Latin America

How China Is Winning The Oil Race
26 April 2006

MSN MONEY (UNITED STATES)--In Latin America, China is increasingly becoming the partner of choice for repressive, paranoid or regionally ambitious regimes that want to buy guns and tanks with their oil and ore revenues. According to The Los Angeles Times, the Bush administration held talks with the Chinese to encourage them to curb their role in training and advising forces in the southern hemisphere. This is getting to be a problem, as the region -- fabulously rich in metal, energy and agricultural resources -- is increasingly run by ideologues willing to snub traditional United States interests and seek less meddlesome buyers. China is now Latin America's second-largest trading partner, surpassing Europe. From 2001 to 2006, exports from the region to China rose more than 500 percent. In 2004 alone, Hu signed letters of intent worth USD 100 billion over the next 10 years, according to published reports. Source: http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/P149330.asp (Reliability: 8)