The KO that Sent Latin America Hiding

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Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it superman? No, it is Uncle Sam overstretching his imperialist hands to follow in the footsteps of the United States’s fifth president.

The modern-day rendition of the imperialist Monroe Doctrine (creatively dubbed Neo-Monrovianism by The Economist in this riveting columnist article) has come to full play with the successful selection of Mauricio Claver-Carone as the president of the Inter-American Development Bank. Claver-Carone, a conservative Republican with little experience in economic development and a knack for American interventionism, will take over the highest position of power within the largest source of development financing in Latin America--a position that has only ever been held by Latin American officials.

This action is consequential for Latin America, both in the short-term and in the long-term.

In the short-term, this appointment represents a final coffin drop for countries like Venezuela and Cuba, who have respectively struggled in recent years to acquire foreign investments from diversified financers because, in the modern world, authoritarianism is a big no-no. Claver-Carone’s historically hawkish attitudes against these countries in particular will ensure that these two nations will continue to struggle immensely from their multiple crises, which themselves were evidently exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis.

In the long-term, though, Latin America stands to lose its once-esteemed potential to rise atop of the geopolitical roundtable. Whereas Latin America’s Pink Tide movement over the past few decades has seen concerted cooperative efforts between Latin American countries to counter the imperialist advances of the United States, the current generation of right-wing governments seem to focus their efforts towards placating a geopolitically volatile Trump administration. Although largely discontent with the appointment of Claver-Carone, Latin American countries were unable to form a cooperative front to back another candidate. And if such disintegration continues to occur, only time will tell whether Latin America really is all hype.