This coming Thursday, March 16, Dante Mossi, the president of the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI), will face off in a public debate with specialists to answer questions about the financial support offered by the entity to the Daniel Ortega regime.
During the meeting, he will face Manuel Orozco, director of the Migration, Remittances and Development program of the Inter-American Dialogue, and Ryan Berg, researcher of the Americas Program at the Center for International Strategic Studies (CSIS), who they will question how consistent “lending policies are with the Bank’s principles.”
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“The Bank has been a fundamental partner with respect to regional efforts in a variety of lending initiatives in Central America. One of its main borrowers, Nicaragua, has increased its dependence on loans since 2018 in the midst of a political and economic crisis,” highlights the Inter-American Dialogue website.
CABEI, a multilateral development bank, currently has 25 “active loans” to finance the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, with approved funds totaling more than 3.5 billion. According to the agreements, these funds will be used for infrastructure projects, but the lack of transparency of the dictatorship calls into question the implementation of these amounts.
The independent organization Urnas Abiertas also joined the demand that Dante Mossi respond to the accusations of financing a dictatorship like that of Ortega and Murillo. In addition, it showed a database where they analyze the Public Investment Program in the execution of 1,030 projects and 5,473 investment works in the period 2017-2021.
Urnas Abiertas criticizes that future generations “are getting into debt with projects in which they cannot influence -because citizen participation is suspended-, and those who cannot carry out social audits either -due to serious deficiencies in transparency-“.
The Central American Bank for Economic Integration is the main “sponsor” of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo. In recent years, the financing of this regional entity went from representing 21.39% of the Public Investment Program (PIP) in 2017 to 39.14% in 2022.
