A look at China’s growing footprint in Latin America

Once America’s backyard, Latin America continues to gravitate towards China’s sphere of influence. Be it Ecuador looking to re-negotiate its debt for oil contracts, Argentina joining the Belt and Road Initiative, or the overall role that China continues to have in the pandemic, hardly a week goes by without China making the headlines somewhere in the region.

Ideological inclinations don’t seem to matter that much either. 

Since the turn of the century, many of the continent’s “pink tide” governments have seen Beijing as a useful counterweight to U.S. influence in the region, having grown skeptical of Washington through the Cold War. The strong hand that the Chinese state exercises over business also sits well with the Latin American left.

But even market-friendly administrations see Beijing as a good fit for their ambitions. 

Decades of industrial growth have led to what seems like an unquenchable Chinese thirst for raw materials, propelling agribusiness, energy, and mining projects in the continent, while in turn, cheap consumer goods exported by China feed the aspirations of Latin America’s middle classes.

From the hard left to the center-right, hardly any force has pulled away from closer relations with China, with the sole exception possibly being Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. The Brazilian president has sporadically veered in another direction, though this has often crashed into hard material realities, leading Brazilian policy to fall back on seemingly unavoidable ties with the world’s second-largest economy.

While links between Latin America and the U.S. still seem stronger than with China, the latter has displaced the former as most...