The days when a foreign correspondent occasionally felt like George Smiley died with the fall of the Berlin Wall. But in South America, if you squint, those old John Le Carré days of Russian espionage can sometimes seem as though they are back – at least if the Gazprom representative that I met recently in Bolivia is anything to go by. With his watery smile, impeccable manners and icy handshake, he seemed to have stepped out of KGB central casting.

It’s all part of the BRIC “great game” in South America. The Chinese are there, and so too the Indians. Brazil, the regional hegemon, is of course all over it. The only BRIC nation missing, so far, has been Russia. Yet that now may be changing. Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, has just called for a new “stage in Russian-Latin American relations”. For the past 50 years or so, security has been Russia’s great calling card in the region. That has mostly meant Cold War listening posts in Cuba (since abandoned), or more recently multi-billion dollars arms sales to Venezuela. Now, by contrast, it’s mostly about energy – which Latin America has abundance.