Many believe the tour is a "move to counteract the rising influence of China, which is in the midst of an unprecendented energy grab in the oil- and mineral-rich region,"
according to a report in the Christian Science Monitor, which asserted that "the Chinese yuan is contesting U.S. hegemony by funding stadiums and dams and investing billions in strategic sectors."
While Geoff Thale, the program director at the
Washington Office on Latin America, agrees that China's presence in Latin America is growing, particularly as a player in the regional energy market, he believes it's "an overstatement" to say China is fully overpowering the U.S. in the region.
"The U.S. has had the leading commercial set of relations with Latin America for the past 50 to 100 years," Thale tells Trend Lines, adding that a more accurate depiction would show the region diversifying with the U.S. still playing a major role.
"Are we moving from a Latin America in which the U.S. is the leading dominant power to a world in which the U.S. is one of several important actors? Of course," he said. "But that's not a bad thing, certainly not bad for Latin America or for the United States."
Noting Obama's stated goal to double American exports globally over the next five years, Thale says it's "pretty clear the president's interest in this particular trip is commercial more than anything else . . . Because Latin American economies are relatively healthy and were hurt less by the economic crisis than the rest of the world, they're an obvious place for the president to be pushing this."
But there are also political motivations, says Thale, who believes Obama seeks to respond to notions that the U.S. is only willing to work with right-wing governments in the region.
The backlash to the Washington Consensus has been a prevalent theme in Latin America over the past decade, says Thale, who adds that today the region is home to a wide political spectrum -- with Cuba's Raoul Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez on one end and Chile's Sebastián Piñera and Colombia's Juan Manuel Santos on the other.
The result, he says, is that "you're not seeing people pick a single model -- a Washington Consensus model or a Cuban model. Instead, governments in the region along with civil society are trying to think clearly about different economic models and experimenting with different models through a mix of approaches."
As for Obama's approach, Thale had this to add: "I think what you're seeing is a new willingness in a new administration to accept that Latin American governments might experiment with different political and economic models and not interpret that in a polarized, 'with us or against us' Cold War-era framework."
