Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) President Luis Alberto Moreno said during a visit to Cartagena that he believes the Colombian army’s rescue of four FARC hostages in “Operation Chameleon” will boost foreign investment in Colombia.
“Anyone who looks at Colombia at the moment doesn’t look at it as it is today, but looks at it in the long term, where clearly the best days in terms of security are still to come in Colombia, which makes the country a very attractive platform for investment,” Moreno said.
According to Moreno the “narrative” about Colombia at the moment “is that it is a country that is starting to really have a lot of success in the fight against crime, against drug trafficking.”
The IDB president, a Colombian national, congratulated his nation’s armed forces and government over the success of the mission that rescued three policemen and a soldier, who had been held hostage by the FARC for the last 12 years.
Moreno is in Cartagena to participate in LAC Flavors 2010, a trade fair attended by 100 small and medium business from Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, the Dominican Republic, as well as Colombia.
“This is the decade of Latin America, because we are going to be at a juncture in which Europe is surely not going to grow much and the West is still paying the costs of the financial crisis, so we need to think about studying our trade and our economies in depth,” Moreno said.
Moreno will run for a re-election as IDB president in July.