Boris Martynov: «Russia’s geopolitical interest in Latin America needs to be reinforced with economics»
Part 2

Grigory Pasko, journalist

See part 1 of this interview here.

For now at least, the only obvious successes are in the realm of cooperation of another kind – in the main on the field of shipments of Russian weapons.

Oil, gas, and arms – realistically, this is the structure of our export. Venezuela …Arms… Yes, must go carefully here, the question is very delicate. Latin America – a peaceful continent, there haven’t been any wide-scale wars there, like in Europe, there have been local conflicts. They’ve always spent little there on weapons. But the USA are constantly whipping up the arms race [Here I honestly did not understand: What does this have to do with the USA, if it is Russia that is shipping the arms to Latin America?–G.P.] And we don’t have objective conditions for rapprochement with the USA. For the USA, domestic policy has always been more important that foreign policy.