Source: Diario Las Americas

The activities of the 49th Meeting of Governors of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) has begun in the Miami Beach Convention Center.

IADB was created in 1959 as a multilateral financial institution for the economic and social development of Latin America and the Caribbean. The IADB Group is formed by the Inter-American Development Bank, the Inter-American Investment Corporation (IIC) and the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF). On its inception, the IADB was an association of nineteen Latin American countries and the United States, but more countries joined and afterwards non-regional countries that were members of the International monetary Fund joined the bank. Nowadays, the IADB has 47 member countries, of which 26 are borrowing members in the region.

The President of the Inter-American Development Bank, Colombian diplomat Luis Alberto Moreno, said that the meeting is a good venue that will allow Latin America and the Caribbean to prove that they “are well prepared” to face the U.S. economic crisis. He added that last year the organization approved loans and credits for $9 billion, “over 40 per cent more than what it did in 2006.”

Mr. Moreno is taking the IADB to a new stage with the realignment begun in July 2007 to modernize the bank’s infrastructure to be in a better position to face the economic and social needs of the region.

The success of the IADB is extremely important for numerous reasons, among them, because there are many pressures in the hemisphere to deviate the countries’ economic policies from the free market system, using old formulas that might produce political benefits in the short term for some countries, but that hinder or eliminate any possibility of solving the problems of the peoples of the region.

DIARIO LAS AMERICAS that, following its motto “For Liberty, Culture and Hemispheric Solidarity”, for over five decades has been informing about the affairs and events of the Americas, greets the IADB and its President, Luis Alberto Moreno, and expresses its best wishes so that this meeting achieve its noble goals to help all sectors of our continent to improve their lives and develop their capabilities for the good of society.

It also congratulates the Miami Host Committee, headed by Jorge L. Arrizurieta, for its excellent job in coordinating the necessary local support to set up this meeting so important for the Americas in general and for Miami-Dade County in particular.