Western media outlets such as the New York Times framed the summit as China’s attempt to “woo” Latin America away from the United States, helped along by Donald Trump’s tariffs war. One report in the BBC went as far as to describe Latin America as the US’s “backyard” and suggested that its abandonment of the region had opened the door to Chinese influence. Little attention is paid in these narratives to the political agency of Latin American and Caribbean nations, whose intentions and motivations are far more complex than these accounts make out.
It is more accurate to attribute the increasingly close relations between Latin America and the Caribbean to the Pink Tide, the rise in left-leaning governments that have emphasized sovereignty and South-South cooperation from the first decade of the century. A recent study published by the Center for Latin American Studies (CEL) suggests that China’s growing presence in the region has helped to foster redistributive policies and progressive governance. Led by the late Hugo Chávez, Venezuela was the first Latin American nation to develop a strategic partnership with China. This relationship made possible massive investments in health, housing, technology, and education. These gains, made in the face of unrelenting Western hostility, demonstrate that alternative development paths are possible, although they rest on fragile foundations.
Despite protracted struggles for power between progressive and right-wing governments across much of the region, relations between Latin America, the Caribbean, and China have continued to disrupt the region’s status quo. The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) itself, founded in 2010 during the peak of the Pink Tide movement to counter the US-controlled Organization of American States (OAS), first convened with China in 2015. The recent forum only makes sense when viewed in the…
Auteur: Carlos Cruz Mosquera
