The US government was aware of a campaign to remove a top development banker from power to stop anti-poverty loans to Nicaragua, where Washington sought regime change. In an exclusive interview with The Grayzone, Dante Mossi, who headed the Central American Bank for Economic Integration from 2018 to 2023, denounced a plot by “Costa Rica and Guatemala, with the knowledge of the US… to oust me.”

After Nicaragua suppressed a violent US-backed 2018 coup d’etat which saw hundreds of deaths, Washington enacted the “Nica Act” sanctions bill in 2018, which largely succeeded in cutting off the country’s funding from international institutions such as the World Bank. According to Nicaragua’s former finance minister, the sanctions had two immediate effects: First, the World Bank stopped financing anti-poverty projects in Nicaragua, meaning that the poorest communities lost funding of around US$500 million annually. Second, after the US-sponsored coup attempt in 2018, the International Monetary Fund refused to issue Nicaragua emergency loans – even though its staff recognized the need for them – because they knew they would be vetoed by Washington.

But one international development bank, with experience in sponsoring successful anti-poverty programs in Nicaragua, remains outside direct US control. The Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI) was founded jointly in 1960 by five countries in the region. Though it now has a wider membership, which includes some US allies such as Taiwan, it has ignored the sanctions adhered to by larger institutions and, as a result, it has come under concerted attack. In 2018, when a new executive president was due to be chosen and it was expected to be Nicaragua’s turn, Costa Rica and others opposed this option and after several rounds of voting a compromise candidate from Honduras, Dante Mossi, was elected.

But if those who helped elect Mossi expected him to fall in line with US designs for the region, it did not go according to plan. Mossi told The Grayzone that he not only understood Nicaragua’s needs as the Central American country with the lowest per capita income, but came to recognize its ability to carry out development programs effectively and use CABEI finance transparently. He lifted the bank’s investment in Nicaragua by 70 per cent, relative to the funding it received under his predecessor. Naturally, this led to pressure from the US. So, he said, “I went to Washington to meet State Department officials to explain how the bank’s finances work, and that it was CABEI’s board of directors that made final decisions on its loans”. Despite being aware of the pressure from the US, the board members continued to back Mossi’s judgments.

By the end of 2023, CABEI’s annual report showed that Nicaragua was the country with the largest share of CABEI’s project portfolio. It accounted for projects worth US$2.29 billion out of a total portfolio of US$10.82 billion. All of this funding was directed at poor communities. Examples included a new public hospital for the Caribbean coast, improved water supplies, paved rural roads, protection against Nicaragua’s frequent natural disasters and measures to adapt to climate change in Nicaragua’s section of Central America’s “dry corridor.”

In response to criticisms that he had favored Nicaragua, Mossi posted data showing that it was by far the most effective country in using CABEI finance. “Each country’s allocation of loans depends on its capital contributions,” he explained. “Costa Rica and El Salvador drew down their full allocations, but didn’t spend them fully, while Nicaragua submitted projects that it was ready and equipped to implement, and did so. It obtained a significant share of funding because it drew down its loans and spent them as agreed with the bank. It doesn’t matter what the politics are as long as poor people are getting the benefit of the bank’s finance.”

This was not, however, how CABEI’s work was seen by Nicaragua’s enemies. In February, 2023, a Washington think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), began to lobby against CABEI. CSIS is funded by governments, Western-aligned foundations, NATO and the defense industry. CSIS’s researcher, Ryan Berg, a US academic and self-described “bane of dictators,” produced an extraordinary, 2,500-word diatribe against the bank’s funding of “Nicaragua’s Dictatorship.” The article was full of innuendo but contained few clear accusations. Instead, Berg argued that CABEI was investing in a “financially untrustworthy” state, despite Nicaragua having an excellent scorecard from the main international financial bodies and good ratings from credit agencies. He also cited another US-funded body, Transparency International, which had labeled Nicaragua as one of the most corrupt countries in the hemisphere. But its report on the subject contains almost zero evidence to back up this judgment.

Among Berg’s flimsy accusations, the most specific was that CABEI had financed the Nicaraguan police, despite their being subject to US sanctions because of their suppression of the 2018 coup attempt. However, this was misleading: “Berg failed to mention that he was citing an old project from 2014,” Mossi explained. “The project with Nicaragua’s police was approved four years before I took office, and it was specifically designed to improve police services in remote rural areas.”

Nevertheless, Ryan Berg felt compelled to set out seven detailed recommendations to the US government on curtailing CABEI’s activities, including imposing sanctions on the bank’s senior staff. Berg also called on Washington to find ways to prevent Dante Mossi, whose term was due to end later in 2023, from being reselected. Later in Global Americans, an online journal sponsored by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy, the Ford Foundation and one of George Soros’ foundations, he again called for Mossi’s presidency to be terminated, accusing him of “problematic ties to the Ortega-Murillo regime.”

Mossi denies showing any favoritism to Managua, telling The Grayzone, “I treated the Nicaraguan government with respect – because I treated all governments in the region with respect. No government received more favorable treatment than any other one.”

Nevertheless, the campaign was beginning to have a real impact on his efforts to fund poverty mitigation projects.

“By March, 2023, the pressure had mounted,” Mossi recalled. “I had a meeting in the CABEI office in Costa Rica’s capital, San Jose. When I arrived, a small group of Nicaraguans opposed to the Ortega government were protesting outside. Afterwards, I had arranged a press conference to answer questions about Nicaragua’s projects with the bank. I told the media that Nicaragua’s work was exemplary, it was meeting the needs of poor communities, and there was no justification to stop the funding.”

Two weeks later, a second think tank joined the attack: the Inter-American Dialogue, which is yet another recipient of sponsorship from US government-funded agencies such as USAID and sympathetic donors like George Soros. It hosted a “conversation” with Dante Mossi, in which Ryan Berg was joined by Manuel Orozco, a former Nicaraguan employed by the Inter-American Dialogue and a vocal opponent of the Sandinista government. Faced with hostile questioning, Mossi said that he could only reiterate that “the decisions to approve, or not, the loans to Nicaragua sat with the Board of Directors of CABEI, not with me as Executive President, and the directors never turned down a single loan to Nicaragua because of the very clear humanitarian impacts derived from them.”

The day after the “conversation,” the chairs of the US congressional foreign affairs committees, the now-former senator and convicted felon Bob Menendez and Rep. Michael McCaul, took the extraordinary step of writing individual letters to the presidents of all four countries neighboring Nicaragua urging them to use their influence to halt CABEI’s funding and eliminate what they called “a lifeline to the Ortega-Murillo regime.” The letters were filled with allegations against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government but contained not a shred of evidence that CABEI loans were being misused. They had little effect.

The reason for this burst of activity was because Dante Mossi’s bid to continue in his job for a further five years would be considered by CABEI’s board on May 12, 2023. Mossi explained: “Before the meeting, I realized that Costa Rica and Guatemala, with the knowledge of the US, were preparing a vote to oust me on the spot.” Dante declined to elaborate, though he pointed out that Taiwan also supported the move against him. Taiwan is highly active as a vector of US influence in Central America and Guatemala is one of the 12 small countries that still recognize it as a country.

In the end, “I decided to avoid this by telling the assembly of governors from the five countries that I wasn’t looking for a second term,” Mossi explained. “This paved the way for a new election, but I stayed in post until the end of my term of office.”

The election was won by the Costa Rican candidate, Gisela Sánchez. The decision was received with jubilation by opponents of the Sandinista government, with Ryan Berg calling it a “victory for Nicaraguans.” But as the potential remains for the office to once again be held by an independent actor, it was apparently seen as necessary to take the funding decisions out of the bank’s hands entirely.

The following month, Senator Marco Rubio (now Trump’s Secretary of State) introduced a bill in the US Senate which would oblige the administration to “oppose the extension by CABEI of any loan or financial or technical assistance to the Government of Nicaragua for any project in Nicaragua.” The bill is still alive, although it has not yet been scheduled for a vote – possibly because it is unclear how it could even be implemented.

In July 2023, a campaign by former Nicaraguan NGOs which are now based abroad led to the freezing of a reforestation project jointly funded by CABEI and the Green Climate Fund (GCF). At the behest of the GCF, Nicaragua’s government had been carrying out extensive consultations with the communities intended to benefit from the project. But after further adverse lobbying, in March 2024 the GCF withdrew from the $116 million program, leading to its cancellation.

In October 2023, a third think tank, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) published a lengthy critique of CABEI’s work across Central America, labelling it “The Dictator’s Bank.” Despite its employees having “spent more than a year investigating CABEI,” their work contained no hard evidence at all that related to Nicaragua. In 2022, investigative journalist Matt Kennard pointed out that OCCRP gets more than half of its funding from the US government. The group works closely with US government-funded Transparency International.

Months after Gisela Sánchez succeeded Mossi as president in December 2023, Confidencial, a news outlet opposed to the Nicaraguan government and which has also received copious US funding, ran a story headlined “The Beginning of the End of the “Bank of Dictators” at CABEI.” It said that Sánchez had announced that loans to Nicaragua (and El Salvador) would be curtailed, as they “have already exceeded the limits of the credits they can receive.” This evoked an immediate complaint from the Nicaraguan government, and two days later the bank clarified that “in no way do we want to stop supporting any country” and that it would continue to work with “all member countries” to alleviate poverty.

Nevertheless, in August, Sánchez doubled down on her comments about Nicaragua on a visit to Washington, where she claimed to be implementing new human rights policies which are not, in fact, in CABEI’s remit. Asked about the bank’s support for Nicaraguan police services, she told the Washington Post, “I want to make sure that something like that, that happened, will never happen again.”

In December, CABEI’s new president concluded her first year in office, during which the bank approved one new project in Nicaragua, for a $130 million plan to modernize drinking water systems in five Nicaraguan cities. CABEI also renewed a credit line of $200 million for Nicaragua’s Central Bank. Sánchez avoids publicizing these deals: scan through the scores of press notices issued by CABEI in the course of the year, and Nicaragua was mentioned just three times. Another US-funded opposition news outlet, La Prensa, published remarks from an anonymous source who asserted that “new resources from the BCIE have decreased” and “only the money that was negotiated [under Mossi] is being disbursed.”

However, despite CABEI’s reticence to publicize its contributions to Nicaragua’s anti-poverty programs in the face of Washington’s threats, it appears that they will continue. “In practice,” Dante Mossi said, “Gisela Sánchez is limited in what she can do by CABEI’s own investment rules. Nicaragua is entitled to loans because of the capital it has put into the bank. It’s one of the countries in Central American in most need and it’s very deserving of CABEI’s funding, especially because its government can’t access World Bank loans.” To emphasize its commitment to the fight against poverty, Nicaragua’s National Assembly recently amended the country’s constitution specifically to prioritize it.

The US State Department’s website currently boasts that “almost all international financial institutions have stopped issuing new loans to Nicaragua, and most external financing will wind down by 2025.” But Dante Mossi says that the State Department’s claim is false: “Unless Washington finds more direct ways to intervene in CABEI’s investment decisions, Central America’s only regional development bank can’t sideline one of its own member countries.”

Original post in The Grayzone. Also published in Popular Resistance, Tortilla con Sal, Nicanotes and Internationalist360 (y en español en Grayzone,  La Primerisima, El 19 Digital, JP mas, Nicaleaks y Tortilla con Sal. Tambien publicaron un comentario en Despacho 505.)