A few years ago, Russia emerged as a key arms seller in Latin America: it supplied everything from fighter planes to Venezuela to combat helicopters to Brazil and different types of missiles to Peru or Ecuador.
This was seen as a sign of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s interest in cultivating ties with the region and responding to Washington in its own hemisphere for NATO expansion in Europe.
But Suddenly, sales of Russian military products to Latin America plummeted.
“In the last five years there has been almost nothing”, observes Siemon Wezeman, researcher senior of the Stockholm International Institute for Peace Research (Sipri, for its acronym in English) that measures arms transfers.
“It is a trend that is very low“, Wezeman tells BBC Mundo about the shipment of Russian weapons to Latin American countries.
The question then is why this marked turn occurs.
A matter of wallet
One of the reasons cited by specialists for Latin America to stop buying Russian weapons is merely economic.
During the first decade of this century, the region experienced a commercial boom with strong foreign exchange earnings that allowed it to equip its armed forces.
South America was the world region where military spending grew the most during 2010, with Brazil lid being that phenomenon.
But the end of the commodity boom brought economic problems to the subcontinent from 2006 and, without major conflicts among themselves, the states cut their purchases of war material.
Between 2017 Y 2021 Arms imports by South American states reached their lowest level compared to any other five-year period in the last half century, according to Sipri.
However, Wezeman warns that in the past five years the region’s states still bought and received military equipment from several other countries—the United States, Sweden, Italy, France, and South Korea in among others—while they stopped buying from Russia.
Venezuela is a paradigmatic example of this swing.
While he presided over the country between 1999 Y 2013, Hugo Chávez used the large Venezuelan oil revenues to buy arms worth billions of dollars from Russia, which along with China became his main supplier in the field.
Venezuela thus became the Latin American country that received the most Russian military products, including sophisticated Su-17, systems of e anti-aircraft missiles S-35, helicopters, tanks, mortars and guided bombs.
But when the Venezuelan economy began to crumble in the following years, the arsenal “made in Russia” stopped growing in the South American country.
“Part of this has to do with the ability of Latin America to buy weapons”, explains John Polga-Hecimovich, a professor of political science at the US Naval Academy
“Venezuela has not been able to buy anything for six years and I suspect that (purchasing power) is related”, adds the analyst in dialogue with BBC Mundo.
“Geopolitical objective”
Russia assures that its ties with Latin America are based on pragmatism, not on ideology.
Despite the drop in its arms sales to Latin America , Moscow maintains its military-technical cooperation with regional allies such as Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba.
As a show of support for Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in his confrontation with Washington, Moscow sent that country a December of 2018 two of his Tu-bombers 26 capable of carrying nuclear weapons.
And, shortly before After Putin ordered an invasion of Ukraine in February, his deputy foreign minister Sergey Riabkov avoided ruling out the deployment of military infrastructure in Cuba and Venezuela if tensions with the US continued to rise.
“All of this, in In a certain sense, it is part of Russia’s geopolitical objective in Latin America to reply to the perception of a US intrusion in Moscow’s own sphere of influence”, says Polga-Hecimovich.
Washington has measured its response.
The White House National Security Advisor , Jake Sullivan, suggested that Riabkov’s remarks were “bragging” and argued that the US would act “decisively”if Russia sought to deploy troops or military equipment in the region.
Ukrainian effect
But the US has also sought to weaken Russian exports of weapons, something that can give you revenue for being the world’s largest arms exporter.
In 2014, Washington passed a law “to counter adversaries through sanctions”, known by its acronym Caatsa, which foresees possible penalties for countries that carry out transactions with Russia, North Korea and Iran.
When Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in 2018 that Mexico was evaluating buying helicopters from his country, a US official warned in Congress that the Latin American country could receive sanctions by Caatsa.
“At the Washington level, we have raised this with our counterparts in Mexico City,” said Hugo Rodríguez, then s deputy assistant secretary of the Department of State for Western Hemisphere affairs.
In fact, after approval of this law and pressure from the West on potential clients of Moscow, Russian arms exports fell 12% Come in 2017 Y 2021 compared to the previous five-year period, indicated the Sipri.
In the same period, global US arms sales grew to more than double those of Russia, the second largest exporter.
After invading Ukraine, Russia could have more difficulties exporting weapons, experts anticipate. In turn, there have been reports of difficulties in maintaining some Russian-made equipment in Latin America.
Almost parallel to a visit by the President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, to Putin in February, the decision of the Brazilian Air Force to deactivate its Mi-Helicopters 127 due to the operational costs and logistical challenges of these aircraft bought from Russia in 989 for about US$127 millions.
The war in Ukraine has also cooled Russia’s ties with Latin American countries and institutions.
The Organization of American States (OAS) suspended Russia on Thursday as a permanent observer until it “withdraws all its military forces and equipment from Ukraine”, something that Moscow lamented and attributed to an “anti-Russian” push by the US and Canada.
And in the near future, US and European efforts will be redoubled to dissuade buyers of Russian weapons, Wezeman anticipates.
“It is notable that there are no known orders in progress from Russia —or China— for any South American state,” the researcher points out. “Nor do there seem to be (in the region) serious discussions about acquisitions from Russia.”
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