A Bank of their Own: Latin America Casting off Washington's Shackles

"The bank, which will be officially launched on Dec. 5, will make development loans to its member countries, with a focus on regional economic integration.(...) The Inter-American Development Bank, which focuses entirely on Latin America, devotes only about 2 percent of its lending to regional integration." That was Lula da Silva, the president of Brazil - not Washington's nemesis, Hugo Chavez -speaking in the Republic of Congo just two weeks ago.

The Albuquerque Partnership wrote an analytical outlook on the Bank of the South and talks about the "good" leftist presidents (Lula of Brazil and Michele Bachelet of Chile) from the "bad" ones -- Chavez of Venezuela, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Evo Morales of Bolivia and, depending on the pundit, sometimes Nestor Kirchner of Argentina. He explains thata "unlike the Washington-based international financial institutions, the new bank will not impose economic policy conditions on its borrowers. Such conditions are widely believed to have been a major cause of Latin America's unprecedented economic failure over the last 26 years, the worst long-term growth performance in more than a century.The bank is expected to start with capital of about $7 billion, with all member countries contributing. It will be governed primarily on a one-country, one-vote basis".

To read the whole article