When Hugo Chávez first met Barack Obama at the Summit of the Americas in April, the Venezuelan leader could not resist pressing one of his favourite tracts into the US president’s hands. Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, a staple of student radical literature, tells the story of a continent that has long seen itself as the victim of foreign exploitation. Mr Chávez, though, may have given the book to the wrong leader. It should have been given to the Chinese.
China’s links to the region are deepening fast. Indeed, if the mooted $15bn bid for Repsol YPF’s Argentine oil unit by China’s state-owned energy companies CNOOC and CNPC comes off, South America will also be the recipient of China’s largest outward investment to date. Bilateral trade with the region has risen 10-fold since 2000, reaching $143bn last year. China is now Brazil’s largest trade partner. It takes almost three-quarters of the iron ore produced by Vale, the world’s largest iron ore company. It has been a bigger buyer of Chilean copper than the US, and it is already a major investor in Venezuelan oil – even as Caracas has nationalised several western concerns.
