Latin American geopolitics
Escrito por Imprensa, postado em 14 dEurope/London agosto dEurope/London 2009 
From The Economist print edition, Aug 13th 2009
The dragon in the backyard
Latin America is tilting towards China, Iran and the global “south”-and away from the United States
IF ALL goes to plan, by 2012 the first shipments of copper from Toromocho, a mine in the Peruvian Andes, will be sent by train and truck to a new $70m wharf in the port of Callao. From there, they will be shipped across the Pacific to China. The mine is being developed at a cost of $2.2 billion by Chinalco, a Chinese metals giant. Both it and the wharf will be the most visible symbols of the burgeoning trade and investment that are fast turning China into a leading economic partner for Peru and many other Latin American countries.
In the first six months of this year China became Brazil’s biggest single export market for the first time (partly because Brazil’s manufacturing exports fell sharply in the recession). During two days of talks in Beijing in May between Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao (pictured above), an agreement was signed under which the China Development Bank and Sinopec, a Chinese oil company, will lend Brazil’s state-controlled oil company, Petrobras, $10 billion in return for up to 200,000 barrels a day (b/d) of crude oil for ten years from the country’s new deep-sea fields. Weeks earlier China offered Argentina a currency-swap arrangement involving use of yuan worth $10 billion, and lent cash-strapped Jamaica $138m to enable it to stave off a debt default. Chinese companies have bought stakes in oilfields in Ecuador and Venezuela, and are talking of building a refinery in Costa Rica. This week China National Petroleum Corporation and CNOOC, another oil firm, were reported to have bid at least $17 billion for the 84% stake in YPF, Argentina’s biggest oil company, held by Spain’s Repsol.
It is not just China that is taking a much bigger interest in Latin America. So too, in different ways, are India, Russia and Iran. These developments are prompting some to declare the end of the Monroe Doctrine-America’s traditional insistence, voiced by President James Monroe in 1823, that any meddling by outsiders in its hemisphere is “dangerous to our peace and safety”. Never mind that Yanqui dominance has always been disputed by Latin American nationalists as well as by Europe, and never mind that the United States (and Europe) are still far bigger traders and investors in Latin America as a whole than China, let alone India or Russia. What is clear is that there are new and potentially powerful actors in the region.
Their arrival coincides with, and is partly a consequence of, two other developments. The first is the relative decline in the economic and political pre-eminence of the United States after its brief moment of unchallenged power at the end of the cold war. “The centres of power are shifting and the 21st century is about the Pacific,” says José Antonio García Belaunde, Peru’s foreign minister. More specifically, under George Bush the United States was widely held to have neglected Latin America because of more pressing priorities elsewhere, especially the “war on terror”. That neglect has helped others to slip in.
The second factor is that many Latin American countries have become more self-confident and bent on asserting their diplomatic independence. That is either because they have achieved economic stability and more robust democracies, or because they have elected left-wing governments which, for ideological reasons, are seeking new allies. Both factors apply to Brazil, which under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has sought a more powerful role as a regional power of global significance.
The diversification of Latin America’s economic ties has raised in some minds a nagging question: does it foreshadow geopolitical changes? In the United States some Republicans worry that China’s growing economic weight poses a political threat. Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, has noted that China and Iran are making “disturbing” gains in the region. But many Latin Americans prefer to see China’s expanding ties to their region as an opportunity. The region, with Brazil in the lead, is forging “south-south” alliances with China, India, Russia and South Africa to push for changes in what they all see as an unjust world economic order.
But for Latin America two other questions may be just as important, if not more so. The first is whether the industrialisation of China and India is helping or hindering its own economic development. The second is whether growing economic and political ties with non-democratic countries such as China, Russia and Iran could undermine Latin America’s own hard-won commitment to democracy.
