On June 16, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin announced he had nominated National Security Council official Mauricio Claver-Carone to become the next head of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). The nomination of Cuban-American Claver-Carone, a fanatical regime-change neo-con in the mold of John Bolton, violates a long-standing unofficial agreement in the region that the head of the IADB would always be an Ibero-American, with an American holding the number-two post.
The Buenos Aires Times claimed on June 20 that the nomination came about because of a “lack of consensus” in the region. Both Brazil and Argentina, whose relationship is extremely tense, each put forward their own candidate. Mnuchin meanwhile gushed that naming a U.S. candidate is evidence that the Trump Administration is committed “to U.S. leadership in important regional institutions.” The IADB, a multilateral lending agency, tends to follow the World Bank’s policy orientation in lending, including attaching conditionalities to its loans.
