November 14, 2007 (LPAC)--Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa announced on Nov. 10 in Santiago that the Bank of the South will be officially founded on December 9 in Buenos Aires, not in Caracas as originally planned.

The date and location of the founding ceremony are significant, given that all of Ibero-America's heads-of-state will already be gathered in Buenos Aires to attend the Dec. 10 Presidential inauguration of Sen. Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. Thus this event, and the Dec. 9 founding of the Bank of the South, will provide an opportunity for a meeting of the informal Ibero-American "Presidents' Club," which has been key in advancing the agenda of regional integration and anti-IMF initiatives. Sen. Fernandez is the newest member of the group and has vowed to play an activist role in the region, as her husband, outgoing President Nestor Kirchner, has been.

The Bank of the South's founders view it as an alternative to the IMF's usurious policies, and its major purpose will be to finance large infrastructure projects, without the kind of austerity conditionalities that the Fund normally attaches to its loans. The founding "will be an enormous step forward for the integration of Latin America, and above all for South America," Correa said, "to finance our own development projects and not the remote-control ones such as those imposed on us by the World Bank, which bankrupted us."