme Court, which will hear several cases against legal abortion, brought by organizations like ADF.

Trump's defeat could weaken that domestic power to some extent and shift some US positions at the United Nations and the OAS.

But it can also be an incentive to intensify international operations.

In 2014, the Ugandan parliament imposed life imprisonment for “aggravated homosexuality.” The original bill, which established the death penalty, was drafted by David Bahati, Ugandan representative of The Fellowship Foundation (portrayed in the Netflix series “The Family”), the current Minister of Finance. The law, which sparked an international outcry, was suspended by the Constitutional Court.

The Fellowship, which has wielded enormous political influence in Washington for decades, is the group that sent the most money to Africa in the last 10 years ($34.5 million). A large portion, more than $20 million, went exclusively to Uganda.

Last month, the Ugandan government announced it would reinstate the death penalty because "homosexuality is not natural to Ugandans." In the past three months, there have been three murders of LGBTI people.

*editor of openDemocracy