Delegates Split Over Protests

Nobody would mistake Mauricio Pareja, dressed in a dark gray pinstriped suit, for one of the demonstrators swarming through the streets of Washington to protest the policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

In fact, Pareja, a board member of Ecuador’s central bank, is a delegate to those meetings. But as he waited in his hotel lobby early Sunday morning for a bus to take him safely to IMF headquarters, he conceded that the protesters have a point: The gulf between the rich countries and poor ones like his is a major failure of the global economy.

“In my country, the poverty rate is 40%,” Pareja said. “In Latin America alone, Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela and Colombia are facing some very difficult times. The Fund and the World Bank have to pay more attention to the social dimension of these problems.”

Delegates from the rich side of the divide had a different take on the demonstrations. Oscar Knapp, a Swiss delegate who works with the World Bank, said he was disappointed that little has been said about his institution’s efforts to help developing countries, its central reason for existence.

“This is the last organization they should be protesting against,” he said.

The IMF and World Bank staffs feel equally upset to be targets of criticism for not standing up for the world’s downtrodden. James D. Wolfensohn, the former investment banker who now is president of the World Bank, says bank-financed development projects in poor countries have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of deep poverty.

“It’s a bit demoralizing when you see there is a mobilization for social justice when you think that’s what you’re doing every day,” he told reporters last week.

The protesters charge that the bank and the IMF, which lends money to countries in sudden financial straits, calibrate their grants and loans to benefit the givers more than the receivers.

Two of their favorite examples: an oil pipeline in Africa from Chad across Cameroon that, they say, would damage the rain forest and threaten indigenous cultures; and a development project in western China that entails moving ethnic Chinese farmers into the homeland claimed by Tibet, which does not consider itself part of China.

Demonstrators advancing these and other causes blocked many of the intersections surrounding the IMF headquarters, where Sunday’s meetings were held. But buses with motorcycle police escorts managed to find routes to deliver most of the delegates.

Some delegates got up before 4 a.m. to join the convoys. Security personnel said that toward late morning, demonstrators managed to close off all routes to the IMF building, which is about three blocks from the White House. But by then most delegates were in.

Those who slept late and tried to come down on their own met with frustration. A well-dressed man in his 50s alighted from a Cadillac limousine three blocks from the IMF building and, with two younger staff members at his elbows, walked right up to a line of chanting protesters. “No one in, no one out, that’s what the line is all about!” cried the marchers.

With a look of disgust on his face, the man turned and headed back to his limousine, snapping at a reporter, “I don’t want to say anything on this.”

Knapp, the Swiss delegate, cited Brazil as an example of a country that had been helped out of a recent financial crisis by IMF intervention--emergency loans in exchange for tight budget policies that pinched the poor in the short run. Raging inflation in that country has been tamed, he said.

“It was a tough program, but look at Brazil now,” said Knapp. “Inflation is less than 5% and investment is flowing back in. The poor in Brazil also benefit from no inflation.”

Ake Tornquist, an IMF official from Sweden, said the organization helped calm the financial turmoil in Southeast Asia that began in 1997 with the collapse of Thailand’s currency.

“The whole notion that these organizations are making things worse instead of better is something I don’t agree with,” Tornquist said. “There is a lot of misunderstanding and lack of knowledge.”

Meanwhile, at a hotel on the edge of the fashionable Georgetown neighborhood, Gonia Zebra, chief economist for a West African governmental bank, said in halting English that he hoped the outcry against the IMF and World Bank would add to the political leverage of nations like his.

“I think the protests can do something,” he said, “for the progress of developing countries.”