This report is the first of a three-part series on recent Indian engagement in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region.
New Delhi: When late Indian PM Indira Gandhi visited Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) in 1968, she noted “the earnest strivings” of people in the region for social progress.
“We did not seek to share the power of the big powers. We did not ask that they deny any of their own people their needs in order to fulfil ours. We, who have had twenty years or less of freedom to work for our progress, did not expect miracles of sudden transformation. Only too well do we know how long and hard is the path of development,” she told world leaders at a plenary session of the UN General Assembly.
Though she left out the part that her tour was cut short due to a military coup in Peru (common in the histories of most Latin American countries), her remarks highlighted the kind of South-South cooperation that New Delhi is striving for today, especially as it seeks to be a “voice” for the “Global South” — a term used to refer to low- and middle-income countries located in the Southern Hemisphere, mainly in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
ThePrint earlier reported that in 2014, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) made a list of countries that no Indian minister had visited in years, many of which are in Africa and Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region. There has been a concerted effort to boost foreign visits to such “untapped” regions, where the private sector, mainly Indian IT and pharma businesses, have been the main driver of relations in the past.
Within a year of the Narendra Modi government taking over in 2014, senior ministers visited several countries in LAC such as Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Guatemala, Jamaica and Dominican Republic.
Modi later met leaders of 11 Latin American countries on the margins of the BRICS Summit in Brazil in 2015, which was followed by a series of two-way visits and initiatives that year. For example, Guyana’s then-President Donald R. Ramotar was conferred the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award in January 2015, and was also the chief guest at the event in Gandhinagar, Gujarat.
In the last two years, External Affairs Minister Dr S. Jaishankar has made two tours to the LAC region which gave new momentum to Indian engagement to the region.
In 2022, he toured Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina and even opened a new Indian mission in Paraguay’s capital, Asuncion.
This year, he visited Guyana, Colombia, Dominican Republic and Panama, which welcomed an Indian minister after 60 years.
Also read: At China-led SCO, Jaishankar bats for debt-free connectivity projects for ‘Global South’
Critical minerals, oil & gold
India’s trade interests in the LAC region mainly concern raw materials such as edible oil, crude, gold and critical minerals like lithium and copper, commerce ministry officials told ThePrint.
“Latin America’s capabilities in producing and supplying raw materials also gives it a very special edge when it comes to trade,” remarked Jaishankar last year at an India-LAC business conclave earlier this year.
Last May, Minister of State Meenakshi Lekhi also visited Chile, home to the world’s largest lithium reserves necessary for electric batteries and green energy. Chile is part of the “Lithium Triangle” with Argentina and Bolivia, blessed with major deposits of this critical mineral. In November, India sent a team of geologists to Argentina to explore opportunities vis-a-vis its lithium deposits.
India has looked to this region for gold. Its gold imports from the region last fiscal was in excess of $6.5 billion, mainly from Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Argentina, Mexico and Ecuador. Chile was the main supplier of copper.
As a major oil-guzzler, India has often looked to South America as a source for crude, mainly Venezuela, Mexico and Brazil. In the 15-year period between 2006-2020, crude from this region increased to 12 percent from about 6 percent, showed data analysed by the Observer Research Foundation (ORF).
However, that changed with Western sanctions on Venezuela in 2017 and in 2019, and especially saw a shift after India began heavily importing cheap Russian crude in the wake of the Ukraine war.
But another kind of oil — edible oil for cooking — has become a key import for a country like India which meets 60 percent of its consumption demand through imports.
Latin America is the main source of soybean oil for India. Argentina and Brazil are the largest producers of the tan-coloured legume. Annually, India imports nearly 15-16 million tonnes of various edible oils annually, including 3.5 to 4.0 million tonnes of soyabean oil mainly from Latin America, according to media reports.
India’s strategic stakes in Latin America
According to Priti Singh, Associate Professor at JNU who specialises in Latin American studies, India’s focus has usually been on five countries — the “ABC” nations of Argentina, Brazil and Chile as well as Mexico and Venezuela. (Mexico was in fact the first nation in this region with which independent India established relations.)
“These five have traditionally shown strong trade trends with India, but less so for sanction-hit Venezuela in recent years,” she said.
Brazil is a key partner for India, as it also enjoys multilateral cooperation with New Delhi in BRICS.
Argentina was invited to join the group, but with new libertarian President-elect Javier Milei, this seems unlikely. Days prior, a top aide of Milei’s questioned what Argentina could gain from the bloc and told Russian news agency Sputnik News that Argentina would not be joining.
India has also started expanding to Central American and North American countries such as Panama and Mexico, which are key to shipping routes in the region. Leveraging the Indian diaspora, as well as India’s soft power, has been key in this respect.
“Soccer, cricket, samba and story-telling, for which the LAC is famous, blends beautifully with the Indian cultural forms, Bollywood, music and spiritual practices like yoga. The presence of about one million Indian diaspora in the LAC region adds a special dimension to the relationship,” said then external affairs minister Gen V. K. Singh at a conclave in Mexico in 2016.
The large Indian diaspora in countries like Suriname, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago — comprising almost half of the population in some of these nations — has helped create a living bridge between India and the LAC, but New Delhi is still far behind China in this region.
“China’s inroads in Latin America and the Caribbean are extensive. Beijing is South America’s top trading partner and second-largest for Latin America as a whole, after the US of course. It’s also been offering satellite construction and launch services to countries like Argentina,” said Professor Singh.
This has paid off for China on the Taiwan issue too. In recent years, Panama, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Nicaragua have backed China on the matter and in March, Honduras switched over by breaking diplomatic ties with Taiwan. Paraguay, however, remains pro-Taiwan.
(Edited by Smriti Sinha)