China has become a powerful trading partner for many Latin American countries and its financial influence is also increasingly felt. This is reason for both celebration and concern.
Newly released data from the Inter-American Dialogue, a think-tank, show that despite sluggish global economic growth, lending to Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) by Chinese development banks reached a near record in 2015.
The China Development Bank and the China Export-Import Bank lent a total of $29.1bn last year to governments and state-owned corporations in the region, almost three times the amount in 2014 and more than the combined loans to LAC from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.