While the richest nations of the world were meeting this past week at the Group of 20 gathering in Pittsburgh, a handful of African and South American countries convened their own gathering this weekend in Venezuela to discuss a broad agenda of items specific to the Global South. The meeting was the second of its kind under the banner of the Africa-South America Summit (ASA); the first convened three years earlier in Nigeria. 

The "Southern" summit brought together thirty heads of states and representatives of some sixty countries from Latin America and Africa together to hammer out ways forward to increase bi-regional cooperation.  The final outcome document, predictably bland, reaffirmed the group's "commitment to promote South-South cooperation as the main objective of the two regions, so as to complement the traditional North-South cooperation" and "promote sustained economic growth ... in the two regions," and "exchange their experiences and encourage a close and effective cooperation between the two regions, with the strong support of the African Union (AU) and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), as main pillars of cooperation between our peoples." 

This is not to suggest that the affair was largely for show.  Venezuela, in particular, made impressive headway in expanding its influence east by securing mining agreements with Sierra Leone and initiating negotiations for similar purposes with Mauritania, Niger and South Africa among others.  Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez also inked a deal with the UN's Food and Agricultural Oraganization that commits the South American country to offering financing, tools, and seeds to the organization's activities in Africa.

But the star of the show was Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.  Picking up where he left off at the UN General Assembly meeting the previous week, Gaddafi continued his world tour of weird, capturing the media spotlight with a day spent kissing babies, shopping with local Venezuelans, and provocative comments aimed at Washington and Brussels.  Among other things, Gaddafi called for the creation of "SATO," a less-than-inspired answer to NATO, in service to the Global South's coming battle against the imperial north. 

On the economic front, Gaddafi noted the disadvantage former colonial countries find themselves tethered to in their international economic dealings with the Global North.  "They think the planet is divided into two parts: masters and slaves. The masters are in the North and in the South are the slaves."  The South's "riches," Gaddafi argued, "are in the south, the mines are in the south, but they are exploited in the north. We have become a shipping platform for riches going north." 

Gaddafi's statement, wittingly or otherwise, echoed Fidel Castro's famous "History Will Absolve Me" speech in 1953 where the future revolutionary delineated Cuba's neocolonial predicament: "We export sugar to import candy, we export hides to import shoes, we export iron to import plows," making reference to the debilitating dependency of Latin America on United States markets. Countries in the Global South find themselves in much the same bind nearly sixty years later, though the terms of agreement have been slightly altered.

As the balance of power in international relation shifts east, South America and Africa have increasingly become the focus for Chinese foreign direct investment and trade. Today, Latin America and Africa export natural resources, not just to the United States, but increasingly to China in return for inexpensively manufactured goods.  As local industry is undercut, and natural resource extraction jobs are increasingly taken by foreign workers, the economies of both Latin America and parts are Africa are caste in doubt.

Given the changed circumstances of international politics-and specifically the process whereby China supplants the United States as top dog in some areas where American influence has historically held sway-one might expect that the South's management of relations with China would be high on leaders' agendas.

Not so.  In fact, the 800-hundred pound gorilla in the room remained invisible, at least in leaders' public statements, which were either aimed at the West, or were empty declarations of unity and the like carefully crafted to avoid rocking the boat.  Not a peep was issued concerning eastern influence.  This willful blindness to China's growing role in the affairs of both regions should be alarming to those concerned with the advancement of peoples and countries in the Global South.

Gaddafi's attacks against the west and its tradition of (neo)imperialism, like Chavez's, make for great sound bites and no doubt bolster political support at home.  But they also serve as a smokescreen which obscures an emerging reality in the developing world. Colonial relations between the powerful and weak are indeed alive and well.  But in their rush to cut the chord of domination with the United States and other former colonial powers, countries like Venezuela and Libya are running headlong into China's warm embrace, relations which increasingly seem to be reorienting southern dependency east.

But perhaps I am mistaken.  It may be the case that, far from swapping colonial overlords, the Global South's weaker powers are carving out more equitable relations with a new cadre of rising powers, thus relieving themselves of the West's suffocating presence.  Or maybe a South-South coalition will be able to provide countries with a modicum of independence from the entire cast of global great powers.  But given China's expanding influence, exploding levels of foreign direct investment in Latin America and Africa, demonstrated fidelity to realism and adherence to an "Eastphalian" foreign policy, I doubt it.