When Hugo Chávez first met Barack Obama at the Summit of the Americas in April, the Venezuelan leader could not resist pressing one of his favourite tracts into the US president's hands. Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, a staple of student radical literature, tells the story of a continent that has long seen itself as the victim of foreign exploitation. Mr Chávez, though, may have given the book to the wrong leader. It should have been given to the Chinese.

China's links to the region are deepening fast. Indeed, if the mooted $15bn bid for Repsol YPF's Argentine oil unit by China's state-owned energy companies CNOOC and CNPC comes off, South America will also be the recipient of China's largest outward investment to date. Bilateral trade with the region has risen 10-fold since 2000, reaching $143bn last year. China is now Brazil's largest trade partner. It takes almost three-quarters of the iron ore produced by Vale, the world's largest iron ore company. It has been a bigger buyer of Chilean copper than the US, and it is already a major investor in Venezuelan oil – even as Caracas has nationalised several western concerns.

Beijing formalised this heightened level of Latin attention last November. In a policy statement, it talked amicably of “win-win” strategies, and mutual political respect. Deeds followed words, with a renminbi currency swap extended to Argentina worth $10bn, a $1bn pledge to invest in an Ecuadorean hydroelectric plant and, in the Caribbean, loan packages to Jamaica and continued trade credits to Cuba. Meanwhile, Chinese light manufacturers eat their Latin American counterparts for lunch. A few years ago, the most oft-cited economic statistic in Mexico was that more sombreros were made in China than at home.