The U.S. candidate, Mauricio Claver-Carone, currently has the requisite super-majority from the Bank’s member governments and shareholders to win a five-year mandate at the helm of the IDB. In an unprecedented gambit, his opponents are trying to postpone the September 12 IDB balloting until after the U.S. election—exposing their ideological and partisan motives.
Although they have invoked an unwritten rule reserving the IDB presidency for a Latin American, similar guidelines for distributing the Bank’s senior positions have been violated. For example, the second ranking position, executive vice president (EVP), has been reserved for a U.S. citizen designated by the U.S. Treasury Department. According to published reports, in 2018 and 2020, Mr. Claver-Carone was nominated to serve as EVP, but current IDB president Luis Alberto Moreno defied Treasury’s wishes and named another U.S. citizen to that key post.
The Mexican economist Jacques Rogozinski, who served for over a decade in the IDB group, has pointed out that Moreno has broken other “unwritten rules” meant to ensure representation of regional heavyweights, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, and to distribute other senior posts fairly among shareholder countries. Although Mexico holds 7.3 percent of the Bank’s shares, Moreno has named only four of its citizens to senior positions, and none to a vice-presidential position. Rogozinski explains that, although Colombia accounts for only 3.1 percent of the Bank’s shares, Colombians hold 10 key IDB posts, including a vice president position.
Today, Bank insiders say that Moreno is actively campaigning against a U.S. successor. This is more than a bit ironic, because many say that the Philadelphia-born, U.S.-educated Moreno (who renounced his U.S. citizenship when he was named Colombia’s ambassador to Washington in 1998) owes his 2005 election to the support of President George W. Bush. Incidentally, Moreno’s Colombia is supporting Claver-Carone’s election enthusiastically.
Moreno locked horns with the United States—the Bank’s major shareholder—over plans to hold the Bank’s 2019 annual meeting in Chengdu, China. After the People’s Republic of China (PRC) refused to seat the representative of the democratic interim government of Venezuela, a majority of IDB member countries joined a U.S.-led boycott, scuttling the PRC-hosted meeting and embarrassing Moreno.
Perhaps the strongest argument for Claver-Carone’s election is the widely shared, bipartisan goal to synchronize American economies, financial markets, industries, and national development plans—to build stronger, more secure supply chains and to counter China’s exploitive economic model, predatory lending, and destructive environmental practices. President Trump signed legislation in 2019 doubling the kind of overseas financing that will incentivize this realignment—securing $60 billion in lending authority for the rebranded U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. Mr. Claver-Carone, who served at Treasury before being named Trump’s Western Hemisphere advisor, spearheaded the Growth in the Americas (América Crece) initiative, which commits robust U.S. financing to promote private-sector-led growth and security cooperation among like-minded countries.
Several Latin American observers also have told me that U.S. leadership will hold the line against corruption and invigorate free-market thinking in the Bank. Mr. Claver-Carone’s life-long commitment to human rights and the rule of law in Cuba and his tireless work to dismantle the dictatorship in Venezuela have sharpened his understanding of grave threats to the region’s security and prosperity.
Those who see the dire challenges ahead for the region should focus their energies on ensuring an urgent transition and encouraging the most talented professionals from throughout the Americas to join Mr. Claver-Carone’s team. Bolstering democratic capitalism -- empowering people to hold their governments accountable and to build more just and inclusive societies -- is neither partisan nor ideological. It is a mission shared by most governments in the region and by Mauricio Claver-Carone, who deserves an urgent vote of confidence.
The author was U.S. Ambassador to the OAS and Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs from 2001-05. He is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and his firm Visión Américas LLC advises U.S. and foreign clients. The views expressed are the author's own.
