The global attention paid to Greece is entirely understandable; the prospect of Grexit is an existential problem for the world’s second largest economic bloc. Yet the Greek economy is smaller than Chile’s, which has suffered vividly from more powerful global economic forces: China’s slowdown and Asia’s growing trade surpluses. Indeed, South America is almost a canary in a coal mine when it comes to these themes.

Their biggest effect so far has been on commodities. Oil prices, for example, entered a new bear market this week, with Brent crude, the international benchmark, dropping below $57 a barrel. That will hurt oil exporting countries everywhere, from Venezuela to Russia — which hosts China, India, Brazil and South Africa at the seventh Brics summit this week. Yet the oil price drop is only part of a broader collapse of commodity prices that has followed the end of the China-led boom.

This collapse has knocked the wind out of developed commodity countries, such as Australia, and vast swaths of the emerging world, especially South America. This can be seen in the region’s tumbling growth rates, shrinking imports, widening trade deficits and plummeting government ratings. In Brazil, Dilma Rousseff leads the most unpopular government since the dictatorship era ended in 1986; in Chile, the world’s largest copper producer, President Michelle Bachelet’s ratings have dropped to 27 per cent; in Colombia, where President Juan Manuel Santos is struggling to make a peace deal with Marxist guerrillas, his approval ratings are 28 per cent. It is a similar story across the region. Everywhere, leaders’ rising unpopularity makes it harder for them to steer their countries through leaner times.