September 30, 2022
The Pan American Health Organisation has a new director, a Brazilian by the name of Dr Jarbas Barbosa da Silva Jr, he replaces outgoing director, Dominican, Dr Carissa Etienne, who has done a fantastic job with organizing the COVID-19 pandemic response for the Caribbean.
Her departure seems to be well timed and not marred with controversy. The official notification was done at the Pan American Sanitary Conference this week where both of them spoke. We wish Dr Etienne all the best success and we thank her for her diligence and steadfastness during one of the worst health crises the world has ever seen. She responded like a true professional and with that we should all be grateful.
But, the departure of now fired, former president of the Inter-American Development Bank, Mauricio Claver-Carone, who is also a Donald Trump appointment comes with a little bit of controversy and was done in a nasty way. The board of governors voted him out on Monday past, just a week before he wrote a cryptic opinion editorial from the bank’s letterhead explaining an investigation report that was done to dispel rumours and allegations made against him and staff members of the bank.
I didn’t know Americans got down with the smear and dirty tactics the way petty shop Caribbean politicians do, but here we have it. At least it was contained because less than seven days from that op-ed on bank letterhead he was voted out. Fired. Given is walking papers. We all saw it coming, but now what was this investigation report about and what were the false allegations because we saw none of that.
Here we have it a tale of two transitions. The IDB has not appointed a new president yet and is now headed by its former executive vice president, Honduran, Reina Irene Mejía Chacón, until they find a new president.
We feel the new president will be a Black female. We just see the handwriting on the wall for the optics. A Black-Latino, non-binary person who is a vegan. Yup! Checks all of the boxes! Because you know the optics mean more these days than the substance.