The US government has announced its intention to present a candidate for the presidency of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Given this fact, we, the founders of the Grupo de Puebla, want to express not only our concern but also our profound disagreement with this manifestation.
By formalizing the appointment of Mauricio Claver-Carone, with the prompt and servile support of countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Uruguay, Donald Trump breaks with sixty-two-year history of this organization, which since its creation in 1959 has always had a Latin American in his presidency.
The agreement ever since its foundation has been part of the unwritten rules of the institution. It has included without fail the presence of a candidate by the United States in its Vice Presidency and representatives of other Latin American countries in key positions, as an expression of a lasting and successful political agreement.
Said nomination by the United States government, significantly changes the balance and will constitute an asymmetry of power and management of the IDB. The USA is the largest shareholder and the only country with veto power in the General Assembly of Governors. This situation would gain an unjustified preeminence in light of the interests of the other countries that are shareholders of the bank; Latin American, European, and Asian countries.
We call other countries that are members of the IDB to join the dismissal of this nomination, which would only consolidate the Trump administration’s desire to end the multilateralism that the world needs today and use the bank as an instrument of imperial foreign policy in the región.
Signed on July 19,2020
1. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero
2. Luis Inácio “Lula” Da Silva
3. Dilma Rousseff
4. Rafael Correa
5. Ernesto Samper
6. Celso Amorim
7. Guillaume Long
8. Iván Cepeda
9. José Miguel Insulza
10. Esperanza Martínez
11. Daniel Martínez
12. Jorge Taiana
13. Aloizio Mercadante
14. Marco Enríquez-Ominami
15. Carlos Sotelo
16. Alejandro Navarro
17. Clara López
18. María José Pizarro
19. Mónica Xavier
20. Evo Morales
21. Maximiliano Reyes