RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The election of Mauricio Claver-Carone as the new president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) has sparked criticism in Latin America.
The current advisor to US President Donald Trump and senior director for Latin America on the National Security Council, will be the first US American to chair the IADB as of October 1st.
Claver-Carone, a fierce opponent of the Cuban and Venezuelan governments, won the election as the only candidate with 67 percent of votes, but several Latin American countries had earlier tried to prevent his election.
Following the election, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez expressed deep concern about Claver-Carone’s “reactionary Cuban policy” and called his election a “danger and an attack on the Cuban people”. Ex-president of Ecuador Rafael Correa called him “Trump’s most trusted vassal”.
Colombian ex-president Ernesto Samper sees the election as a “worrying move by Trump”. Some experts believe that this “move” is also directed against China, which has become increasingly influential in Latin America in recent years.
Particularly Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Peru had taken a stand against the hardliner. They initially sought to delay the vote until after the presidential elections in the USA on November 3rd but failed to win sufficient backing to do so.
However, Claver-Carone, who is of Cuban descent, has allegedly already held initial talks with representatives of these governments in order to secure their support for his five-year term in office. Trump’s opponent in the presidential elections, Democrat Joe Biden, also expressed his disapproval and declared that if he wins the election, Claver-Carone would be removed from office, if possible.
A total of 16 countries eligible to vote abstained in the election last Saturday. In addition to seven Latin American countries, there were nine other states from the European Union, which are part of the 48 countries eligible to vote, including Germany, Spain, and France, as “non-lenders”.
In the two weeks before the election, the two other candidates from Costa Rica and Argentina dropped their candidacies on the grounds that they had no chance of winning. Despite announcements to the contrary, Mexico did not ultimately present its own candidate.
Claver-Carone announced that during his mandate he would focus on strengthening the financing base as lender and on promoting unity in the region.
Since World War II, an international agreement had been in place that a European would chair the International Monetary Fund (IMF), an American the World Bank, and a Latin American the IADB. This agreement has now been broken for the first time. Claver-Calone succeeds Colombian Luis Alberto Moreno, who had been in office since 2005.