LEFTIST LATIN AMERICA: The Latin American China Syndrome

While the U.S. remains concerned elsewhere, another superpower has done nothing to hide its intense interest in Latin America. The power has no issue working with even the most radical governments of Chavez and Morales – perhaps they even consider it a blessing because deals go down, rather than with a team of lawyers, with a simple handshake. The superpower, of course, is China.

In 2004, President Hu Jintao took a Latin American tour (Brazil, Chile and Cuba) and signed up $100 billion of investments in the next ten years.

More, China’s imports from Latin America have increased more than 600% since 1999. (Meanwhile, the U.S. has merely doubled its imports.) Chavez has vowed to increase the Sino-Latin economic collaboration even faster. Undoubtedly, China’s need for energy and natural resources will cease, or even crest, anytime soon, so there’s not much in store to stall the relationship.

The matter is such a concern that last year the U.S. State Department submitted a report to Congress entitled, “China’s Growing Interest in Latin America.” It says that “Much of China’s interest . . . is economically motivated, with Beijing eager for access to such commodities as iron and other ores, soybeans and soybean oil, copper, iron and steel, integrated circuits and other electrical machinery, and oil in order to meet the demands of China’s booming economy.” Meanwhile, Latinos are buying three times as many Chinese goods as did they five years ago. Electrical appliances, clothes, computers and office supplies.

Sounds like a happy friendship. And there’s no one in sight to break up the party.

There’s always the elephant in the room: oil. Brasil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras is teaming up with China’s National Offshore Oil company for joint operations. China’s also talking to Ecuador, Bolivia (recently nationalized by Morales), Peru, Columbia and Argentina. Don’t forget Chavez’s Venezuela. Chavez, who sells the U.S. 12% of the oil it needs every year, has tired out his hand signing deals – worth hundreds of millions – with the Chinese.

The situation is no laughing matter for the U.S. According to the State Department report, “Some observers believe increased Chinese interest and economic linkages with Latin America constitute a significant future threat to U.S. influence and interests in Latin America . . . China is using Latin America to challenge U.S. supremacy in the Western hemisphere and to build a third world coalition of nations with interests that may well be at variance or even inimical to American interests and values.”

China’s hiding nothing. This aren’t covert operations being waged politically like in the era of the Cold War. No, this is the free market. And a free market buttressed against democratically-elected leaders in Latin America, to boot. In this post-neoliberalism economy, if the U.S. doesn’t start paying close attention, the market may leave her behind.

(Photo from flickr.)