Latin America: India's Most Undervalued Export Market

 Latin America: India's Most Undervalued Export Market

India’s exports to Latin American countries now exceed exports to several neighboring markets and traditional trade partners, underscoring the region’s emergence as a strategically important destination for Indian goods.

In 2025–26, India’s exports to Brazil reached 7.02 billion dollars—higher than exports to Japan (6.04 bn), Vietnam (6.6 bn), Spain (6.96 bn), South Korea (6.01 bn), South Africa (7 bn), and Malaysia (6.82 bn).

Exports to Mexico totaled 5.73 billion dollars, exceeding exports to Sri Lanka (5.52 bn), Thailand (5.06 bn), Indonesia (4.49 bn), Russia (4.49 bn), Canada (4.67 bn), Egypt (3.93 bn), and Turkey (4.54 bn).

Exports to Chile reached 1.22 bn, exceeding exports to neighboring Myanmar at 808 m.

Exports to Guatemala at 656 m were more than the exports of 567 m to New Zealand.

Exports to the Dominican Republic totaled 411 m, which were higher than the exports to Cambodia at 280 m. Dom Republic has a population of about 11.5 million, compared with Cambodia’s 18 million.

Exports to Honduras totaled 257 m, exceeding exports to Kazakhstan at 185 m, despite Honduras having roughly half Kazakhstan’s population.

This is not a one-year wonder; it is the continuation of a decade-long trend. Latin America has clearly emerged as an important destination for India’s exports, with significant room for further growth in the coming years.

India’s exports to the 19 Latin American countries were 21.55 billion dollars in 2025-26, doubling from 10 bn in 2015-16.

Exports could scale to 50 billion dollars if Indian exporters and the Commerce Ministry pursue this underexplored market through a systematic, long-term strategy.

Latin America is a large market of 19 countries, 620 million people, 8 trillion dollars of GDP with per capita income of around 12,000 dollars. The region’s total imports in 2025 were 1.75 trillion dollars.

Motorcycles ride the wave of export boom to Latin America

India’s motorcycle exports to Latin America totaled 1.64 billion dollars, accounting for 41% of India’s global motorcycle exports.

Colombia ranked as the top global destination for India’s motorcycle exports in 2025–26, at 578 million dollars.

Mexico ranked second at 320 million dollars.

Other major markets included Brazil (174 m), Guatemala (141 m), Argentina (90 m), Peru (85 m), and Honduras (56 m).

India is the second-largest supplier of motorcycles to Latin America, after China.

Car exports

Car exports to Latin America totaled 2.25 billion dollars, representing 25% of India’s global car exports of 9 billion dollars.

Major destinations were Mexico (1,125 m), Chile (279 m), Peru (251 m), Colombia (150 m), Panama (77 m), Costa Rica (74 m), Guatemala (58 m), Uruguay (52 m), and Ecuador (50 m).

Pharmaceuticals

Pharmaceutical exports totaled 1.6 billion dollars. India was the 5th largest supplier of pharmaceuticals to the region after US, Germany, Switzerland and Ireland. China ranked 11th.

Major destinations for India’s pharmaceutical exports were Brazil (530 million dollars), Mexico (219 m), Chile (179 m), Colombia (112 m), Guatemala (95 m), Venezuela (79 m), Peru (72 m), the Dominican Republic (72 m), Ecuador (37 m), and Honduras (33 m).

Major items of exports of India to Latin America in 2025-26

Vehicles: 5.5 bn

Chemicals: 3.2 bn

Machinery: 3 bn

Pharmaceuticals: 2 bn

Textiles, including apparel, fabrics, and fibre: 1.3 bn

Petroleum products: 1.07 bn

Aluminum products: 560 m

Plastics: 446 m

Rubber products: 469 m

Cotton: 451 m

Ceramic products: 383 m

Iron and steel: 352 m

Indian companies are also doing well in Latin America

Here are two inspiring examples:

UPL, the largest Indian multinational agrochemicals company got 37% of its revenue from Latin America as against 12% from India.

For Financial Year 2025-2626, UPL Limited reported total consolidated revenue of ₹51,839 crore.

Revenue from Latin America was ₹19,358 crore which is three times more than their turnover of ₹6,343 crore in India.

Kalpataru power transmission company of Mumbai has secured around a billion dollars of EPC contracts in Latin America. This includes the single largest contract of 430 million dollars in Chile

In January 2026, Welspun Corp, an Indian steel pipe manufacturer, has won a 203 million dollar contract from Argentina, which is building the infrastructure for exports of shale gas and oil.

 

India's imports from Latin America:

Gold - 14.7 billion dollars

Crude oil 5.7 billion dollars

Vegetable oil (mostly soya oil) 4.8 bn 

Raw sugar 1.24 bn

Copper concentrate   4.6 bn 

Machinery and equipment  1 bn

Iron and steel 514 m

Wood        487 m

Chemicals 485 m

Fresh Fruits and vegetables 467 m

Cotton 405 m

Wood pulp 244 m

Aluminium products 212 m

Raw gold import has doubled to 14.7 bn from 6.8 bn last year. Peru was the top source of gold imports with 7.99 bn (up from 4.6 bn last year) followed by Chile 1.8 bn, Dominican Republic 1.5 bn, Bolivia 1.25 bn,Colombia 808 m,  Argentina 902 m, Brazil 232 m and Mexico 174 m.

Crude oil imports which reached a peak of around 15 billion dollars in 2013-14 has come down drastically due to US sanctions on Venezuela which had supplied 10 bn dollars of crude in 2013-14.

 

Crude oil import sources in 2025-26: Brazil 2.3 bn, Colombia 1.6 bn, Mexico 333 dollars and Venezuela 255 m.

The loosening of US sanctions have reopened India's crude imports from Venezuela in 2026. In May 2026, Venezuela became India's third-largest crude supplier in May, overtaking Saudi Arabia and the United States. Venezuela supplied around 417,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil to India in May, higher than 283,000 bpd in April.

India has ramped up crude imports from Brazil after the disruption of supplies from the gulf due to the Iran war. Brazil became India’s fourth-largest crude supplier, sending around 290,000 b/d in April. India became the #2 destination for Brazilian oil exports in 2006.

Argentina has emerged as a new source of LPG (Liquefied Petroleum Gas) for India in 2026. Argentina shipped 50,000 tonne of LPG to India in the first three months of 2026 after starting with 22,000 tons in 2025. The country has potential to increase the supplies in the coming years. Argentina has the world's second largest shale gas and the 4th largest shale oil reserves. These are being being extracted and exported starting in the last few years.

Latin America is the main source of soy oil imports of India. Argentina is the #1 global supplier with 3.7 billion dollars, followed by Brazil 1.1 bn. 

Brazil is the source of imports of raw sugar which India refines and reexports to other countries.

Chile, the main supplier of copper and other mineral concentrates from the region, supplied 2.4 bn (up from 1.6 bn last year), followed by Brazil- 935 m, Peru 730 m, Mexico- 286 m and Colombia 148 m

Main suppliers of wood from the region:  Brazil 133 m, Uruguay 120 m, Ecuador 90 m and Panama 33 m.

The region has become a regular and reliable supplier of energy, minerals and edible oil helping India’s policy of strategic diversification of sources of imports, besides contributing to India's energy and food security. The region is endowed with abundance of critical minerals and rare earths.

The Latin Americans have started placing greater emphasis on trade with India as they seek to reduce overdependence on China and diversify beyond the more protectionist markets of Europe and the United States.

Trade 2025-26

Figures in millions (except where it is given in billions) of US Dollars

Country	Exports	Imports	Total trade
Brazil	7.02 bn	8.05 bn	15.07 bn
Mexico	5.73 bn	2.1 bn	7.83 bn
Argentina	1.01 bn	4.96 bn	5.97 bn
Peru	1.15 bn	8.87 bn	10.02 bn
Colombia	1.80 bn	2.9 bn	4.7 bn
Chile	1.22 bn	5.03 bn	6.25 bn
Venezuela	210	469	679
Bolivia	56	1.26 bn	1.82 bn
Ecuador	447	127	574
Uruguay	238	290	528
Paraguay	188	26	214
Guatemala	656	52	708
Dominican Republic	411	1.65 bn	1.76 bn
Panama	311	242	553
Honduras	257	83	340
Costa Rica	250	142	392
El Salvador	184	4	188
Nicaragua	180	6	186
Cuba	19	6	25
Total	22.7 bn	36.3 bn	59 bn

Source: Ministry of Commerce of India

The Water War: how Cochabamba defied the Washington Consensus-and won

The Water War: how Cochabamba defied the Washington Consensus-and won

In the year 2000, in a remote Bolivian city most of the world had never heard of, ordinary people did something extraordinary — they took on a multinational corporation, defied their own government, resisted Washington Consensus and won. The Water War of Cochabamba, Bolivia, was not just a local revolt against unaffordable water bills. It was the first crack in the wall of neoliberalism that had been suffocating Latin America for fifteen years, a warning shot heard from Montevideo to Milan, and the opening chapter of a global struggle to reclaim water as a human right.

To understand why it happened, one must first understand what had been done to Latin America by the Washington Consensus.

In the 1980s, many Latin American countries emerged from decades of repressive military dictatorships. The newly elected governments were attempting to consolidate their fragile democracies while watching the military barracks in their rearview mirrors.  At this insecure time of democracies, Washington DC struck Latin America with the imposition of neoliberalism in the form of Washington Consensus. The Latin American countries were forced to open their markets to Wall Street capital, privatize assets of public sector and cut down expenditure on healthcare, education and social welfare policies. These policies inevitably lead to increased poverty and inequality causing what is called as the Lost Decade of the 1980s.

On the twenty- fifth anniversary of the Water War, the book "Echoes of the Water Wars: Legacies of Cochabamba, Bolivia ” was published in 2025. It brings together contributions from Bolivian activists as well as writers and analysts who supported the movement from outside the country. 

Here is the story of the water war: 

In June 1999, the World Bank issued a report on Bolivia that addressed the water situation in Cochabamba. The city and its surrounding region with about a million inhabitants had long faced water shortages for drinking and farming. The World Bank, along with the International Development Bank, had made privatization a condition for loans and recommended that there be “no public subsidies” to offset increases in the price of water services.

In September 1999, the Bolivian government signed a contract with a company “Aguas del Tunari” granting  control of the water resources and distribution in Cochabamba area. Registered in the Cayman Islands, it was a consortium of International Water of US, Abengoa of Spain, and four Bolivian companies. International Water, which held the majority interest in the consortium, was part of the vast holdings of US-based Bechtel Corporation,

In October 1999, the government enacted Law 2029 to regulate water and sanitation. It restricted long-standing traditional communal water practices and removed protections for rural systems based on collective management and local sharing arrangements. 

At that time, only half of Cochabamba’s population was connected to the central water system. Many others obtained water from cooperative water houses built to meet local needs. Yet, Law 2029 declared that, within the territory covered by a privatization contract, such systems were illegal. Only the contracted company could distribute water. The law thus demanded that the autonomous water systems be handed over without reimbursement or compensation for the people who had invested their own labour and resources in building them. The law extended even to wells installed in peoples' own properties. The law also restricted peasants from collecting rain water without official permission. For many critics, this amounted to the privatization of rain itself.  

The forty-year contract awarded to Aguas del Tunari proved even more controversial than Law 2029. It specified that at the end of each year, rates would rise annually in line with the consumer price index in the United States, in effect “dollarizing” water payments. The contract guaranteed the company an average 16 percent rate of return per year on its investment regardless of management performance or service quality. There was a clause in the contract stating that the contract itself superseded all other contracts, laws, and decrees.

Once Aguas del Tunari began operations, it took advantage of its exclusive rights under Law 2029 to assert control over existing water networks. In some cases, household’s water bills skyrocketed as much as 300 percent. A pensioner, or a teacher who made $80 a month, might see a bill jump from $5 to $25 a month. The consortium had been assembled quickly after no other company bid for the privatization contract. Its capital base appeared limited. Many observers concluded that the company intended to finance investment largely through payments collected from Cochabamba’s residents themselves. 

The people of Cochabamba rose in revolt against the commodification of water for the profit of a private company at the expense of the rights of the citizens and traditional local practices. In November 1999, they formed a community organization called as "Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida” (Coordinator for the Defense of Water and Life) with citizens, farmers and workers. Protests began in January 2000 and continued for four months. Demonstrators blocked roads, organized marches, occupied government offices and eventually took over the office of the water company itself. The government responded first with police repression and later with military force. They even resorted to cutting off supply of food and other goods to the city. Ultimately, the popular resistance proved stronger than the government’s resolve, so the latter had no choice but to terminate the private company contract and repeal Law 2029 in April 2000. 

The victorious water activists, along with supporters from Canada, US, India and Brazil, issued the Cochabamba Declaration on 8 December 2000. The Declaration stated that water belongs to the earth and all species; is sacred to life;  and it is a fundamental human right and a public good.

The privatization of water in Cochabamba was not the first  privatization initiative in Bolivia. Nor was Law 2029 the first legal measure designed to facilitate privatization. Both were part of the neoliberal policies pursued since 1985. At the same time, this economic model was not simply an  external imposition. It was also supported by part of the local business oligarchy which wanted to benefit through collaboration with foreign firms. 

Following the Water War, Bolivia entered a new period of resistance to neoliberal policies, particularly through mobilizations led by Indigenous and popular sectors. This broader wave of struggle helped create the conditions for the rise of Evo Morales, who was elected president in 2005. He was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president and the first to be elected in Latin America.

The Bolivian activists also carried their message about water rights of citizens to other countries of Latin America, Europe and even India. They helped inspire the formation of the Inter-American Network for Water Defense and Rights, REDAVI. Subsequently, other networks emerged, such as the European Water Movement, the African Network for Water Justice and KrUHA in Asia (People’s Coalition for the Right to Water”) based in Indonesia. It came up in 2002 during debates over Indonesian water laws influenced by the World Bank. The People’s Forum for Water encompasses all these networks of the world.

The historic Water War of Bolivia became a major point of reference for movements across Latin America and beyond. In Uruguay, a 2004 referendum was approved by  64% of the voters for water rights of citizens. After the constitutional amendment, Uruguay became the first country in the world to constitutionally recognize access to water and sanitation as a fundamental human right. 

In 2010, the United Nations formally recognized access to safe drinking water and sanitation as a human right.

In Italy, voters rejected water privatization in a 2011 referendum, in a major popular rebuke to the government of Silvio Berlusconi's neoliberal economic policies. The Italian referendum became one of Europe’s largest anti-privatization mobilizations. 

In Chile, the social uprising that began in 2019 intensified pressure to reform the ultra-neoliberal Water Code of Pinochet regime established in 1981.  The reforms enacted in 2022 gave greater priority to human consumption and environmental protection. 

India witnessed its water-rights movement in 2002 in Plachimada in Palakkad district of Kerala. The villagers complained that the Coca Cola bottling plant established in 1999 extracted massive quantities of ground water which affected the wells of households and water sources of farms. The local panchayat  refused to renew Coca-Cola’s license, arguing that groundwater belonged to the community and that extraction harmed public welfare. The plant was closed in 2004.

The people of Cochabamba who blocked roads and braved soldiers in the high-altitude cold of Bolivia did not just win back their water. They inspired struggles across the Global South against the Washington Consensus and sent a simple message: citizens can win even when their own governments stand  against them.

The unfinished search for Mexican identity in the novel "América del Norte"

 The unfinished search for Mexican identity in the novel "América del Norte"

The novel “América del Norte” by Mexican writer Nicolas Medina Moro is an intellectual exploration of Mexican identity as part of North America which is overwhelmingly dominated by the United States. The novel reads like a fictional counterpart to Octavio Paz’s non-fiction “The Labyrinth of Solitude” the foundational meditation in which Paz analyses and interprets Mexican identity from psychological, cultural and historical angles. Paz concludes that the search for Mexican identity remains unfinished. Medina extends this inquiry into the era of the right-wing politics of Trump and the upending of Mexican politics by the leftist ex-president Lopez Obrador.

The author acknowledges that his editor at Soho Press, who instead of steering him toward convention, encouraged him to make the novel weirder, longer, funnier, and riskier. The result is visible throughout the book. Medina has taken full advantage of this editorial encouragement to be more provocative, adventurous and unconventional including challenging the English language readers with all the subtitles and some texts fully in Spanish without translation. 

Sebastian Arteaga y Salazar, the protagonist, is the descendant of an elite Mexican family who studies at Yale and then enrolls in a Master’s program at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. During his job as teaching assistant he gets caught in the crossfire in the ideological polarization of the American academic world following Trump’s assault against woke culture. 

Sebastian has the familiar American Dream to settle in the US. He has been 'conditioned to desire America and Americanness even in the face of heartbreak'. His repeated attempts for Green Card end up as failure after Trump’s policy of increasing restrictions against immigration. When he returns finally to Mexico, Sebastian finds that his conservative wealthy family is at the receiving end of the leftist agenda of President Lopez Obrador. He feels out of place in Mexico too. He realizes that he belongs fully to neither Mexico nor US. He was not white enough for Trump's America, yet his family was not brown enough for Obrador's Mexico 

Sebastian is acutely uneasy with his creole (descendent of the Spanish colonizers born in the Americas) identity and privileges within Mexico. He defines creole as "That colonial subject who benefits more than he suffers from the colonial situation. The creoles are to imperialism as the professional and the manager are to late capitalism; their function, like those of the overseer and the comprador, is to mediate between the ruling class and its subalterns—or, what is the same, to administer the colony for the benefit of the metropolitan ruling class. This is why the so-called 'revolutions of independence' of the various Latin American colonies were not conflicts between imperialists and anti-imperialists, but between imperialists and aspirants to imperialism”. It was the creoles of Mexico who had invited and crowned the Austrian prince Maxmilian Van Habsburg to become the emperor of Mexico in 1864. The Mexicans were able to defy the notorious Monroe Doctrine at this time since the US was mired in their internal civil war. Sebastian says, “ Emperor Maxmilian was eventually killed by the Mexican revolutionaries but the Mexican creole rulers have all shared an Austro-Hungarian temperament: a vulnerability to zealous passions, a predisposition to the fevers of ambition and a weakness for fantasy.”. 

In an interview about the novel, Medina remarks that “the creoles served the same social function: translating, informing on, explaining the colonies to the imperial elite. Translators are often lovers, but they’re also always traitors”. He adds, “I am far from the only Mexican writer to betray his country by translating it into the language of the empire. The origins of Mexican literature are to be found in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Letters of Relation, the prose chronicles that inform the Spanish court of what was going on in the colonies. Nothing much has changed since then”.

Like every colonial elite, the creoles of Mexico resented their metropolitan cousins, whose laws excluded them from the highest spheres of wealth and power. Betraying their underdeveloped sense of proportion, they began to identify with the grandeur of the pre-Columbian past—though never, tellingly, with the Indigenous present—sincere in their conviction that the fact the Spaniards treated them as second-class citizens brought them close to the people their grandfathers had massacred. As their resentment mutated from self-pity to self-regard, they saw their creole condition as an addition rather than a subtraction from their Western identity.

Sebastian falls in love with an American musicologist who is attracted to Latino men and Mexico. Yet his love for her gets complicated by his constant questioning of his own identity against the American attitude of subtle superiority and casual condescension.  He finds that his "American classmates treat Mexicans nicely not because they see them as equals but because they are light-skinned curiosities in well-cut suits, distinguished guests from a quaint but insignificant country. With Indigenous people and mestizos, it was a different story. The Chicago Boys’ belief in individual freedom didn’t extend to people with dark skin. Their economics was not the objective science they claimed it to be, but a political instrument designed to justify imperial expansion—a postmodern American equivalent of sixteenth-century Spanish Catholicism".

Sebastian is equally clear-eyed about the structural role he was groomed to play: "The Americans had let me go to Yale because they wanted me to become a translator, a go-between. I was supposed to go back to the capital, leverage my last name into a position in the highest levels of government, and advocate for American interests. For better or worse I was a child of NAFTA which realigned Mexico along a north-south axis and created incentives to move all valuable commodities toward the United States. At the same time, the treaty forced Mexican farmers to compete with the industrialized agriculture of the Middle West, which, despite the US government’s breathless celebration of free markets, remained subsidized. Millions of Mexicans, many from Michoacán, were forced to emigrate to the North, where they found themselves marginalized by the law and excluded from lucrative work. Predictably, some turned to the drug trade. When they returned home, they discovered that the collapse of the old state apparatus from the days of one-party rule had left a vacuum of services and therefore authority. It’s no surprise they decided to fill the gap".

Mexico is home to the largest and most vital native Indian population in the Americas. Mexican intellectuals and artists celebrate the Indian mix of their culture to distinguish themselves from the Europeans and Americans. 

This backdrop of dispossession and displacement gives the novel its deepest resonance. 

Mexico had lost half of its territory to Trump’s predecessors in the second half of the nineteenth century. A well-known joke captures this historical wound which still haunts the Mexican psyche. A US Border Patrol agent tells a Mexican “Mister, you have crossed the border” The Mexican replies, “señor I did not cross the border. The border crossed me”. The border crossing is not just geographical but persists in economic, political, racial and imperial terms. As a result, the search for Mexican identity remains an unfinished and continuing journey.