Because of the strong ties that the United States has with Latin America and the Caribbean, the U.S. has long been sensitive about the involvement of extra-hemispheric powers in the region.2 In recent decades, China’s expanding economic and political relationships with the region put that sensitivity to the test. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced before the Organization of American States in November 2013 that the Obama administration was breaking from the U.S. historical legacy, embodied in the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, of resisting activities in the region by countries from outside the hemisphere.3 Yet the scale and rate of growth of China’s economic relationship over the past decade have captured the attention of leaders in the U.S., as well as in Latin America. From 2001, when the PRC was accepted into the World Trade Organization, through 2013, PRC bilateral trade with Latin America and the Caribbean grew 20-fold, from $15 billion in 2001 to $288.9 billion in 2013.4 Between 2005 and 2013, leading Chinese banks provided an estimated $119 billion in credit to the region, of which three-quarters went to Argentina and the anti-U.S. regimes of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA).5 Although prior to 2010 cumulative Chinese investment in the region was less than $7 billion, approximately $10 billion of Chinese investment arrived in the region per year after that date.6