India-Latin America Relations

The One Relationship With Nothing Wrong With It

India’s relationship with Latin America and the Caribbean is analytically unusual, and the unusualness is the whole point. There is no territorial dispute, no security competition, no colonial grievance, no adversarial third party to manage and no history of grievance in either direction. There is also, correspondingly, almost no policy.

• Every other major Indian regional relationship is organised around a problem — China a border and a rival, Pakistan a conflict, West Asia energy and nine million workers, Africa a contest with Beijing, the United States a partnership with friction built in
• Latin America presents India with no problem at all — and India has responded by paying it almost no attention. The relationship’s defining condition is not friction but indifference, and indifference is harder to write about than conflict because nothing forces it into the news
• The result is a relationship that is economically substantial and politically weightless: no India–Latin America summit, no regional policy document written since 1997, and no institution charged with the region
• The analytical task is therefore inverted. The question is not how India manages a difficulty but why the absence of one has produced so little

A relationship with no obstacles has produced no policy, which suggests that obstacles, not opportunities, are what actually drive foreign policy attention.

• Two facts frame everything that follows. The private sector arrived before the state did, inverting the sequence in which trade follows the flag; and China’s trade with the region passed US$500 billion in 2024 against India’s high-$30 billion range — a gap of more than twelve to one that distance, language and commodity mix cannot explain, because they apply to China equally

The Region as an Object of Indian Policy

What “Latin America” Means and Why the Definition Matters

• Latin America denotes the landmass and islands south of the United States — Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and South America — named for the Latin-derived languages that dominate it
• The region occupies about 13% of the earth’s land surface and contains the Amazon, the world’s largest river system and equatorial forest
• Around 60% of the population speaks Spanish and around 30% Portuguese, with English, Dutch and French pockets in the Caribbean and the Guianas
• Counted as Latin America and the Caribbean, the region is 33 sovereign states with a population of roughly 660 million and a combined output of several trillion dollars. Counted as “Latin America” alone, or as South America alone, the numbers fall sharply
• This definitional instability is not pedantry — it is the single largest source of error in Indian writing about the region. Whether Mexico and the Caribbean are inside or outside the boundary changes India’s regional trade total by ten billion dollars or more, and different arms of the Indian government use different boundaries

The Resource Endowment That Matters to India

• The commodities that drew the Iberian empires still dominate the region’s exports, joined in the twentieth century by crude oil and in the twenty-first by lithium
• Brazil is the world’s largest producer of sugarcane and a major soybean, crude oil and iron ore exporter
• Mexico leads the world in silver production and is a large crude and manufactured-goods exporter
• Chile supplies roughly a quarter to a third of world copper and is the second-largest lithium producer
• Peru is a top-tier copper, gold, silver and zinc producer
• Argentina is the world’s leading exporter of soybean oil, and part of the lithium triangle
• Bolivia holds the world’s largest identified lithium resource and exports gold
• Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven crude reserves at roughly 298 billion barrels, inside a regional total of about 336 billion barrels — around one-fifth of global reserves — plus some 58 billion barrels of shale oil barely exploited
• Guyana has moved from irrelevance to significance within a decade, with output from the Stabroek block passing 900,000 barrels per day in November 2025
• Colombia and Ecuador supply crude; Colombia and Brazil supply emeralds and other gemstones

What India needs	Where the region supplies it
Crude oil	Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Guyana, Ecuador
Copper	Chile, Peru, Panama
Gold	Bolivia, Peru, Brazil
Lithium	Argentina, Bolivia, Chile — the “lithium triangle”
Vegetable oil, principally soy oil	Argentina, Brazil
Sugar and ethanol	Brazil
Pulses and off-season fruit	Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru
Silver	Mexico, Peru

The Political Environment That Keeps Breaking Continuity

• The region has established credible electoral processes without correspondingly establishing the rule of law, effective representative institutions or peaceful and cohesive societies
• Wealth inequality has remained severe through periods of strong growth, and Latin America and the Caribbean are consistently ranked among the world’s most dangerous regions for violence and insecurity of life
• Two states — Venezuela and Nicaragua — have moved from representative democracy to authoritarian rule in two decades, and democratic consolidation elsewhere remains uneven
• The political cycle has repeatedly broken the continuity of India’s engagement. The US-backed military dictatorships of the 1950s–80s; democratisation in the 1980s–90s; the “Pink Tide” of left governments from the late 1990s; its partial reversal after 2015; and the implosion of Venezuela have each reset the field faster than Indian institutional memory could adapt
• Most of the region operates what is best described as a procedural democracy, where an abrupt change of leadership changes policy priorities wholesale and prevents long-term relationships from consolidating
• Large resources plus unstable politics invite great-power interference, which affects the external relations of the states concerned — Venezuela, holder of the world’s largest crude reserves, being the classic case

How India’s Latin America Policy Got Here

This is best told as a story about Indian foreign policy rather than about Latin American history. The region’s own trajectory matters only where it explains what India did or failed to do, and for most of the period what India did was very little.

1947 and the Polite Distance

“India did not enter me through my mind but through my senses.” — Octavio Paz

• Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet and Nobel laureate, was his country’s ambassador in New Delhi in the 1960s, resigning in protest at his own government’s conduct — the most substantial cultural bridge the two regions produced in a century, and it was built by one man
• When India became a nation-state in 1947, independent Latin America had already existed for more than a century, most of the region having broken from Spain and Portugal by 1825, with the Caribbean territories following only in the 1960s–70s
• Political and diplomatic relations were established soon after 1947, made easy by the total absence of disputes and by a shared experience of European colonialism
• The early exchanges identified common ground and produced no political consequence. Latin America was oriented towards Europe and the United States; India was non-aligned; and the civilisational difference produced a polite distance rather than an argument

Cuba, the Cold War and India’s Absence

• Cuba was among the earliest members of the Non-Aligned Movement and remained India’s one substantial political link into the region through the Cold War, a link of solidarity rather than of interest
• During the 1950s–80s, in the name of the war against communism, thousands of leftists were hunted, detained, tortured and killed by US-backed military dictatorships across the region
• India was absent from this, and the absence was deliberate rather than accidental. New Delhi had neither the capacity nor the strategic stake to take a position that would have cost it something, and non-alignment supplied a respectable reason not to
• The consequence is that India built no constituency in the region’s democratic opposition movements, which is precisely the constituency that came to power after 1985
• The 1980s and 1990s were the decades of transition — dictatorships ended, democracy was restored across most of the region. India, still searching for its own position in a changing world order, engaged with the transition hardly at all
• The one multilateral point of contact was the Group of 15, formed in 1989 out of the Non-Aligned Movement’s economic wing, which put India in a standing forum with Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela and Jamaica, with Chile joining later when the membership rose to seventeen — a forum that never acquired substance

After 1991: The Priorities Went Elsewhere

• India’s post-Cold War foreign policy energy went to the Look East policy of 1991, to South Asian regionalism and to West Asia for energy security. Latin America received none of it
• The private sector went anyway. Bajaj built a large two-wheeler customer base; the pharmaceutical industry spread across almost the whole region; the information technology industry established service and development centres from the late 1990s
• This is the analytical inversion the relationship turns on: in most regions trade followed the flag; in Latin America the flag followed the trade — and followed it slowly, and at a distance

FOCUS: LAC, 1997 — The First and Last Policy Instrument

• The Department of Commerce launched the Focus: Latin America and Caribbean programme in November 1997, the first deliberate Indian policy instrument aimed at the region
• Its design was frankly export-promotional rather than strategic: sensitising export promotion councils and chambers of commerce, incentives for Indian exporters, delegations, trade fair participation, and support through lines of credit and export credit guarantees
• It has been reviewed and extended periodically, most recently through March 2019. That is the entire architecture of India’s regional policy: a commerce ministry export scheme, designed in 1997, last formally extended for a period that has since ended
• Set that against what India has built for Africa — three summits, a duty-free tariff scheme, a line-of-credit programme, a continental e-network and seventeen new missions actually opened

The Visits Era

• The current period has seen a real increase in high-level contact. In one nine-year stretch the region received 34 high-level Indian visits, including six presidential, six vice-presidential and four prime-ministerial
• Modi’s July 2025 five-nation tour took in Trinidad and Tobago, Argentina and Brazil alongside Ghana and Namibia; the Argentina leg was the first bilateral visit by an Indian Prime Minister in 57 years
• Modi’s state visit to Guyana in November 2024 was the first by an Indian Prime Minister since 1968, and he was conferred the Order of Excellence, Guyana’s highest national award
• Lula’s state visit to India on 21 February 2026 was the most substantive bilateral engagement the relationship has produced
• Visits are not a policy. They establish that political will now exists at the top; they do not by themselves supply the institutions, the connectivity or the language capacity that convert will into trade

Trade: What Is Known, What Is Not, and Why

The Numbers Problem, Stated Honestly

• India’s trade figures for Latin America are the least reliable in Indian regional statistics, and the reason is definitional rather than statistical incompetence
• The regional total changes by ten billion dollars or more depending on whether Mexico and the Caribbean are counted. The Ministry of Commerce’s Focus programme covers 44 countries including Mexico; other compilations use “Latin America” narrowly, or South America only
• Compare the published claims. The External Affairs Minister has cited India–LAC trade of around US$50 billion for FY 2022-23; commonly published series give US$35.73 billion for FY 2023-24 and US$39.21 billion for FY 2024-25; and a figure of US$48 billion for FY 2022-23 circulates widely. These cannot all be right on one definition, and the difference between them is Mexico and the Caribbean
• What is safe to say: regional trade peaked above US$40 billion, has been volatile with the commodity cycle and with Venezuela’s collapse, and sits in the high-$30 billion to mid-$40 billion range depending on where the boundary is drawn
• What is stable, and therefore what an argument should be built on, is composition and country pairs. Those do not move with definition

India’s regional trade, as commonly published	Total	Exports	Imports
FY 2023-24	~US$35.7 bn	~US$14.5 bn	~US$21.2 bn
FY 2024-25	~US$39.2 bn	~US$15.2 bn	~US$24.0 bn

Read with the definitional caveat above; the boundary used for these figures is not the boundary the Focus programme uses.

What India Sells

• Petroleum products — India’s refining industry, buying crude widely and selling refined product back, is the single largest export line
• Vehicles and vehicle parts, above all two-wheelers and commercial vehicles, where Indian price points suit the market
• Chemicals and agrochemicals, including a substantial crop-protection business
• Pharmaceuticals, where inexpensive Indian generics have measurably reduced healthcare costs for Latin American consumers and public health systems
• Textiles, iron and steel products, electrical machinery and leather goods fill out the basket

What India Buys

• Crude oil, historically the largest single line and the source of most of the volatility in the series
• Gold, with Bolivia and Peru the principal suppliers — India being the world’s largest gold importer
• Vegetable oil, overwhelmingly soy oil, with Argentina the world’s leading soy oil exporter and Brazil close behind
• Copper ores and concentrates, principally from Chile, then Peru, Panama and Brazil
• Sugar, cotton, sesame, pulses, and precious and semi-precious stones

The Venezuela Collapse, and Why It Explains the Apparent Decline

• Venezuela was a major source of Indian crude imports between roughly 2001 and 2015. Indian refiners were among the largest buyers of Venezuelan heavy crude, and Indian state companies held upstream stakes
• This single flow accounts for most of the higher import figures up to 2015 and most of the sharp fall from 2015 to 2016
• The causes were United States sanctions and the implosion of the Venezuelan oil industry, not any Indian decision and not any deterioration in the relationship
• Indian companies also had to write off tens of millions of dollars in unpaid dues for pharmaceutical and other exports to Venezuela, which taught Indian business a lesson about political risk that it has not forgotten
• The flow has partially resumed. Venezuelan barrels returned to Indian refiners under licensed arrangements, and by May 2026 Venezuela had re-emerged as India’s third-largest crude supplier as Gulf supply tightened — evidence that the underlying complementarity was never destroyed, only interrupted by sanctions
• The analytical consequence is large. Any account of “decline” in India’s presence in Latin America that rests on the trade series is measuring an oil sanction, not a diplomatic retreat

The largest single number in the story of India’s Latin American decline was decided in Washington and Caracas, not in New Delhi.

The Decline Question: Three Different Things Wearing One Name

The claim that India’s presence in Latin America has declined is partly true, partly a statistical artefact and partly a confusion between absolute and relative movement. Separating the three is the whole of a serious answer.

The Decline That Is Statistical Artefact

• The trade series fell sharply after 2015 and the fall is dominated by one commodity from one country. Remove the Venezuelan crude line and the underlying trend is upward
• Commodity prices did the rest. Trade accelerated at roughly thirty percent annually between 2000 and 2014, reaching about US$46 billion in 2013-14, then slowed with the fall in commodity prices, crude above all
• Definitional churn compounds the illusion. A series that quietly drops Mexico produces a “decline” of several billion dollars on paper

The Decline That Is Relative, Not Absolute

• Indian trade with the region grew; Chinese trade grew far faster. China’s regional trade passed US$500 billion in 2024; India’s is in the high-$30 billion range. India has not fallen behind by shrinking — it has fallen behind by growing more slowly than the comparator
• China’s institutional investment compounds the gap. The China–CELAC Forum has held four ministerial meetings, the fourth in Beijing in May 2025, at which a credit programme of about US$9.2 billion was announced; China has published two dedicated policy papers on Latin America, in 2008 and 2016; and Chinese lending, contracting and infrastructure presence operate at a scale India cannot approach
• The counter-argument matters. Only about 18% of Indian investment in the region targets raw-material extraction, against roughly 57% of Chinese investment. India’s smaller presence is differently composed — more manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals and services, more locally employing, less extractive — and that composition is a political asset China does not have

The Decline That Is Real

• There is no summit mechanism. India has held three India–Africa Forum Summits; it has held no India–Latin America summit at all
• The India–CELAC dialogue exists and has been erratic. The first India–CELAC Foreign Ministers’ meeting was held in New Delhi on 7 August 2012 in a troika format, followed by meetings in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 on the margins of the UN General Assembly — then a five-year gap, with the forum revived only in September 2022. Even the minimal pledge of annual foreign-ministerial meetings went unfulfilled
• The regional policy instrument is a 1997 commerce scheme last extended to 2019. Nothing has replaced it
• No trade agreement of consequence exists. The India–Mercosur Preferential Trade Agreement covers around 450 tariff lines with limited concessions; the India–Chile PTA, even after expansion, covers about 1,798 Chilean lines and 1,031 Indian lines and is a preferential agreement, not a free trade area
• The diplomatic footprint is thin. India maintains resident missions in a minority of the region’s 33 states and covers the rest through concurrent accreditation, which means an ambassador in one capital nominally represents India in three or four others
• Institutional participation is absent. India has still not joined the Inter-American Development Bank, the Andean Development Corporation or the Central American Bank, unlike the United States, Europe, China, Japan and Korea — and Latin American banks have shown correspondingly little interest in India
• Nascent strategic cooperation has stayed nascent. Agreements exist on outer space, nuclear energy, defence maintenance and counter-terrorism; cooperation under them has been minimal

The Six Impediments, and the Reply to Each

Each of these is a genuine constraint, and each has a counter-argument that must be stated, because the counter-arguments collectively make the case that these are excuses rather than explanations.

Linguistic and Cultural Unfamiliarity

• Spanish and Portuguese are the region’s working languages; English is India’s window on the world. Indian firms in the region are consequently dependent on local collaborators for growth, and Latin American firms in India are burdened by unfamiliarity with the Indian commercial ethos
• Language carries culture and ideas as well as contracts. Its absence has blocked the informal exchange out of which durable business relationships grow
• China has over 60 Latin American study centres and hundreds of Spanish and Portuguese language institutes, plus Confucius Institutes, strong academic linkages and an expanding film presence in the region
• India has a growing number of Spanish learners and very little consciousness of Latin American culture and conditions — which is a different and harder deficit, because language can be taught in two years and area expertise cannot
• The reply: language is a solvable problem India has not attempted to solve, and it did not stop Indian pharmaceutical and software firms building substantial regional businesses. Business acumen can overcome some handicaps but cannot build a lobby without a commitment beyond the bottom line

The Absence of a Diaspora

“This may be the only region where professionals outnumber the settlers from India.” — Deepak Bhojwani

• India’s largest single foreign-policy asset is missing here. There are almost no settled Indian-origin industrialists with the weight to act as nuclei for compatriots or to pull investment into India — the model that built India’s linkages with the Gulf, East Africa, Britain and the United States
• The community’s modest economic condition generates neither the remittances nor the tourism that draw official attention to communities of Indian origin elsewhere
• The real exception is under-used rather than absent. Indentured migration from 1838 built substantial Indian-origin populations in the Caribbean and the Guianas, and they are now politically dominant in several states

State	Indian-origin population	Share	Indian-origin heads of state or government
Guyana	~320,000	~40%	Cheddi Jagan; Bharrat Jagdeo; Irfaan Ali
Trinidad and Tobago	~470,000	~35%	Basdeo Panday; Kamla Persad-Bissessar
Suriname	~170,000	~27%	Chandrikapersad Santokhi
Jamaica	~93,000	~3.4%	—

• The first Indian indentured labourers reached British Guiana on 5 May 1838; Trinidad took labourers from 1845 and Suriname from 1873; over half a million Indians were carried to the Caribbean between 1838 and 1917
• The reply: the diaspora is not absent, it is in the wrong part of the region for the trade India wants and has been treated as a cultural constituency rather than a commercial and political one. A community that supplies presidents and prime ministers is a foreign-policy instrument, not a heritage file

Geographical Distance and the Economics of Connectivity

“We live in a globalized era and we must now make sure that distance is no longer an impediment. Modern logistics offer us collaborative possibilities, so do modern communications.” — S. Jaishankar

• South America is the farthest continent from India, and direct air and shipping links are considered uneconomical because the volumes are too low to fill them
• The circularity is the problem. Volumes are low because connectivity is poor and connectivity is poor because volumes are low, and neither side has tried to break the loop with guaranteed cargo, warehousing or a shipping consortium. Attempts at direct shipping in the 1980s were discontinued on precisely these economics
• The reply, in three parts. Distance does not deter China, whose regional trade is twelve times India’s; it does not deter Indians travelling to the United States, whose coasts are as far from India as São Paulo and Mexico City; and India ships to Europe and East Asia over routes once judged uneconomical
• The transport cost problem is real and has been documented. A 2010 study by the Inter-American Development Bank, pointedly titled “India: Latin America’s Next Big Thing?”, identified physical connectivity and the high cost of transport as the binding obstacle alongside tariffs, and noted that India, unlike China, has no direct shipping services to the region

The Absence of Regional Cohesion

• India cannot deal with the region as a unit, because there is no unit to deal with. When India negotiates with the European Union or ASEAN it faces a single counterpart with a common external tariff; Latin America offers nothing equivalent
• Mercosur — Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay — and the Pacific Alliance — Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru — do not between them cover the whole of South America, let alone Central America and the Caribbean. Venezuela is a full Mercosur member whose membership has been suspended since 1 December 2016
• CELAC convenes all 33 states and is a consultative body without trade competence; CARICOM covers the Caribbean; several states hold free trade agreements with the United States and Canada that constrain what they can offer India
• India therefore transacts bilaterally with more than 20 countries and engages regionally only occasionally. An Indian firm shipping to Brazil cannot from there access the rest of the region, and India must ship separately to South America’s eastern and western coasts
• The reply: fragmentation is a reason to build country strategies, not a reason to build none. Bhojwani’s prescription is exactly this — disaggregate the relationship to sub-regional level and, where necessary, identify country-specific issues. China faces identical fragmentation and has responded by running a regional forum and bilateral policy simultaneously

The Political Environment and the Absence of a Strategic Stake

• New Delhi has never had a reason it could not ignore. The region rarely inserts itself into geopolitics; no state in it possesses nuclear weapons; and it has seen no interstate war since the late 1800s
• Partnership with the region carries no great-power charm, and has been consigned to the margins of India’s foreign policy priorities as a result
• Leadership churn breaks continuity. In a system where an election reverses policy priorities wholesale, an Indian relationship built on a personal understanding with one president does not survive the next
• The reply: the absence of a strategic stake is why the relationship is cheap, not why it is impossible. A relationship that costs nothing to maintain and carries no risk of entanglement is precisely what a state pursuing strategic autonomy should want more of

Variable Economic Growth

• The Indian economy has grown at 6–7% with a broadly stable outlook; the region has not. Commodity dependence, debt cycles, currency crises and political disruption have produced growth that oscillates rather than compounds
• This feeds directly into trade. Fluctuating volumes and shifting composition prevent long-term supply relationships from being built, and make Indian firms reluctant to sink capital into region-specific capacity

None of these six impediments applies to China any less than to India, and China’s trade with the region is twelve times larger. The binding constraint is attention.

India and Brazil

Why Brazil Carries the Relationship

• Brazil is India’s largest trading partner in Latin America and the only state in the region with which India has a strategic partnership, and the only one that appears with India in every significant Southern coalition
• The two are structurally alike in ways that matter more than the geography that separates them — continental democracies, federal and plural, with large agricultural sectors, substantial state-owned industry, ambitions for permanent Security Council seats and a shared instinct that the international economic order was written by others
• Diplomatic relations date from 1948; the Strategic Partnership was declared in 2006 during a period of unusually active Indian and Brazilian Southern diplomacy
• The architecture is unusually thick for a relationship at this distance: a Joint Commission Meeting at foreign-minister level; a Strategic Dialogue between National Security Advisers; Foreign Office Consultations; a Trade Monitoring Mechanism; and joint committees on defence, science and technology, agriculture and cyber issues
• A 2+2 Political-Military Dialogue was inaugurated in March 2024, the format India reserves for its more serious defence relationships

The Trade Relationship and Its Shape

Year	Indian exports	Brazilian exports	Total
2014	US$6.87 bn	US$4.79 bn	US$11.66 bn
2016	US$2.57 bn	US$3.16 bn	US$5.73 bn
2020	US$4.35 bn	US$2.88 bn	US$7.23 bn
2022	US$9.60 bn	US$6.34 bn	US$15.94 bn
2024	US$7.25 bn	US$5.26 bn	US$12.51 bn
2025	US$8.35 bn	US$6.86 bn	US$15.21 bn

• The series is a textbook illustration of commodity volatility, collapsing by half between 2014 and 2016 and recovering twice since, without any change in the political relationship in either direction
• India sells Brazil petroleum oils, medicaments and pharmaceutical products, heterocyclic compounds, fungicides and insecticides, and motorcycle parts — a refined-product and chemistry basket, not a raw-materials one
• India buys from Brazil cane sugar, crude petroleum, soybean oil, cotton and sesame
• Indian investment in Brazil exceeds US$15 billion; Brazilian investment in India is around US$1 billion — an asymmetry of fifteen to one that has attracted very little Indian policy attention
• Indian corporate presence runs through hydrocarbons, automobiles, information technology, pharmaceuticals and metals: BPRL and OVL; Bajaj, Tata Motors, Mahindra, Hero and TVS; TCS, Infosys, HCL and Wipro; Glenmark, Sun Pharma and Dr. Reddy’s; and Novelis, the aluminium business acquired by the Aditya Birla Group, which also holds carbon-black capacity in Brazil and Colombia
• Brazilian corporate presence in India includes Vale in mining, Stefanini in information technology, WEG in electrical motors, Embraer in aerospace and Dedini in ethanol equipment; Gerdau acquired an Indian steel plant and Marcopolo entered a bus-chassis joint venture with Tata
• The Indian community in Brazil numbers roughly 4,000 people, concentrated in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro — which is the whole diaspora argument in one number

The Trade Instruments, and Why They Are the Binding Constraint

• The India–Mercosur Framework Agreement was signed in 2003 and the Preferential Trade Agreement on 25 January 2004, entering into force on 1 June 2009
• The PTA covers around 450 tariff lines with limited duty concessions and operates through five annexes covering tariff concessions on each side, rules of origin, safeguards and dispute settlement
• Four hundred and fifty lines out of tens of thousands is not a trade agreement, it is a gesture. It is the single clearest reason India–Brazil and India–Mercosur trade has underperformed the complementarity so obviously present
• India’s trade with Mercosur as a whole ran to about US$8.12 billion of exports and US$9.36 billion of imports in FY 2024-25, most of it with Brazil
• Argentina has pressed publicly for expansion, its ambassador reporting a general consensus among Mercosur members to work with India on widening the agreement, and noting that the arrangement “has to be expanded because it’s limited to a number of products”
• India and Brazil agreed in October 2025 to broaden the PTA significantly, covering tariff and non-tariff issues, with a technical dialogue under the Joint Administration Committee to define modalities
• The terms of reference for those negotiations were still being finalised through 2026, and no expanded agreement has been signed. Officials on both sides have acknowledged that agricultural sensitivities on both sides are the obstacle, which is the same obstacle that operates at the WTO
• The counterfactual is instructive. Mercosur concluded a far more ambitious agreement with the European Union; India, a natural partner with fewer agricultural conflicts than Europe has, has 450 lines

Ethanol and Biofuels: The Standout Complementarity

• Brazil has the world’s longest continuous experience of fuel ethanol, built from the Proálcool programme launched in the 1970s in response to the oil shock, and sustained through flex-fuel vehicles, a sugarcane feedstock base and a distribution network built over five decades
• India has the world’s fastest-moving blending programme. India achieved 20% ethanol blending in petrol in 2025, five years ahead of its own target, with the Ethanol Blended Petrol programme saving very large sums in foreign exchange since 2014-15
• The complementarity is exact and rare. Brazil has the technology, the agronomy and the half-century of policy learning; India has the demand, the scale and the political commitment; and Brazil can supply ethanol itself when Indian demand outruns Indian feedstock
• The Global Biofuels Alliance was launched at the New Delhi G20 Summit on 9 September 2023, with India, Brazil and the United States as its principal movers, alongside founding members including Italy, Argentina, Singapore, Bangladesh, Mauritius and the UAE; it has since grown well past thirty member countries and a dozen international organisations
• This is the one multilateral institution India has built in which a Latin American state is a co-founder rather than a participant, and it is a template for what the rest of the relationship could look like
• Brazilian firms with ethanol expertise are entering the Indian market, and an understanding between Brazil’s sugarcane industry association and its Indian counterpart was exchanged during Lula’s 2026 visit

Defence, Space and Nuclear

• A defence cooperation agreement was signed in 2003 and ratified in 2006, with a Joint Defence Committee as its institutional mechanism
• India has bought Brazilian aircraft, civilian and military, and Indian helicopters, armoured vehicles and non-lethal equipment have been sold to states in the region
• A space framework agreement dates from 2004, and India launched Brazil’s Amazonia-1 Earth observation satellite in 2021, the first fully Brazilian-built satellite placed in orbit by an Indian vehicle
• The defence relationship’s most recent movement is submarine sustainment. A tripartite understanding on Scorpène submarine maintenance cooperation, involving Mazagon Dock and both navies, was concluded in February 2026 — both countries operate the same French design, which makes the cooperation technically natural
• Brazil paused negotiations on purchasing India’s Akash surface-to-air missile system, having preferred a European alternative with longer reach, at the same time as the two governments agreed to expand defence ties. Both facts belong in any honest account: the political relationship deepened while the flagship defence sale did not close

The Multilateral Track, and Its Sharpest Limit

• India and Brazil appear together in more Southern institutions than any other pair of states outside Asia — the G-20, BRICS, IBSA, the G-4 on Security Council reform, and the wider Global South coalitions on climate finance and multilateral reform
• IBSA in particular is a Brazil relationship as much as a South Africa one, founded in 2003 out of shared disappointment with the Doha Round’s development content, and it lapsed into near-dormancy in part because both sides let the bilateral relationship drift
• BRICS gives the pair a standing summit-level channel, and Modi attended the Rio de Janeiro summit of 6–7 July 2025 on the tour that also took him to Argentina
• And then the limit, which must be stated. India and Brazil sit on opposite sides of the WTO’s agricultural negotiations. Brazil is a leading agricultural exporter and a member of the Cairns Group, pressing for deep cuts in domestic support and market access; India leads the G-33 in defending public stockholding, special safeguards and policy space for low-income and resource-poor farmers
• This is not an abstract divergence. Brazil brought a WTO dispute against India’s sugar and sugarcane measures; the panel report, circulated on 14 December 2021, found India’s product-specific domestic support to sugarcane producers in excess of the permitted level across five seasons and its export schemes inconsistent with the Agreement on Agriculture. India notified an appeal on 24 December 2021, into an Appellate Body that could not hear it
• At the WTO’s fourteenth ministerial conference, Brazil tied movement on agriculture to movement on electronic commerce and clashed with the United States over domestic support — a negotiating posture that does not serve India’s agenda
• The honest formulation is therefore this: India and Brazil are allies on the architecture of the international order and opponents on the content of agricultural trade. The strategic convergence is real; so is the commercial conflict; and the second is why the trade agreement has stayed at 450 lines

India and Brazil agree on who should write the rules and disagree on what the rules on agriculture should say.

The February 2026 Summit and What It Set in Motion

• President Lula made a state visit to India on 21 February 2026, timed to the AI Impact Summit, and held a bilateral summit with Modi that produced the fullest package the relationship has generated
• The headline was a trade target. The two set a goal of taking bilateral trade beyond US$20 billion within five years; Lula told Modi that twenty billion did not seem ambitious enough and that they should target something closer to US$30 billion by 2030. Current trade of US$15.21 billion makes both figures reachable
• A critical minerals and rare earths agreement covering technology transfer, joint research and investment was the centrepiece, and was widely read as a diversification move away from Chinese processing dominance
• A Centre of Excellence for Digital Public Infrastructure is to be established in Brazil, exporting the Indian identity-payments-data stack as a replicable system rather than a procured asset
• A digital partnership declaration covering artificial intelligence, semiconductors, supercomputing, quantum technologies and blockchain
• A pharmaceutical and medical products regulatory understanding between the two drug control authorities, aimed squarely at the registration bottleneck that has held Indian generics back across the region
• Cooperation on renewables, ethanol blending and sustainable aviation fuel; on climate-resilient and precision agriculture and bio-fertilisers; and a Centre of Excellence in Brazil for oilseeds, pulses and integrated farming
• Commercial and institutional pairings: industry chambers on both sides, Vale with Tata on mining and steel supply chains, and Fiocruz with Biocon on health research
• A ten-year business visa for Indian passport holders, and cooperation on postal services, small enterprise and film and cultural institutions
• Modi’s framing was explicitly Southern: “when India and Brazil work together, the voice of the Global South becomes stronger and more confident”
• What the summit did not do is conclude the Mercosur expansion, resolve the agricultural divergence or close the missile sale. It set direction and left the binding constraints in place

The Other Relationships That Matter

The Regional Architecture, Named

• Mercosur — Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, with Venezuela suspended since 1 December 2016 — is India’s only regional trade counterpart, through the 2004 Preferential Trade Agreement
• The Pacific Alliance — Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru — is where India holds observer status and no agreement
• CELAC convenes all 33 states and is India’s only region-wide political channel, at foreign-minister level and intermittently

The Country Table

Country	What it is to India	Instrument	Status in 2026
Brazil	Largest regional partner; strategic partnership 2006	Mercosur PTA; strategic partnership	Trade ~US$15.2 bn (2025); expansion talks live
Mexico	Second-largest partner; Privileged Partnership 2007	New engagement framework	Largest Latin American investor in India
Argentina	Lithium, soy oil, defence	Mercosur PTA; strategic partnership	Trade ~US$6 bn FY 2025-26; pressing PTA expansion
Chile	Copper and lithium	PTA 2006, expanded 2017	CEPA under negotiation, not signed
Peru	Gold and copper; third-largest regional partner	PTA negotiation	Ten rounds held, not concluded
Colombia	Crude; Hero’s first overseas plant	—	Joined the Belt and Road Initiative in 2025
Venezuela	Crude, historic and renewed	—	Third-largest Indian crude supplier by May 2026
Guyana	Diaspora and new oil	Five MoUs, 2024	~40% Indian-origin; ~900,000 bpd output
Suriname	Diaspora	—	~27% Indian-origin
Trinidad and Tobago	Diaspora, energy	—	~35% Indian-origin; Modi visited July 2025
Cuba	The Cold War link	—	Diplomatic relations since 1960

Mexico

• Mexico is India’s second-largest trading partner in the region and the largest Latin American investor in India, with cumulative investment of over US$350 million
• A “Privileged Partnership” was declared in 2007, and a new engagement framework has been launched to give the relationship a working structure
• The relationship’s commercial character is unusual for the region: it is manufacturing-and-services heavy rather than commodity heavy, built around auto components, electronics and information technology, because Mexico is a manufacturing platform for the North American market rather than a raw-materials exporter to Asia
• Cinépolis of Mexico became India’s fourth-largest multiplex operator, growing from a few hundred screens to a national chain — the most visible Latin American consumer brand in India
• Mexican crude was a significant Indian import through the 2010s, second only to Venezuela in the region at its peak
• A dozen or more Latin American companies in steel, auto parts and electrical motors run manufacturing and assembly in India, most of them Mexican or Brazilian

Argentina

• Argentina is India’s principal lithium partner and one of its principal food suppliers, being the world’s leading exporter of soybean oil, of which India is the world’s largest importer
• Bilateral trade reached about US$6 billion in FY 2025-26, growing over 25%, making India Argentina’s sixth-largest trading partner
• KABIL, the Indian state joint venture for overseas minerals, signed an agreement with CAMYEN, the Catamarca provincial mining and energy company, on 15 January 2024 — India’s first overseas lithium exploration project
• The agreement covers five blocks — Cortadera-I, VI, VII and VIII, and Cateo-2022-01810132 — across roughly 15,703 hectares, with an Indian commitment of about ₹200 crore and exploration, exclusivity and subsequent exploitation rights
• Exploration is at an early stage and production is years away. This is intent converting slowly into asset, not secured supply, and should be described as such
• Argentina is the most active advocate of widening the India–Mercosur agreement, which gives India an interlocutor inside the bloc for the first time
• Modi’s visit of July 2025 was the first bilateral prime-ministerial visit in 57 years and produced agreements on minerals, energy and defence

Chile

• Chile is India’s copper supplier, holding roughly a quarter of world copper output and around 30% of lithium production
• The India–Chile PTA of 2006 was expanded in 2016 and came into force in expanded form on 16 May 2017. The expansion was substantial in relative terms: Chile moved from 296 tariff lines to 1,798, India from 178 to 1,031
• Bilateral trade has grown fast: from about US$2.70 billion in FY 2023-24 to about US$3.76 billion in FY 2024-25, and to roughly US$6.25 billion in FY 2025-26, a rise of about 66% — the fastest growth of any Indian relationship in the region
• Negotiations for a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement began in 2025, with terms of reference signed in May 2025 and four rounds completed, the last in December 2025
• Both sides have stated a target of concluding in 2026, with critical minerals and market access the outstanding issues, and Indian officials describing only a few issues as remaining. No agreement has been signed

Peru

• Peru is India’s third-largest trading partner in the region, with bilateral trade having risen from about US$66 million in 2003 to some US$3.68 billion by 2023
• India buys gold and copper; Peru produced about 2.7 million tonnes of copper in 2024, against Indian refined copper imports of about 1.2 million tonnes in FY 2024-25 and projected Indian demand of 3–3.3 million tonnes by 2030
• Trade agreement negotiations have run since 2017. The ninth round concluded in Lima on 3–5 November 2025, covering goods, services, rules of origin, technical barriers to trade and a dedicated critical minerals chapter; a tenth round was scheduled for New Delhi in January 2026, with further rounds in 2026
• Peruvian officials have spoken of signing during 2026. The agreement has not been concluded

Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia

• Colombia supplies crude and hosts Hero MotoCorp’s first overseas manufacturing plant, with capacity for around 150,000 motorcycles a year — a rare case of Indian manufacturing investment rather than resource extraction
• Colombia joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2025, which is a useful marker of how far Chinese institutional penetration now runs
• Bolivia holds the world’s largest identified lithium resource in the Salar de Uyuni and supplies India with gold, of which it has been the region’s single largest supplier to India
• India signed an understanding with Bolivia on lithium cooperation, and no Indian production has followed. Bolivian lithium has defeated better-resourced entrants than India, and should be described as an aspiration

Venezuela: What Was Lost

• Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven crude reserves and was, for fifteen years, India’s most important economic relationship in the region
• Indian state and private refiners were among the largest buyers of its heavy crude; Indian companies held upstream stakes; Indian pharmaceutical exporters had a substantial market
• United States sanctions and the collapse of the state oil company ended almost all of it, and Indian exporters wrote off very large unpaid dues
• The lesson Indian business drew — that political risk in the region can destroy a book of business overnight — has shaped its caution ever since, and is part of why Indian firms have not invested in pipelines, port and rail capacity, refineries or warehousing in the region
• The partial resumption of Venezuelan crude flows to India by 2026 shows how quickly the commercial logic reasserts itself when the political obstacle is lifted

Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago: The Under-Used Asset

• These are the three states where Indian-origin populations are politically and demographically decisive, and where India’s ordinary diaspora diplomacy should work best
• Guyana has become an energy state within a decade. Production from the Stabroek block passed 900,000 barrels per day in November 2025, transforming a small economy into one of the fastest-growing in the world
• Modi’s state visit to Georgetown in November 2024 produced five memoranda covering hydrocarbons, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, agriculture and economic and human capital development, and he received the Order of Excellence
• Suriname’s president Chandrikapersad Santokhi and Guyana’s president Irfaan Ali are both of Indian descent, as were several of their predecessors — a fact with no parallel anywhere else in India’s foreign relations outside Mauritius
• The strategic point: these are small states, but they hold votes, they hold oil, they hold a genuine emotional constituency, and they sit inside CARICOM. India has treated them as heritage and not as leverage

Cuba

• Cuba was one of the earliest members of the Non-Aligned Movement and India’s principal political interlocutor in the region through the Cold War
• Diplomatic relations date from 1960, and the relationship has been sustained by solidarity, medical and pharmaceutical cooperation and periodic Indian humanitarian assistance rather than by commerce

CARICOM: Where India Does Hold Summits

• The India–CARICOM Summit mechanism is the one summit-level institution India has in the Western Hemisphere. The first summit was held on 25 September 2019 on the margins of the UN General Assembly; the second in Georgetown, Guyana, on 20 November 2024; and the third is to be held in India
• Modi framed the second summit’s agenda by re-reading the acronym CARICOM as a seven-pillar programme: Capacity building, Agriculture and food security, Renewable energy and climate change, Innovation and technology, Cricket and culture, Ocean economy and maritime security, and Medicine and healthcare
• The deliverables were characteristically Indian: 1,000 information technology scholarships; extension of a technology centre in Belize to all members; drone deployment and millet promotion in agriculture; invitations to the International Solar Alliance and the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure; extension of India Stack, UPI and the government e-marketplace; scholarships for women’s cricket trainers; and Jan Aushadhi generic pharmacies, telehealth and adoption of the Indian Pharmacopoeia
• The Caribbean thus has what Latin America does not — a summit, a framework and a deliverables list. Fourteen small states have more institutional attention from India than twenty large ones

The Areas Where the Relationship Can Actually Grow

Agriculture and Food Security

• India and the region are the world’s two great consumption economies outside China, and food security is critical to both — which makes agriculture the most obvious growth axis and the most politically obstructed one
• The complementarity is between Indian technique and Latin American land. Indian sustainable farming methods, digitisation and water conservation technology meet the region’s enormous arable area, water availability and favourable climate
• Indian investments already in place include millet farming in Guyana, edible oil production in several states, agrochemical manufacturing plants in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, and agricultural research centres
• Pulses are the largest untapped line. India accounts for roughly half of world pulse imports, and the region has the land and climate to become a major supplier — a trade that barely exists
• Off-season fruit and vegetables from Chile and Peru arrive in the Indian market when Indian producers are out of season, so they attract no domestic protectionist objection — a rare category of agricultural trade with no Indian lobby against it
• UPL is among the largest agrochemical operators in the region, and Brazil is its largest single market
• The obstacle recurs everywhere. Indian agricultural tariffs have historically been very high — one assessment put India’s average tariff on the region’s agricultural goods at 65%, more than five times China’s — and the region’s tariffs on Indian manufactures, at roughly 9.8%, were well above OECD levels

Energy

• Crude diversification is the strategic driver. India’s crude imports were around 4.5 million barrels per day in 2023 and are forecast to reach about 9.1 million barrels per day by 2040, with import dependence rising from roughly 80% to about 90%
• The region holds around one-fifth of global proven reserves, plus roughly 58 billion barrels of shale oil barely touched, and Guyana’s new production adds a supplier with no OPEC obligations and no sanctions history
• Renewables cut both ways. Suzlon has built wind projects in Brazil and Uruguay; Chile’s Atacama Desert hosts multi-billion-dollar solar developments that are an opportunity for Indian equipment suppliers and investors; and the International Solar Alliance has substantial Latin American and Caribbean membership

Critical Minerals

• This has become a first-order Indian interest and the fastest-moving part of the relationship. Copper for electrification, lithium for batteries, and rare earths for everything from motors to defence electronics
• Every live Indian trade negotiation in the region now carries a critical minerals chapter — Chile, Peru and the Brazil agreement of February 2026 alike
• The lithium triangle of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile holds the majority of world lithium resources, and India’s only operating position in it is KABIL’s early-stage Argentine exploration
• The honest assessment is that India has intent, agreements and exploration rights, and does not yet have secured supply. Nothing has moved from block to production
• The supply chains remain immature and intermediated. Indian buyers of the region’s metals and gemstones frequently transact through middlemen; direct access would raise margins on both sides

Pharmaceuticals

• India exports roughly one and a half billion dollars of pharmaceuticals to the region, and inexpensive Indian generics have reduced healthcare costs for consumers and public systems across it
• Ayurveda has acquired a following in several states, and the health cooperation agreed with Brazil in 2026 explicitly includes it
• The registration bottleneck is the binding constraint. Approval of Indian pharmaceutical products by national regulators is slow, expensive and duplicative, and Indian industry has pressed for its easing for two decades
• The February 2026 regulatory understanding with Brazil’s authority is the first concrete movement on it, and if it produces mutual recognition it is worth more to Indian exporters than most tariff concessions

Information Technology and the Nearshoring Model

• Over two dozen Indian companies run development and service centres, including business process outsourcing, across the region
• They employ around 25,000 people, almost all of them local. With a few hundred technicians from India, Indian software firms train and employ tens of thousands of Latin Americans, use their languages for the North American, European and local markets, and avoid long-term visas
• This is the “nearshoring” model — Indian software and management, Latin American staff, American time zones — and it is the most successful and least noticed thing India does in the region
• It is also modest for the world’s leading services exporter. The constraint is confidence in each other’s economies rather than capability

Investment, Both Ways

• Indian investment in the region is estimated at around US$20 billion, spread across hydrocarbons, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, agro-processing, engineering, textiles, chemicals and electronics — against Chinese investment of roughly two and a half times that
• The composition is the argument. Roughly 18% of Indian investment in the region targets raw-material extraction, against about 57% of Chinese investment. India employs and manufactures where China extracts, which is a political asset India has never systematically used
• Reliance, OVL, Essar, Apollo Tyres, Ashok Leyland and TVS have all taken positions or shown interest in the region’s oilfields, shale, mining, agribusiness, chemicals, auto parts and commercial forestry
• Latin American investment in India is around US$2 billion and concentrated in a few names — Peru’s Aje, which bottles and markets Big Cola in India, alongside Mexican and Brazilian firms in steel, auto parts and electrical motors

How the Scholars Read the Relationship

Scholar	Core proposition	What follows from it
S. Jaishankar	Latin America forms part of India’s larger goal of becoming a leading global power; India must develop a footprint with relationships that really count	The region is instrumental to India’s ambition, not peripheral to it
Deepak Bhojwani	The hiatus between content and potential, measured against China and even South Korea, calls into question the commitment on both sides	The problem is will, not capability
R. Viswanathan	Latin America sees India as a hedge against overdependence on either China or the West	India’s opening is the region’s own diversification anxiety

Jaishankar’s Four Pillars

Speaking at the India–LAC Business Conclave, the External Affairs Minister set out four axes for intensified engagement, and they read as a working policy statement in the absence of a written one.

• Supply chain diversification. The pandemic demonstrated an urgent need for resilient and reliable supply chains; the world economy needs multiple and redundant sourcing and diversified production, and that opens space for India and the region together
• Resource partnerships. As India’s economy expands, so does demand for oil, gas, strategic minerals and food commodities; the region can contribute to India’s growth, and Indian products and services in turn meet the expectations and price points of a rising Latin American middle class
• Sharing developmental experience. As countries of the Global South, both benefit from dialogue on digital capability, health solutions, agricultural practice and infrastructure; India must customise its existing programmes to the region’s requirements and make them more user-friendly
• Addressing global challenges. Climate change, the concerns of the Global South, and reform of global financial and multilateral structures, where both are significant stakeholders
• His framing of distance is the memorable one — that in a globalised era, modern logistics and modern communications must ensure distance is no longer an impediment
• The trade ambition is on the record. India and the region have set a working target of doubling trade towards US$100 billion, from a base then described as under US$50 billion

Bhojwani’s Diagnosis

“Political will is the prime mover of India-Latin America relations.” — Deepak Bhojwani

• Start with a hard look at the current relationship, disaggregated to sub-regional level and, where necessary, to country-specific issues. A single regional strategy is the wrong instrument for a region with no single counterpart
• Both sides lack institutional memory, which means vital facts and statistics have to be re-verified each time rather than accumulated
• India should take the lead in identifying and activating the principal actors and forums, because Latin America acts through multiple overlapping layers of regional and sub-regional organisation
• India cannot match China’s achievements in the foreseeable future and must concentrate on incremental accretion — which is realism, not defeatism
• India should strengthen what distinguishes it from China: civilisational depth, democratic governance with its demands of transparency and accountability, and the multilateral issues on which Latin America identifies more closely with India than with Beijing
• The relationship carries no baggage of the past, which is an asset almost nowhere else in Indian foreign policy

“The advent of an Indo-Latin American community, in lands which have witnessed centuries of miscegenation, is not inconceivable but presupposes extensive official and institutional diligence.”

— Deepak Bhojwani

Viswanathan’s Reading

• “Latin America is closer to India than you think” is his working proposition, and the argument behind it is commercial rather than sentimental
• India can count on the region as a reliable long-term contributor to its energy security and for agricultural products such as vegetable oil and pulses; Latin Americans are correspondingly excited about India as a large and growing market
• New complementarities and synergies are being discovered by business on both sides, which is why he reads the two as on course for a sustainable long-term partnership
• The most useful line for policy is the geopolitical one: Latin America sees India as a hedge against overdependence on either China or the West — which means demand for India exceeds India’s own effort, and India is under-supplying a market that wants it

What a Latin America Policy Would Have to Contain

A serious improvement in the relationship is not expensive, because none of the constraints is a hard one. It is sequenced roughly as follows, from cheapest and slowest to most valuable.

Capacity: Language and Area Studies

• Fund Spanish and Portuguese teaching at scale and, separately, fund area expertise, because they are different deficits — the language can be taught in two years, the regional understanding cannot
• Build Latin American studies centres in Indian universities and think tanks, with official support where necessary, against China’s sixty-plus
• Use ITEC deliberately. India offers a few hundred fully-funded technical scholarships to Latin Americans annually on very attractive terms, and they are chronically under-utilised with almost no feedback loop back to New Delhi — a failure of marketing and follow-up, not of generosity

Connectivity

• Direct shipping and air links will not appear from market forces, as the discontinued attempts of the 1980s demonstrated
• The instrument is institutional: guaranteed cargo commitments, warehousing, a shipping consortium, or a subsidised trial route long enough to build volume — the standard tools for breaking a low-volume trap

Institutions

• Create a summit mechanism. India runs a forum summit for Africa and a summit for CARICOM and nothing for Latin America; an India–LAC or India–CELAC summit is the single cheapest thing India could do, and would in itself close much of the visible gap with China
• Restore and honour the annual foreign-ministerial meeting that was pledged and abandoned
• Replace the 1997 export-promotion programme with a policy document that states interests, priorities and country tiers — the function China’s 2008 and 2016 papers perform for Beijing
• Join the regional development banks. Membership of the Inter-American Development Bank and the Andean Development Corporation would give India a seat where project finance is decided, for a modest capital subscription

Trade Instruments

• Conclude Chile and Peru, both of which are close and both of which carry critical minerals chapters
• Widen the Mercosur agreement well beyond 450 lines, which will require India to confront the agricultural sensitivities that have blocked it, and to trade something for the access it wants
• Negotiate pharmaceutical registration reciprocity across the region, following the Brazilian regulatory understanding — worth more to Indian exporters than most tariff cuts
• Consolidate the juridical matrix: investment protection, avoidance of double taxation, extradition, immigration and the removal of regulatory friction, which matter as much as the forums

Finance and Presence

• Extend the line-of-credit and EXIM Bank presence. US$811 million for 33 countries is not a development partnership
• Open resident missions where India is presently accredited concurrently, because concurrent accreditation is a statement that a country does not warrant an ambassador
• Use the Caribbean diaspora as a political instrument rather than a cultural one, and use the Guyanese and Surinamese relationships as the entry point to CARICOM’s fourteen votes

Conclusion

• India’s relationship with Latin America is the clearest test case in Indian foreign policy of whether complementarity alone produces engagement. The answer, on the evidence of seventy-five years, is that it does not
• The economies fit; the politics are friendly; the history is clean; and the relationship has still underperformed, because nothing in it has ever been urgent enough to force an Indian minister’s calendar
• What has changed is the resource logic. Critical minerals, crude diversification, edible oil and pulses have converted the region from an optional market into an input into India’s growth, and every live negotiation now carries a minerals chapter
• What has not changed is the institutional deficit. No summit, no policy document since 1997, four hundred and fifty tariff lines with Mercosur, US$811 million of concessional finance and a diplomatic footprint stretched by concurrent accreditation
• The Brazil relationship shows both faces at once. Deep strategic convergence in every Southern institution, a February 2026 package of real substance, and an agricultural conflict at the WTO that keeps the trade agreement small
• The strongest argument for acting is not Indian. It is that Latin America sees India as a hedge against overdependence on China and the West, which means the demand exists and India is failing to meet it
• The honest conclusion is Bhojwani’s. The impediments are real, they are also excuses, none of them stopped China, and the prime mover is political will