I study China’s economic footprint in Latin America and what it does to politics there.

Books

‹

›

Economic Displacement: China and the End of US Primacy in Latin America

Cambridge University Press, 2026 · 257 pp. · ISBN 9781009672245

Between 2001 and 2020 China filled an economic space the United States had vacated. The loss of US influence that followed was not the product of a Chinese grand strategy: it was American retrenchment meeting Latin American demand. I call this economic displacement — influence lost without anyone setting out to take it.

• The argument

  Power is relational. What matters is not how much China gives, but how much less indispensable Washington becomes once an alternative exists.

• The measure

  A new operationalization of economic statecraft that treats displacement as unintentional and takes host-country agency seriously, rather than reading every Chinese loan as a bid for leverage.

• The evidence

  Trade, FDI and lending data for the region, 2001–2020; original public opinion and elite surveys; UN voting; and case studies of Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Venezuela.

Cambridge CoreAmazonICLACReview in LAPS

Desplazamiento económico: China y el fin de la primacía estadounidense en América Latina

Ariel · Grupo Planeta, 2026 · Spanish edition

The Spanish edition of Economic Displacement, published by Ariel for Latin American readers. The same thesis, written for people who live inside the phenomenon the book measures.

Planeta de Libros

Political Data Science Using R: A Practical Guide

Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2020 · The R Series · edited with Andrés Cruz

An open-access textbook that teaches political scientists to work in R with political data, from cleaning and visualization through regression, causal inference, text analysis and maps. Every chapter is reproducible and written by researchers working on Latin American cases.

Taylor & FrancisRead online

Conversations about the book

Feb 2026

Pekingology, CSISpodcast
China’s growing influence in Latin America

Feb 2026

U.S.-China Perception Monitor
How China displaced the United States in Latin America

Oct 2025

The China-Global South Projectpodcast
Economic displacement in Latin America

Nov 2025

Centro de Extensión Alameda UCSantiago
With Umut Aydin and Gloria de la Fuente

Research

Almost everything I have written comes back to one of three questions. Each entry links to the published version.

Fondecyt Regular 1260087 (2026–2030) extends the displacement argument beyond Latin America and asks whether the same mechanism operates where the United States never held primacy to begin with. The ICLAC nucleus, renewed through 2028, runs the regional data collection behind it.

Complete list — 30 refereed articles and 6 book chapters — on ORCiD and Google Scholar.

Data and code

Policy work

Policy Paper Nº 7 · 2026Una exploración al lobby chino en ChileWith Daniel Alcatruz

Policy Paper Nº 3 · 2024Monitor de Opinión Pública 2023: ¿qué piensan los chilenos sobre China?With Nicole Jenne, Claudia Labarca, María Montt

Teaching and advising

Institute of Political Science, UC Chile.

I have supervised 26 undergraduate theses since 2017. Prospective doctoral students working on China, economic statecraft or Latin American foreign policy are welcome to write before applying — a short note about your question is more useful to me than a CV.

Selected talks and testimony

Rooms where the findings had to survive contact with practitioners.

Available for lectures and panels in Spanish, English and Portuguese, in person or remotely. Write to me.

Press

Complete record, 2019–2026, in the CV.

Contact