Last month, Xtellus Partners joined policymakers, investors, and business leaders at “The New Great Game in Latin America” conference in Miami. The group discussed one of the most consequential questions facing global markets today: how does Latin America translate its extraordinary natural resource wealth into lasting economic growth?
“What we’re seeing is a reappraisal of Latin America’s potential,” said Paul Swigart, CEO of Xtellus Partners and conference speaker. “Xtellus has been operating in these markets long enough to know that the opportunity has always been here — what’s changed is that the rest of the world is finally paying attention.”
The key, as participants discussed, is financing the agriculture, infrastructure, and critical minerals sectors to support meaningful and sustainable growth.
Rethinking Agriculture’s Financial Architecture
The conference opened with an honest assessment of Latin America’s agricultural sector. As the backbone for millions of families and cooperatives, the region’s agricultural sector has been chronically underserved by traditional financial institutions.
Colombia alone exports between 12 and 14 million bags of coffee annually, making it the world’s third-largest supplier. Yet smallholder farmers continue to face significant financing gaps, rising input costs, and growing climate unpredictability. XTS Commodities‘ partner EvoAgro is directly addressing these structural challenges through in-kind fertilizer financing. XTS functions as the connector, bridging regional cooperatives to premium global markets through structured trade models that improve both cash flow and quality control.
“The financing gap in agriculture isn’t a new problem, but the solutions are finally catching up. When you remove the bottleneck between the farmer and the market, the whole value chain performs better,” noted XTS’ Leonid Kouperschmidt, Managing Director of Equities & Commodities.
Infrastructure as the Enabling Layer
Infrastructure emerged as the second defining theme of the conference. Breakout groups discussed Argentina’s role as a major energy exporter, citing its premium crude, expanding pipeline capacity, and dual-ocean trade access. Guyana’s extraordinary growth trajectory was another key example cited, driven by the sharp increase in construction surrounding its oil boom.
As Argentina’s Vaca Muerta shale formation reaches its export potential and Guyana’s offshore fields continue to come online, the pipelines, terminals, and storage facilities needed to bring those resources to market represent some of the most significant capital deployment opportunities in the hemisphere.
In fact, to support growth across the region, infrastructure investment has become increasingly urgent. Studies estimate that Latin America and the Caribbean will need to increase their investment by over 70% to close the gap between current assets and future needs.
The Critical Minerals Imperative
The third, and perhaps most forward-looking, discussion centered on critical minerals. Latin America sits atop some of the world’s most significant reserves of lithium, copper, nickel, and rare earth elements. These resources are essential to building electric vehicles, renewable energy infrastructure, and semiconductors.
Xtellus’ work in Guyana, where aggregate mining operations revealed high-purity silica sand and NdPr deposits, illustrated precisely how rigorous due diligence can unlock strategic value that others overlook.
“The best investments start with strong fundamentals,” said Greg Gigliotti, Head of Xtellus Advisors and conference speaker. “Guyana started with construction aggregates. What we found underneath was a globally significant strategic minerals story.”
Across all three conference themes, it became clear that the intersection of Latin America’s agriculture, infrastructure, and critical minerals sectors is driving the region’s transformation. The fertilizer financing that helps a Colombian coffee cooperative improve its yield depends on the logistics networks that move that coffee to a port and a ship bound for Singapore. The aggregate mining operation in Guyana that supplies material for a new highway may also provide the silica sand deposits that feed a global semiconductor supply chain. And the energy infrastructure being built across Argentina and Guyana creates the power and transport backbone that makes large-scale mining and agricultural processing economically viable in the first place.
Ultimately the speakers agreed: it is in the growing and dynamic interconnection between these sectors and markets where the most durable growth opportunities in Latin America will be found.