Rio de Janeiro---Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang heads home from a Latin American tour Tuesday with a briefcase full of deals that bolster a relationship profitable for the region's slowing economies but still highly unequal.
Li's visit bore the most fruit in Brazil, where he sealed deals for $53 billion in Chinese investment, mainly focused on upgrading the regional giant's strained infrastructure.
He also made stops in Colombia, Peru and Chile on the nine-day tour.
The visit followed on Chinese President Xi Jinping's last July, when he pressed the flesh in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Cuba, underlining the Asian power's role as a key trade partner for the region.
"Xi Jinping has been very clear about that in the past few months, that China will be contributing much more to the region, billions more to the region in the coming years, despite slowing growth on both sides of the Pacific," said Margaret Myers, the director of the China and Latin America program at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington.
China extended more than $119 billion in loans to Latin American countries and companies from 2005 to 2014, according to a report by the Inter-American Dialogue and Boston University.
Oil-rich Venezuela has been the biggest beneficiary, with $56.3 billion, followed by Brazil with $22 billion.
China, which is on track to displace the United States next year as Latin America's largest trading partner, has devoured the region's raw materials and natural resources, exporting manufactured goods in return.
The relationship is "still unbalanced," said Myers, even if China is slowly starting to import finished goods.
"We see a lot of Chilean wine being exported, processed coffee, chocolate, a lot of value-added agriculture," she said.
But that isn't enough to redress the imbalance, said Alicia Barcena, head of the UN's Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).
"Just five products, all commodities, accounted for 75 percent of the value of regional sales to China in 2013," she wrote in Spanish newspaper El Pais.
Some 90 percent of Chinese investment in Latin America meanwhile went toward extracting natural resources, mainly mines and hydrocarbons, she said.
AFP
