Arabella Advisors, the US-based hub of a politically liberal “dark money” network, has recently been extending its reach into seven countries in Latin America.
Operating under the umbrella of a nonprofit organization not required to disclose its donors, Arabella Advisors wields enormous influence over US elections and politics.
Authors like Scott Walter have highlighted the magnitude of this influence, but little has been said about its operations abroad until now.
In our pro-life advocacy work at the Population Research Institute Iberoamérica, we have repeatedly encountered Arabella Advisors and its pernicious network. For example, we have discovered that Peru is one of its preferred targets. According to the Arabella Advisors Impact Report 2021–2022, they funded over 400 projects in Peru from 2016 to 2022. The New Venture Fund, an organization created by Arabella Advisors to transfer funds from wealthy donors to NGOs working in poorer countries, supports projects by Planned Parenthood’s main partner in Peru, PROMSEX.
The “Mila Case” is one such project that demonstrates this harmful influence through a media campaign to legalize abortion in Peru. Mila is the fictitious name of an 11-year-old Peruvian girl who was raped and became pregnant, becoming the center of news in July and August 2023. This poor girl was systematically raped from the age of 6 or 7 by her stepfather and neighbor. The first report of these abuses was made in 2021, but no one cared about Mila’s case. Unfortunately, she was only one of thousands of girls sexually abused in the poor areas of our country and the world.
So, why did Mila’s case become relevant in 2023 and not when it was first reported? Unfortunately, the international pro-abortion lobby focused on Mila only when her case offered the most opportune moment to use her abortion as a symbol that demanded the expansion of legal abortion in Peru. Once her case was on the front page, the international pro-abortion machinery sprang into action.
The Population Research Institute’s Latin America office constantly monitors any abortion initiatives that arise in Peru and throughout the region. When we detected the first signals of the upcoming propaganda barrage, we immediately went into action, to stop the campaign and reveal its true intentions. PROMSEX, the most important pro-abortion NGO in Peru, sponsored the Mila case judicially and directed a media narrative in which Peru’s Minister of Women was involved. This was no coincidence: PROMSEX is a partner of Planned Parenthood and the New Venture Fund, as acknowledged in each of their annual reports from 2017 through 2020. This collaboration no longer appears in their public documents, but that doesn’t mean that their efforts have abated.
In 2023, PROMSEX registered a project with the Peruvian Agency for International Cooperation, admitting to receiving $7,000 from the New Venture Fund. This project, identified with the number 16146, declares the purpose as “financing communication support for the strategic litigation of the Mila Case” and that “a report on the case of the girl Mila” was produced between October and December 2023, three months after Mila’s abortion.
This grant funded the video, but the effort did not gain much traction. By then, a strong protest and coordinated actions by Members of Congress and pro-life organizations were underway. The Minister of Health and the Minister of Women were summoned to Congress to testify regarding the illegality of the abortion in Mila’s case and in four similar cases between August and September 2023. These hearings revealed that those ministers were allied with PROMSEX in procuring these illegal abortions.
With these revelations, PROMSEX’s supposed selective “compassion” for raped girls was exposed to widespread outrage. In this case, as in other prominent cases fabricated by pro-abortion groups in the region, the goal was not to protect the well-being of the women involved but to exploit their suffering to champion the widespread legalization of abortion. The script closely resembles that of the abortion lobby’s current campaign in the United States to “restore Roe vs. Wade as the law of the land.”
The Population Research Institute’s Latin America Office continues to monitor the PROMSEX project. Our investigations have unearthed evidence that the abortion industry works closely, and often secretly, with the system created by Arabella Advisors. They call the relationship “fiscal sponsorship,” and describe it on the New Venture Fund’s website.
With this model, the dark money from Arabella Advisors, transferred to the New Venture Fund, becomes available to friendly NGOs like PROMSEX in poor countries. This maneuver avoids these partner NGOs from locating in the United States to access those funds: the New Venture Fund handles that problem for them, and oversees all aspects of the project.
The summary sheet of the PROMSEX project indicates that the $7,000 grant that produced the video in the Mila case was actually one of many included in an agreement signed between the New Venture Fund and PROMSEX on September 18, 2018. That arrangement represents a flagrant abuse of the purpose of international cooperation, which should be aimed at helping a country’s legitimate development, not changing Peruvian laws.
The abortion industry has countless ways to finance the expansion of the death market. These avenues always employ fraudulent rhetoric, for a good reason: killing an innocent unborn child in the womb horrifies any sensitive human spirit, and the abortion industry knows it. So their efforts to raise public or private funds for promoting abortion require a perversion of language as well as morals conceal their true aims. Instruments like the 2030 Agenda, promoted by the UN, provide countless examples of the success of the abortion industry’s constant efforts to manipulate public opinion to favor its agenda.
A close look reveals that funding for the video in the Mila case’s media campaign is justified under Sustainable Development Goal 5 of the 2030 Agenda: achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls.
Do Arabella Advisors’ donors know that the beautiful purposes shown in their promotional videos also include producing videos aimed at legalizing abortion? Whatever the answer, Arabella Advisors seems always to need to put all their actions in a context of equity and belonging, as the New Venture Fund preaches.
Perhaps some do know they are funding abortion. But undoubtedly, many other donors would have preferred that their money not fund PROMSEX’s pro-abortion lobby, which has already received millions of dollars directly from Planned Parenthood. Common sense suggests a better destination for those $7,000 or any other financial help would be to aid Mila and other poor girls in their real needs.
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