US capital dominated Latin America throughout the twentieth century. Starting around 1898, a suite of US policies effectively placed the whole Western Hemisphere under North American economic control. For more than a hundred years, North American companies leveraged Washington’s outsized power to shape Latin America into a continent of banana republics, beholden to US interests.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, things seemed to be continuing apace. A cliché from the Mexican Revolution found renewed meaning in an era marked by free trade agreements and structural adjustment policies: “Poor Latin America. So far from God, so close to the United States.”

In 2015, however, China surpassed the US as the largest investor in the region.