ABSTRACT
After over 25 years of multiracial democracy in South Africa, this chapter examines the place of South America from the perspective of a succession of African National Congress administrations. The analysis addresses both the context of South Africa’s new extra-continental alliances and the subsequent responses of its partners. Despite its discursive commitment to the states of the global South, South Africa has prioritized its regional context, giving a low profile to its relations with the countries of South America when designing its external strategies and international insertion policies. The first decade of the 21st century witnessed a flourishing of relations across the South Atlantic Ocean, at the political, economic and security level, giving rise to quite optimistic expectations. At the beginning of the third decade, those relations are clearly on the wane due to systemic changes and domestic constraints on both sides of the Atlantic.
