Polarization, security and other social pressures are testing Latin America’s resilience and reshaping its international relations as the region's strategic importance is on the rise.
How can leaders effectively respond to public demands and build the trust needed to ensure stability and reliability?
This session was developed in collaboration with Televisa-Univision.
This is a livestreamed session. Please arrive 15 minutes early as the doors will close at the scheduled time.
At Davos, leaders and experts argued that rebuilding trust in Latin America requires legitimacy plus “performance and results,” with security and state capacity at the center. Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa framed the regional struggle not as ideology but as “democracy versus anarchy,” describing a “war against narco terrorism” that spans streets, courts, and social media. He warned that criminal networks exploit democratic guarantees and diversify into “illegal mining” and human trafficking, making poverty reduction his key metric: “If we break that balance, then… we would not be any better than Maduro.”
Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino, drawing on Panama’s 1989 invasion, criticized weak regional mechanisms: the OAS “do nothing,” enabling crises to fester and fueling migration, including through the Darién Gap. Oxford’s Ngaire Woods cautioned against normalizing leader-removal interventions, noting the poor record of “liberate you” campaigns and emphasizing institution-building and post-crisis governance.
IDB President Ilan Goldfajn highlighted a “double sword”: rising geopolitical attention creates opportunities in critical minerals and energy, but demands stronger regional cooperation against organized crime and illicit finance. Panelists converged on concrete trust-builders: education, responsible public spending, youth employment and “hope,” curbing illicit flows (including crypto), and deeper trade and regional agreements.
Thank you so much for joining us today here in Davos at the 56th edition of the World Economic Forum. We have an incredible panel. I want to thank President Daniel Noboa from Ecuador for being here today. Mr. president muchas gracias. Gracias por estar con nosotros.
Thank you very much for being here.
José Raul Mulino Quintero, president.
The president of Panama, Mulino Quintero, thank you very much for being with us. It's a pleasure to be with you here.
The dean of the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. So, so good to see you. We were already having a robust conversation backstage, so I hope we can keep that going. Thanks again for your time. President del Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo. president of the Inter-American development Bank, Ian Goldfarb.
Thank you, sir.
Muchas gracias.
Thank you very much. It's, it's a pleasure to be here.
If you.
Hear me switching.
From Spanish to English, I won't do Spanglish, I promise that. It's just because most of the people here in our audience come from Latin America. So we'll do a little Spanish, a little English. I'll just introduce the, the subject. Our, our panel today is called Rebuilding Trust in Latin America. And it really has a double meaning internally. It means rebuilding confidence in democracy through the legitimacy through security and stability. But also, I think through the state's capacity, to, to bring back trust in, in its performance, in its results externally. I think it has to do with credibility, credibility that allows us to build a strategic partnerships, long term sustainable investment in in the region and a constructive role in a very turbulent, geopolitical moment. So if you don't mind, we were saying backstage, it's impossible to ignore the moment. As a journalist. I promise I won't stay in the moment. There's so much to talk about. But we do have to address what's happening in Venezuela, in the region. President Noboa, if you don't mind, we could start there. Is it? There seems to be a false. I don't want to call it a debate, but a false choice between stability and security and giving up principles and autonomy in order to secure that. How do you see that equation? And, the role the US has has now promised to, to play in the hemisphere in what it calls its its hemisphere.
Well, thank you. It's an interesting subject. Definitely. But when we were talking about autonomy, it's autonomy of the people. In the case of Venezuela, the people of Venezuela chose a president, and the results were not respected by a regime, by dictatorship. So the whole concept of autonomy is broken there because it's not autonomy. They're just being the people being held hostage by a regime that decided that they were not going to leave. So personally, I think we can always, dream for a better way to do things. But the result is that the people of Venezuela now see hope. Now see a light at the end of the tunnel. There's a half a million Venezuelans in Ecuador, a lot of them that left with nothing. And they had to, you know, relearn life. And I see most of them, if not all of them, are happy with this result. So that goes back to the concept of autonomy. They want a better future. They want the people of Venezuela want a free country, a democracy. And if this is the way that they can obtain it, then I'll be rooting for it.
President Mulino Panama sits at the at the crossroads diplomatically, geographically, economically of of, everything that happens in, in our hemisphere, in our region. How do you see the US intervention in Venezuela and what has happened since? The, the detention and removal of Nicolas Maduro in, in that country?
Well. It's a very complex question. As most of you may know, my country suffered an invasion because of another dictator, Manuel Noriega, in 89. Everything was ready to finalize a big and deep political crisis into such a movement. Those days, Panama used to have internally military troops of the United States. We were in the face last, last phase of the implementation of the Panama Canal Treaty. They left on the 31st of December of 1989, ten years after that. But. That situation, as in Venezuela, was provoked by one single person and his entourage. They, as the president said, they forgot about democracy, human rights and all kind of possibilities to live under democratic rules in general. But Panama Panama has a long standing relationship with Venezuela. We are a neighbor, as my friend, the president of Ecuador, but we suffer the consequences through the immigration crisis that passed through Panama. And roughly speaking, in the last year of my government, when I assumed the government, I went to the area in the Colombia Panama border.
The Darién.
Gap, the Darién Gap, yes, known as Darién Gap. There were five entrances. Illegal entrances for scores. We shot four and left one. And I said, in one year I finished this and I did it in ten months. With a lot of courage and determination. No way. Today we have zero immigrants, but Venezuela, where the 94% of those immigrants good and bad. No, because as I said, in that moment, that particular place within our territory, border with Colombia was as a concentration concentration camp of the 21st century, that dramatic? Was it very dramatic. And you find them, most of them, the majority, 93, 94% were Venezuelan, the Colombian a. Colombia, Venezuela. Chinese.
Caribbean countries also. No. No. Haiti. Cuba.
Haiti. Yes. Haiti. Yes. The entrance as far as I know, through Ecuador. But I might be wrong.
And immigration will be a key topic of our discussion today.
Yes. No. Immigration. It's impossible to run a country in terms of stability. You have a migratory crisis. We have in Panama, I should say, around 100,000 Venezuelans investing, working that simply came to Panama back in 2006 seven, imagining what was going on.
Yeah.
And they they worked perfectly. And they are completely integrated to the Panamanian society. But the other ones, poor people, especially poor people with kids experience maybe the most dramatic nightmare they had in mind. And they went up. The final destination was us, of course, I don't know how many of them crossed the line or or how many of them were returned. The thing is that we are we have now the same situation on the opposite direction, direction, but with very much less Venezuelans. Still, the 90% of the people coming north south are Venezuelan, but we are dealing with 200 something per month and we immediately take them move to the Atlantic side of Panama in the border of Colombia, and moved them to Colombia by boat or by plane, through a process that we have of immigration return for foreigners.
And we will address this immigration crisis and the effect it's had in the region and, of course, in the relationship with the United States. More in depth. But I want to ask Nery Woods about how Latin Americans should interpret this moment, especially in an increasingly contested global order.
Yeah. So, well, as dean of a school of government, I see leaders from 65 or so different countries in the school each year, and sometimes they debate who's got the worst leader. And Zimbabwe will say, well, ours and Venezuela will say, well, ours, etc.. Right. And it poses the question, if another country has a bad leader, why not remove them? Well, who to remove them? And for 100 years there's been norms about not removing other countries leaders. We don't have time to go into those norms, but I just do want to pick up on something the president just said, which is the record of one country removing another country's leader simply because they can is not great in Panama, in Haiti, in Iraq. Let's not forget, the US said we're coming to liberate you in Libya. That it's not enough simply to make one leader disappear. The world keeps imagining that nothing could be worse than the leader that they've got. And then finding, to their horror, that things can actually get worse. Which is why the principle of not doing this has long been with us. Because it's not about getting rid of the one person. It's about what do you do with the institutions? What do you do with the people? What do you do with their aspirations afterwards? Do you go as an occupying force and spend ten years trying to rebuild? Do you bring the whole of the international community together to make them a sort of annexed territory of a global community? It's it's really difficult. And there are other options to going in and capturing a leader and removing them. There are other ways that an international community can support people to end up with a government that is their choice. And so I think when it comes to Venezuela and Latin America, we need to think, well, what happened to those other means of supporting Venezuelans to ensure that the person they elected to be president would be elected? And what's the difference between saying this is a judicial exfiltration? We're just taking this person to put them on trial in the United States and saying, we are now governing Venezuela. We are now in charge of Venezuela, you know, big responsibility. We'll see how that goes.
And Venezuelan resources as well. I see a theme, emerging in our discussion, Ian, and it's not exclusive to, to the rooms of, of the World Economic Forum. I think it's, it's part of what we've seen in the, in the last few weeks, in this conversation about the region, a necessary response to a regional disorder, this intervention or something that undermines sovereignty, multilateralism and long term trust, which is the essential concept of our conversation. How do you see it?
Well, we are in the business of trying to improve the lives of people in the region. That's our region. We do it in in moments where we believe that the market cannot do it by itself, so that we have some additionality. And in the moment of change, moments where we see that there are conditions for a sustainable recovery, we we do enter, intervene with the resources to do so. And yes, that's part of regaining trust because I think multilateral institutions have the ability to bring trust to, types of economic intervention. But you need the conditions to do so. And some of them are more practical conditions. So, for example, in the case of Venezuela, there are you need to have legitimate by our boards to engage. We need to have approval. We we have 48 members of our board. So we need approval of the members. We need to be, in relationship, economic relationship, which we don't have at this point with Venezuela for other reasons. But there are other conditions which are you need to intervene when you believe that there is a possibility of sustainable recovery, when the investment can look at the long term and believe it's a moment to enter and to have investments for the future, and that's what we're looking in the meantime, we are an institution, the IDB. We have been following Venezuela for decades, and we continue to do so even these, these years. So, for example, the data most used are the data that we provide by our proprietary service, social, macroeconomic. And we have been following Venezuela in the best way we can. And we are preparing ourselves for when and if the conditions arise.
Do you know, let me ask just one thing.
Absolutely.
We have regional institutions in Latin America, OAS mainly.
Yes.
Some others in the United Nations. But the problem is that when you go to exercise your right as a country to the OAS, for example, they are very weak, to say the least. They are very weak and they do nothing. They do nothing. We suffer that in Panama. We exercise all the possibilities to get out of the crisis. Venezuela, I don't know how much they did, but the problem is, when you discuss in the OAS and try to adopt a resolution condemning, not saying more than condemning immediately, one, two, three countries exercise the lack of consensus, which is the opposite size of a veto, right? No, I'm not in consensus. I am veto vetoing the resolution. So the inefficiency of our organizations in the region that don't that doesn't resolve a crisis.
I think it's a crisis that extends, beyond the region to to global, multilateral institutions. I was saying at the beginning that there's there's two components to democracy, right? The legitimacy elections and all the values and principles of a liberal democracy. But then there's performance and results. And, at the heart of that president is security. You've had that experience in Ecuador. How's that trade off between acting fast, acting decisively, and making sure that you're preserving the democratic norms?
Well? It's always difficult when you're at war, and we are at war. We're at war against narco terrorism. If you add up the amount of fighters, let's say, from from the three largest, they're not gangs anymore. They are transnational narco terrorist groups. We are today above 60,000, 60,000 armed men and women. And it's very difficult to fight this in a traditional way, almost impossible also, because throughout time, these criminal organizations have adapted to our system. In the case of Ecuador, we have we have a constitution that gives a lot of guarantees to citizens. So they adapt. They know exactly what to do. They know exactly how to get caught. They know how to present in habeas corpus. They they know how to play the game. So by using all the Democratic, let's say, ways, rules and rules, they know how to play them better. That's that's the reality. We're fighting a war that is not only on the street, it's a war that is in courts. It's a war that is in the media. It's a war that is in social media. Also in that, it's a complete war against evil and narco terrorism. That's why the only indicator that we see now, and that I tell my team that that we should see, is the poverty index, not GDP growth, not anything else. So we see the poverty index. Why? Because in a way, we're taking people out of poverty, out of the the hands of these narco terrorist groups. And we're giving them a chance to live a regular life. Ecuador right now, poverty index is at 21.4, is the lowest poverty index rate in the history of the country. And for me, it's the only number that matters. But there's a fine line between protecting people and protecting the rights of people, protecting the rights of the majority of people, or protecting the rights of the minority that wants to destabilize. It's a question that we ask ourselves every single day that we have to fight every day to keep that balance. If we break that balance, then we just we would not be any better than Maduro.
And neither would, this situation where emergency measures seem more permanent, not just in Ecuador, but in other parts of, of the hemisphere. This erosion of trust in the capacity of the state to intervene, in a way that really moves the needle and makes a difference in people's lives. Do you think that's the primary failure of of democracy in Latin America?
Yeah, I think I think we're living in a moment where leaders across the world are making choices between policies of coercion and policies of co-option and accommodation. And coercion is tempting. It's it's tempting in the face of some of the atrocities that narco terrorists, deploy. It's tempting when you think you're up against evil forces. But the problem for any society is that if you make enemies of the people within your society, where does that take you? What is the future? Do you simply try to extinguish a whole group of people, or are you actually trying to build a society that in the end, can live together? And we've seen this all over, you know, under colonial rule, you saw Britain trying to do it by coercion in Kenya and India, etc. you saw it in Northern Ireland for years, a terrible civil war, because each side felt that they were fighting evil on the other. And you've, you know, we've we've seen it in Colombia, in, in Latin America, we've seen three different approaches to internal. Some would say, you know, terrorism to internal groups that pose a security threat and risk both to the state and to other citizens. But my observation, looking right across the world is that each of these situations that's been resolved has ended up having to be resolved through dialogue. Dialogue doesn't mean embracing narco terrorism, narco terrorists, but it does mean thinking about how you deal with adversaries without making them into perpetual enemies. It does mean look at the experience of other countries in finding a way to build to a future together, because in the end, a society that is in a perpetual civil war is never going to be secure for anybody, not for its citizens, not for its government, not for its international investors. And so, you know, in Northern Ireland, it endured decades before people came together and had the courage to create a process for actually talking through what it would take to live side by side and not live in fear of terror every day.
Let me change the tone a little bit before we go to our audience for questions, because, Latin America seems to be back at the center of global geopolitics. And it's not because of its internal challenges, which we've already covered, some of them, but because the world increasingly needs or depends on the region for its resources, migration, control and policy alignment. So, Ian, in terms of the opportunity there, a world that is more dependent of Latin American resources, of Latin American, stability, political alignment. What does that mean for, for the region, for the region's future?
Well, it is definitely we are seeing more attention to the to the hemisphere, to the region. And this is a double sword, because at the same time, there is a lot of challenges and geopolitical issues that came come to the to the forum, but there's also opportunities. And our challenge together is to use these challenges and enhance the opportunities. You mentioned critical minerals. Definitely. If the world is looking for safe supply chains to diversify them and the region is responsible at least one third of the minerals of the world. This is the place where we can embrace and be part of the global economy in a constructive way. And the way to do it is, of course, bringing value, bringing investment, bringing processing, try to bring more job creation. With this opportunity, there are other opportunities, energy supply also very important coming from the region. Security we are part of this discussion of security is very important. This is about organized crime. It is not about just one country. It's not about only Ecuador, Panama. It is across the region. One thing that surprised me the most when I got to the job was that the development bank will do security. We cannot hire police or military, but we created the Alliance for security because every other president in the region, independent of the political side, will tell us for development. We need to deal with security. So the alliance is against the organized crime, is, about organizing ourselves, is about exchanging information. For example, one result of the of the of the alliance is exchanging criminal records that we didn't have when one, one criminal crossed the border, we didn't exchange. So now we are doing it, or we're using technology to use Brazilian, for example, looking at illegal mining in Amazon and do it in the rest, things like that. We need to start using intelligence. Why is it that regional opportunity? Because part of the organized crime and narco traffic is part of the region, and it's opportunity for us to embrace it and to try to do it in a constructive way through dealing with social, as the president mentioned, dealing with the institution, giving them the support where the state can be present, and finally dealing with the legal, Transfer of money that we can try to work.
Ian was mentioning President Mulino, the political spectrum, the ideological spectrum in Latin America, how it has shifted from a more leftist governments in Latin America to a mix of conservative and leftist governments. How do you see that in terms of the global cooperation that is needed? In, in, in the hemisphere, given everything that we're seeing in the world right now?
I think that the financial institutions are working better than years ago, and they are putting in the balance whether I'm going to help a dictator or I'm going to use those funds to help the development of democratic nation. I think that is a key element, because at the end, for example, we are fighting in Panama because we inherited the former government and the government. The double Panama has a public debt of 56,000 million USD. That's enormous for a country like US.
$56 billion.
Billions. Yes. It's enormous. I have with me the Minister of Finance. I have been a hero in a very dramatic year, trying to balance, to put fiscal controls to reduce the level of deficit, 3.5 points from seven, three, five to close to four. So it's important to make the government function not only in terms of politics that consume a lot of time, but at the very end, democracy is discussion is that wide variety of opinions that you have to listen, but also to conduct a nation. I think one of the problems that we are facing in the region is education. I'm entering in a process of transforming the law of education in Panama that was enacted in 1946. And no one has dared to enter into that process. I did it, and I hope that more or less March, April, we will have a draft to go to the Congress or to the Assembly. That's important. Investing in education is a one generation period of time that you have to wait.
Especially at a time where technology is impacting us.
At this moment in Panama.
That is.
Those kids or students who has the chance know how to be rich people. Many, the majority of them, the fathers are making a big effort to send their children to private school. It doesn't mean that you are rich. No. But the majority in the in the public schools face a gap, a big gap between one another big gap. And that brings in the medium and long run a lot of instability because there will be students that say, what do you have for me? Opportunities. I don't see any. And they are the ones who goes for the easy life with a lot of money, short life and a lot of money. Narco trafficking.
Yeah. And it's tied to what President Obama was saying exactly. Combating poverty, investing in education.
We have to face that. I think that Panama and Ecuador are facing a problem with narco trafficking. We just finished 2025 with that enormous amount of drug seized, 155 metric tons, tons. That's a lot of cocaine. That's a lot of.
Cocaine and a lot of resources for those criminal organizations.
One one single ship, 13.5 tons in one ship. So that funds part of those funds. Enter the society.
Yeah. Through the I don't want to say something, but if you don't mind, let me open the floor for questions, because we only have a few minutes left. And I do want the audience to to have the opportunity. Housekeeping item, because this session is being televised, I'm going to ask you to stand up. Once I point to you and you have a microphone, brief introduction and brief question so we can get to as many as possible here in the audience. So please go ahead over here if you can. Please stand up and introduce yourself.
Thank you, thank you and thank you for the opportunity and your words. My name is Camila. I'm from Caracas, Venezuela, and I'm an economist. I'm also a global shaper, and I'm here with the World Economic Forum. Throughout my life, I've been fascinated by the way that money moves across the region, and I've worked from humanitarian aid to private equity, the discourse for the Venezuelan situation right now, or at least the economic argument, is that the new inflow of money and investment will result in the benefit and positive outcomes for the Venezuelan people. My question is that this new inflow of money could actually disrupt the way the money moves in the region, and I wanted to know if there is a possibility of regional alignment for the priorities of this investment, and if there is not a possibility of alignment so far, how can we make that happen?
Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Over here Ian I don't know if you want to tackle that now. You're.
I don't think there is a regional, discussion about where the flows to Venezuelans are going. I think we are in a moment of, still a political environment to be, to be resolved. I believe that there will be a moment where, we will need to have a very important discussion about whether where the resources should be, should be allocated, multilateral development banks and others, IMF and others should be a discussion. And at that moment, it will be very important to have alignment in the region and alignment between several of the members of where is that where the resources have the most potential. What I can say is that everybody is being prepared for that moment to see where, you need more resources and not only the resources, but also the policies. Sometimes the policies are as important than the resources, rules, changes, institutions. Those are very, very important.
And I agree. Look, the natural resources across Latin America give me huge optimism for the continent. It's got extraordinary resources, extraordinary talent. It's also got over the last few decades, people who have fought really hard for democracy and for democratic governance, which has given lots of countries on the continent real security. It's also got, as the president mentioned, habits of cooperation on the nuclear treaty in Southern America, the CAF in the north. So, so all of this is reasons for being optimistic. But now every country on the continent is facing a competition between outside powers the US, China for control and the to me, the most important thing, whether it's for Venezuela or its neighbors, is that each country and collectively the continent has a clear strategy of its own that it doesn't end up simply bandwagoning with the United States or China becoming the just convenient back seat passenger, but rather has a strategy for its own people and for the region itself. And I think that's that's what I would be looking for for Venezuela. It's I sit on the board of a of a mining company. You can't, as a publicly listed company, make multibillion dollar investments in a country whose political system is obscure or insecure. You just can't your shareholders won't buy it because they'll you'll risk being expropriated just after you've dropped your first few billion. Right. So there's a lot, there's a lot more work to do to make the promise of investments in Venezuela, investments which pay off for all of the Venezuelan people and don't either fall into great power rivalry or into rent seeking and resource curse.
And that great power rivalries is playing out as we speak today. We'll see. Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney speaking here at the forum, just days after normalizing their relations with, with China. And I don't have to tell the president here about about those tensions. They live with them every day. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much. Venancio Mendes, also with Venezuela. Just posing an interesting challenge on the perspective of international law. And my question is, what happens when international law is meant to protect those that are being tortured or killed? What happens when those mechanisms fail? Then the ultimate result is what we saw on January the 3rd. So it's a question for us, to to think about this. And the second part of the question is, we as Latin Americans, we have infinite resources, talent. We have incredible geography. We hear, Emmanuel Macron, and the Europeans talking about their own strengths. We hear China on the I battle with the US. How can we, as Latin Americans come together on the topic of cooperation and dialogue? And, what are your what are your thoughts specifically on, you know, the rest of the world is talking about AI and energy. How can we have our own conversations of of strength and growth?
Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. This is a fascinating question. President Noboa. Because I think you touched on this a little bit at the beginning. I was just listening to another conversation here at Davos about the role of shame and pride have in politics, and a lot of the conversation around Latin America comes from a place of of shame and not pride. What do you what do you think about that?
Yeah. First, I think that the the whole discussion about ideology has to be eliminated. I mean, the real enemy is misery and the real enemy is having an impoverished nations that have billions and billions of dollars, trillions of dollars in resources and still can't have three meals a day. So instead of ideology, we should focus on on tackling misery. The fight in Latin America is not territorial. It's not religious. It's not even culturally. It's democracy versus anarchy. So it's different than what happened in Ireland. It's different from what's happened in the Middle East. It's organized crime taking over and replacing a state or replacing, replacing, you know, the, the, the protector figure to its people. So first we need to eliminate the ideology discussion. Second of all, we need an alignment alignment in key issues, reduce poverty, fight narco terrorism. And also in controls. How what do I mean, in controls? There's going to be a lot of shifts in the in the movement of money through our nations. For example, in Ecuador, there were political campaigns that were financed by the Maduro regime. There was money funneled through PDVSA to to certain political parties. Same thing happened with Podemos in Spain. Same thing happened in Colombia. So the whole, structure is going to shift, and we need to use those resources to benefit people, then be aligned also in controlling that money. The flow of dirty money. And today, dirty gold, the multiple in gold at today's price, which reached 4725 using mercury, which is illegal but illegal miners use it the same. The multiple is very similar to cocaine. So even narcos are adapting. They say, you know what? If they catch me with a kilo of cocaine in a highway, I'm going to jail straight. If they find me with a couple of kilos.
Of mercury.
No, of gold, they'll they'll applaud me. Probably. So they're shifting. The the criminal structures are shifting. Now, it's not only, drugs now it's drugs. It's illegal mining. It's human trafficking. Trafficking. And we need to work on the basic things that we all agree. Eliminate the ideology discussion and understand that we're very similar in Latin America. We just need to fight the right fight together.
Ian, you were nodding. So I know you want to say something.
I think the the end of the question is very important. What can we do? It's a very polarized world today. I think we need to start, with our own institutions, with our own families, bringing this dialogue, and in a lot of, our own world, we can start building this consensus. Let me give you an example of this year of our organization. We have 48 members, each one thinking differently. It's a polarized world, but we wanted to concentrate on common interests. What unites us instead of concentrating what does not unite us, we concentrate on security, which we just mentioned. Everybody. We concentrate on how private sector could help us lead for development. We concentrate on how to deal with natural disasters, which everybody was facing. And we concentrated on what, president just mentioned about efficiency, which is not an ideology dealing with what we need to do by evidence. So those four were the basics of what we concentrated this year. And at the end was a very good result for the year we went together. We had record year of projects and efficiency and impact, because we wanted to concentrate on issues that unite us with more dialogue. Will this change the world? I don't know, but it's a good start from our institutions, from bottom to up.
Okay, we are out of time. We have less than two minutes. I do want to have a closing round and ask you a very concrete question in order to make that efficient. In a year from now, if we're here in Davos again, or we see each other in Ecuador or in Panama at Oxford University in Washington DC, what would be the the single institutional reform, the policy outcome that could tangibly help rebuild trust in Latin America? I'll start with President Mulino. Is it education, as you were saying? Is it government efficiency through innovation and technology? What do you think is the single outcome in terms of policy, institutional reform that can tangibly help rebuild trust in Latin America?
Education? Number one, in the long term, not right away. It takes 25 years to if everything goes okay. I think that another mission to fulfill what you are saying is to reduce the level of expenses of the government in useless, in a useless manner. We need to invest. We need to produce employment. We make to, to, to. We have to make our country safe. Precisely for what you say. How can you invest in a country with on a completely unstable. This is doesn't go together. So I think that governments and we that are leading our countries have to be very conscious and address the funds, the public funds to the areas in which we can help the people in a very integral way. It's not making politics with public funds. That's the most easiest way of doing politics. They taking money and give it to the people. That's not the way I'm doing. Investing the public. A budget needs to have a good component of investment in social things, social areas. I think that brings stability. We have to recover a credibility. The politicians are very low in credibility for many reasons. So we have to regain the credibility of the people that we are doing what we are doing for them, not for me, for them.
So I'll take education in the long term. But in a year, if we meet again, it would be responsible spending. The finance minister was, I think, rolling his eyes a little bit. So it's up to him. In many ways, President Noboa.
Youth occupation,
Youth occupation.
We need to check on the tornado chart of our population. South America is very young. In the case of Ecuador, 40% of the people are between 14 and 35. So is it going to look at the population of policy for that population? Easier access to jobs, technical schools, trade schools and of course, education. But it's not as simple as that is to follow up and to help that young man or woman to find a better life. It's not only give them the education, give them education, find them a job, find them meaning, help them find meaning for themselves and give them hope. Give them hope that they're going to live as well or better than their parents.
It goes back to the shame and pride equation that we were talking about.
I agree with President Noboa. The most important is that governments actually set out a strategy, a vision that gives their citizens hope. In too many countries, politicians are saying, we've got to manage the mess that our predecessors made. We've got to manage our international relations with the superpowers. And they're failing to set out a strategy of where where the country can go that actually gives their young people hope and a sense that they'll have a future. I also wanted to pick up on President Noboa's point about illicit flows, because that will crucify the ability to do a strategy. And the single most important thing for me is crypto, because I sat here in Davos last year listening to security chiefs and financial controllers talking about as the global economy goes, crypto governments, regulators, integrity organizations lose all control of illicit funding. And I think that's something that we should come back to next year.
Absolutely. 30s. Ian.
So let me concentrate on the regional aspect, because I agree with education, illicit flow from a regional perspective. In a year, if we have agreements like the EU, Mercosur that has actually started to implement, if I see the region having more agreement between Central America or between north and central or south connection, if I see more of that actually being implemented, I think it's a good step forward.
Wonderful job in doing it in 25 seconds. Thank you so much. This year's theme in Davos is the spirit of dialogue. And I think we see that as an aspiration. And the only way that can make that we can make that happen is through conversations that matter. I really hope this conversation matter to you and it was of your interest. I appreciate President Noboa, President Molina and Ian Goldman for their time and for their incredible insights. Thank you so much and have a wonderful day.
Thank you, thank you.