The Japan's Official Development Assistance (ODA) in Latin America, 1960-2022: Challenges in the Age of Two Superpowers

Since 1960, Japan's Official Development Assistance (ODA) has been charac-terized by supporting its government's export promotion program, initially in Asia. In the case of Latin America, Japanese ODA with the support of the pu-blic and private sector has shown consistency in order to ensure its economic interests in the region, such as the granting of aid in the case of JICA and the export of capital in the form of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and loans for exports and imports, especially in the strategic sectors (energy, mining, agri-culture, manufacturing) in the case of the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC, formerly EXIMBANK). However, so far this century and with the arrival of China as the second largest economy in the world after the U.S., the Japanese govern-ment proposed a new initiative to ensure and promote order, prosperity, and peace in Latin America, given that the region has strategic natural resources and more than 2 million Japanese descendants. Thus, the objective of this pa-per is to elucidate the scope of the aid policy in the region, which, we assume, was at the service of the economic and commercial interests of that country in Latin America during the period under study. This can be seen, at first, through the trade surplus that Japan obtained with the countries of the re-gion and the export of capital from that country in the main Latin American economies. In order to achieve this goal, the comparative method was used.