IMF meets in hostile territory of Latin America

Lima: The International Monetary Fund faces a chilly reception as it meets this week in Latin America, the region that has been most hostile toward its policy prescriptions.

There is loaded history lingering in the air in Peru as IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde and her team jet into Lima for the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank from Friday to Sunday.

Many Latin Americans, including some key leaders, harbor bitterness over the medicine the Washington-based Fund has prescribed for the region's economic woes since the 1960s.

In a part of the world long resentful of being seen as America's back yard, the IMF and World Bank's loans and accompanying fiscal policy prescriptions -- commonly derided as the "Washington consensus" -- are often criticised as just another way for the US to maintain its dominance over the hemisphere.

"It's a long love story," joked Claudio Loser, a former head of the IMF's Latin America department.

"For quite some time, there has been a political rhetoric in Latin America presenting the IMF as a tool of a new kind of imperialism."

Cuba is the most extreme case: It slammed the door in the IMF's face in 1964, withdrawing from the Fund five years after Fidel Castro's revolution.

But other Latin American countries also blast the IMF.

Argentine leaders have blamed the IMF for provoking the country's 2001 default, which still dogs Latin America's third-largest economy.

"Where was the IMF and why hasn't it managed to avert a single crisis? Where was it when the world economy was forming not just financial bubbles, but financial hot-air balloons?" railed Argentine President Cristina Kirchner in 2013.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whose country has refused to share its accounts with the IMF since 2004, said of the Fund last July: "First they suck your blood, then when you need oxygen they take away the oxygen supply."

Bolivian President Evo Morales resorted to a different metaphor.

"It's like giving your money to the wolf, or asking him to guard the sheep. The wolf isn't going to guard the sheep, he's going to devour them," he said in 2009.

The region's largest economy, Brazil -- which got an IMF bailout from 1998 to 2005 -- found a subtler way to snub the Fund: It teamed up with other emerging powers last year to launch a rival monetary fund to the Western-led institutions.

This is the first time the annual meetings have been held in Latin America since the 1967 edition in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Loser acknowledged IMF missteps in the region, but defended its track record.

"Of course there have been some mistakes and maybe some arrogance, but (Latin American) countries are more careful about their public finances," he told AFP.