Watching President Barack Obama at his mega-summit with nearly 50 African heads of state in Washington, D.C., in which he announced $33 billion in investments and vowed to increase access to electricity to 60 million African households, many of us asked ourselves the same question — why doesn’t he do the same with Latin America?
The conventional wisdom among the thousands of dignitaries and business people who converged on Washington for the Aug 5 US-Africa Leaders Summit was that the Obama administration organized the event in a desperate effort to catch up with China. In recent years, China has become Africa’s top business partner.
Well, I’ve got news for US policy-makers: if Washington continues to pay little attention to Latin America, the same will happen there. It’s already happening in several countries in the region.
Not only China, but also Russia and Japan — whose heads of state visited Latin America in recent weeks