Last week’s meeting in Brasília between presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Evo Morales of Bolivia was tinged with farce before it began. Mr Morales has been under increasing domestic pressure to deliver concrete benefits from his “nationalisation” of foreign assets in Bolivia’s natural resources industries and threatened to cancel the meeting unless Brazil promised to renegotiate gas supply contracts with Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled oil group, during his visit.

Brazilian diplomats described such tactics as “childish” and “amateur” and insisted any renegotiation would take place on a strictly commercial basis – and that Petrobras’s contract would stay in force unchanged until it expired in 2009.