Claver Carone

TRUMP TRANS 2017

an 12 24

If Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for secretary of state, is confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2025, one of the people who might be reporting to him is Mauricio Claver-Carone.

Trump has nominated the Miami-born Claver-Carone as special envoy to Latin America at the U.S. State Department.

Rubio is likely to enjoy a bipartisan confirmation, as he isn't among the more controversial picks for Trump's incoming administration. But Claver-Carone, according to International Business Times reporter Pedro Camacho, isn't without controversy.

Previously, Claver-Carone served as president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) — a position he held from 2020-2022. According to Camacho, his role as IDB president "came to an abrupt end" when "an independent investigation, catalyzed by an anonymous whistleblower, found he had an intimate relationship with a staffer."

Camacho, in an article published on December 23, explains, "The report also found that Claver-Carone had misused bank funds and policies, though evidence of intentional misconduct on travel expenses and internal card policies remained inconclusive. Both Claver-Carone and the woman, referred to throughout the process as J.B., refused to cooperate fully with the investigation, declining to provide relevant documents or participate in interviews."

Claver-Carone, Camacho notes, "has consistently denied the allegations, criticizing the investigative process and labeling it as lacking transparency."

On his Truth Social platform, Trump announced the Claver-Carone nomination on December 22.

The president-elect posted, "I am pleased to announce Mauricio Claver-Carone as the State Department's Special Envoy for Latin America. Mauricio has served in many important roles, including the White House, as my Senior Director for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Over the last four years, chaos and anarchy have engulfed our Borders."

Trump added, "It is time to restore order in our own hemisphere. Mauricio knows the region, and how to put America's interests FIRST. He also knows the dire threats we face from illegal mass migration and fentanyl. As the State Department's Special Envoy, Mauricio will work tirelessly to protect the American People."

Camacho notes that Claver-Carone is "known to have close ties with" Rubio.

"Prior to the controversies that ultimately led to his firing at the IDB," Camacho reports, "Claver-Carone was known for his hardline stance against Cuba and Venezuela and his advocacy for curbing Chinese influence in Latin America, as Infobae points out. He proposed measures to penalize countries in the region using Chinese-owned infrastructure for trade — a policy he argued would bolster U.S. strategic interests."

*Read the full International Business Times article at this link.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/24/what-the-right-wing-in-latin-america-means-by-democracy-is-violence/

ctrpunch no lnx

jaNUARY 24, 2020

What the Right Wing in Latin America Means by Democracy Is Violence

by VIJAY PRASHAD

It was a curious exchange. Frustrated by the attacks on his party—the Movement for Socialism (MAS)—former president of Bolivia Evo Morales made an audio recording in which he called upon his supporters to form militias. Maximilian Heath of Reuters went to Argentina to speak with Morales about this leaked recording; Morales said, “In Bolivia, if the armed forces are shooting the people, killing the people, the people have the right to organize their security.”

Morales’ anxiousness is rooted in fact. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights—a body of the pro-U.S. Organization of American States—reported in December 2019 that there have been a series of massacres conducted by the armed forces of the current interim government in Bolivia. The use of the word “massacre” in this report is significant; these were not clashes or conflicts, but the targeted murder of civilians who supported MAS and Morales.

The interim president of Bolivia, Jeanine Áñez Chávez, has made inflammatory statements about the indigenous support base of MAS and Morales. She has frequently spoken of them with derision, even saying that she dreams of a Bolivia without “satanic indigenous rites” and that “the city is not for the Indians.” Áñez signed Supreme Decree no. 4078 that exempted the military from any criminal responsibility for its use of force; she wants to ban MAS, and her interior minister has filed a warrant for the arrest of Morales. This is a rapid and disturbing attack on the political fabric of Bolivia.

Apology

Morales’ statement about militias came merely as a way to say that he worried about the repression and violence occasioned by the interim government and the military, now immune from prosecution. U.S. President Donald Trump’s main envoy to Latin America—Mauricio Claver-Carone (who organized the bankrupting $57 billion loan to Argentina when he was the U.S. director at the International Monetary Fund)—went to Bolivia and attacked Morales. Morales, Claver-Carone said, is fomenting insurrection from Argentina. This is a bizarre statement.

Morales was re-elected in 2014. There was not a whiff of impropriety in that election. He had a mandate to remain in office until January 2020. Even if there was a problem in the 2019 election, he should have remained in office until this month. But he was removed by a U.S.-backed military coup. That coup is not the insurrection that worries Claver-Carone. What worries him is that Morales is concerned about his supporters who are being intimidated and killed. It was not the coup, but Morales’ statement of anguish that became the scandal. Morales then apologized for his statement.

Elections

Bolivia will face an election on May 3. The Movement for Socialism Party nominated Luis Arce Catacora, Bolivia’s former minister for the economy, as its presidential candidate, and David Choquehuanca, Bolivia’s former foreign minister, as its vice-presidential candidate. MAS has been deeply bruised. More than 100 government officials from the MAS party are either in detention or face criminal charges, while a handful are in the Mexican embassy in La Paz (they have been denied safe passage to the airport).

The anti-coup uprising in Chapare province led the interior minister Arturo Murillo to make a statement that he would perhaps disenfranchise the entire province if the rebellion continues (the rebels burned down a hotel that he owns). Supporters of MAS and its party workers are afraid to leave their homes, let alone campaign in the election. Morales’ statement came as a mirror of their own anxiousness.

No one imagines that there is going to be a “fair election.” The Trump administration has said it will send a USAID team to Bolivia to monitor the situation, and then to resume U.S. aid to the country; the U.S. will also monitor the elections. Between the U.S. monitors and Supreme Decree no. 4078, the conditions for a fair election simply do not apply.

And not many outside the region seem to have any problem with this attack against democracy.

‘Staggering Number’

On January 14, the UN’s human rights body released a brief statement on the killings of human rights activists in Colombia. The UN said that a “staggering number of human rights defenders” were killed last year in Colombia; by the UN’s count, between 107 and 120 activists were murdered. In 2018, 115 human rights defenders were killed, and in the first two weeks of January of this year, 10 human rights defenders have already been murdered. Most of them are from left-wing people’s organizations.

The UN numbers are conservative. For 2018, the Center for Research and Popular Education Peace Program, based in Colombia, documented 1,151 death threats, 648 assassinations, and 304 cases of physical injuries. But the UN’s trendline is correct. Of the murders last year, 98 percent took place in very poor rural areas. The killers, the UN suggests, are “criminal groups and armed groups linked to illicit economies in areas vacated by the FARC-EP.” In other words, right-wing paramilitary groups and their affiliated drug gangs have taken advantage of the peace treaty signed by the Left to terrorize the countryside.

In the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research dossier on Colombia (December 2019), the argument is made that the Colombian oligarchy does not want to move toward peace because this would shift the needle of Colombian politics toward the people’s movements and the Left. The continuation of the war—now as assassination and intimidation—favors the oligarchy. They prefer this violence to democratic politics.

These targeted murders and this targeted intimidation is only one part of the problem in Latin America. The other is that this region—with its outrageous social inequality—experiences violence at extreme levels. While Latin America is home to only 8 percent of the world’s population, 33 percent of all homicides occur in the region. This includes high violence against young men, and it includes the highest rates of femicide in the world. None of the right-wing governments are interested in addressing this fundamental problem for the hemisphere.

What the government of Iván Duque is doing in Colombia is what the interim government of Jeanine Áñez is doing in Bolivia—both are using extreme state violence against trade unionists and peasant organizers, against socialist leaders and indigenous leaders. This extreme violence undermines the possibility of democracy and allows the oligarchy to be re-elected in polling booths where the Left not dare enter.

Héroes del Ñancahuazú

...

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/31/mauricio-claver-carone-cuba-national-security-council-805571

caputo

Trump is poised to promote an international finance official tied to Sen. Marco Rubio to lead Western Hemisphere Affairs at the National Security Council, making him the fourth member of an unofficial team of top pro-democracy Cuba hard-liners who are executing and advocating the administration’s Latin American policies.

Mauricio Claver-Carone, an attorney who rose to prominence in conservative foreign policy circles as a writer for the Capitol Hill Cubans blog and as the executive director of the U.S. Cuba Democracy PAC, advised Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. He then joined Trump’s transition team for the U.S. Treasury Department, where he was instrumental in U.S. sanctions on Venezuela’s president, who was labeled a “dictator” by the Trump administration. ...Now the acting U.S. executive director at the International Monetary Fund, Claver-Carone will work under National Security Advisor John Bolton and coordinate White House policy with the State, Treasury and other departments. Reached by phone, Claver-Carone said he couldn’t comment.

Claver-Carone joins fellow Cuban-Americans promoted by Trump to execute a hardline foreign policy in which Cuba is seen as a major disruptor in Latin-American affairs: Carlos Trujillo (U.S. Ambassador to the Organization of American States), Eliot Pedrosa (U.S. Alternate Executive Director of the InterAmerican Development Bank) and Tomas Regalado (head of Radio Marti).

That places the president’s foreign policy in the region in the hands of top anti-Castro hard-liners in the areas of White House policy, multi-lateral policy, finance and media.

“We have people who understand the cause, and not just the symptoms, of the problems in Latin America — not all the problems — and that is Cuba,” said Otto Reich, who has a long foreign policy résumé under former presidents Reagan, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush.

“The United States has been a fire brigade in Latin America for the last 60 years and we have ignored, to a large degree, the arsonist,” Reich said. “Look at Venezuela today. The Cubans run the military intelligence systems, strategic comms, the voter rolls, the ports, airports, counter-intelligence police. In Nicaragua, it’s practically the same thing. They’re supporting [Nicaragua President Daniel] Ortega. The Cubans are in Bolivia supporting Evo Morales, and they were supporting the violence in Colombia, in Argentina and in Brazil.”

Venezuela’s deteriorating economy and failed-state government are leading to the largest mass-migration in the hemisphere — an estimated 2 million people — and is on pace for an inflation rate of 1 million percent, meaning a person who had $1 million before the crisis hit now has a worth of $1.

Reich, a former ambassador to Venezuela who’s now a lobbyist, said Claver-Carone’s intelligence and background make him ideal to understanding Venezuela’s problems and the influential role of trade and finance in the region. He said his “strong personality” makes him a good fit in national security circles because “it attracts strong personalities.”

Trujillo, for instance, worked with Vice President Mike Pence to persuade a majority of the Organization of American States to vote to eventually expelVenezuela from the organization.

All have close ties to Rubio, who’s playing a central role in setting U.S. policy in Latin America as chair of the Senate’s Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. Rubio has a close relationship with Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who successfully pushed for tougher Venezuela sanctions Rubio had been calling for — including penalties that target a Venezuelan official implicated in an assassination plot against the senator.

Rubio and Florida GOP Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart were architects of Trump’s policy to unwind President Barack Obama’s rapprochement with Cuba, and used as a reference point the “Military Transparency Act” that Rubio had previously written with the input of Claver-Carone.

Claver-Carone was not involved directly in the issue because he was a former registered lobbyist on Cuba-related issues and felt he shouldn’t be involved directly in Cuba policy for two years after entering the administration, according to a knowledgeable source.

Claver-Carone’s former lobbying, blogging and political activity have made him a target of pro-Cuba engagement activists who supported Obama’s policy.

"Claver-Carone built his career peddling campaign cash to dissuade members of Congress from revising our failed Cuban embargo policy,” said James Williams, president of a group called Engage Cuba, who also criticized Claver-Carone for elections and ethics complaints that had been filed against him years ago.

Rubio warns of possible civil war in Nicaragua

By ELI OKUN

“It's a mistake to appoint someone with such poor judgment and lousy ethics to direct White House policy toward the rest of the Americas, especially at this critical time in the region,” Williams said.

Williams and other activists also noted that Claver-Carone had once called himself a “Never Trump” Republican during the 2016 GOP presidential primary when he backed Sen. Rubio’s failed presidential campaign.

Brian Ballard, Trump’s former Florida lobbyist and a top fundraiser for the president’s 2016 campaign, laughed at the description of Claver-Carone as anti-Trump. Ballard, whose firm also employs Reich as a lobbyist, said Claver-Carone was instrumental in advising the president’s campaign and then his administration.

Along with Trujillo and Pedrosa, Ballard said, Cuba, Venezuela and their allies will become increasingly isolated in the region.

“President Trump’s anti-Castro policy couldn’t be better served than by having three of these important men in such important posts,” Ballard said. “All three have served the country well to rid the hemisphere of the Maduro-Castro axis.”

Mauricio Claver-Carone, the new Latino on Trump's team | AL DÍA News

aldianews.com/articles/politics/national/mauricio-claver-carone-new-latino.../53944

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:{Sep 19, 2018 - Proof of this is the presumed rise of the lawyer and writer of the Capitol Hill Cubans blog, :{Mauricio Claver:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:-:{Carone:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, who was also the :{executive:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Cuba hardliner elevated to key security counsel post | McClatchy ...

https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white.../article217597830.html

Aug 30, 2018 - Claver-Carone will take over the influential White House department for Juan ...Mauricio Claver-Carone, executive director of Cuba Democracy ...