Latin America is going through quite a tough recession, but the private equity that flooded the region before the downturn is there to stay -- at least, for now.

The reason is not charity, but rather the bottom line, currency valuations and a lack of clean exits from investments in Latin America, according to Cate Ambrose, chief of the Latin America Private Equity & Venture Capital Association (LAVCA).

According to Ambrose, private equity firms are facing tough conditions in the weak or completely stalled economies of Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico and others. But, rather than cut and run, many firms are now looking for returns in the long-term.

The Chips Are Down

"The expectation is private equity firms are looking to extend the life of those funds, so rather than a 10-year horizon or a nine-year horizon, maybe it is going to be 11 or 12 years," Ambrose said on a Bloomberg podcast.

"No one saw this coming in terms of the spectacular devaluation on the real," she added, referring to the primary force keeping investments in place: the decreasing value of Latin American currencies against the U.S. dollar. Latin American currencies have trended toward weakness since mid-2014. Meanwhile, the fall of oil and commodities prices, coupled with various political crises in the region, only continued the trend.

Ambrose said the currency issue would be enough to keep fund managers from divesting right now "because they will not want to sell them in such depressed valuations."

Major firms have put a lot of money into the region. They have recently continued to do so, even as the Latin American economy stumbles into stagnation.

Carlyle Group LP, for example, was cited as a big investor in Brazil in 2015, going in with Brazilian firm Vinci Capital Gestora de Recursos Ltda. on a $283 million ($1.1 billion reais) investment in a for-profit university in October. Boston-based private equity fund Advent amassed a $2.1 billion Latin American fund starting in 2014 and has continued to make big buys into Mexican and Brazilian companies as late as Q3 2015.

Total investments in Latin America last year reached $6.5 billion, according to LAVCA figures reported by Bloomberg. That's 18 percent less than in 2014, but accounting for the devaluation in local currencies, it only represents about a 9 percent downturn in investments.

No Exit

If major firms in the region like Carlyle and Advent were to pull out now, they would almost certainly post losses on the sales, warned Ambrose.

"The exit is always the tricky part of the story in Latin America," she said, pointing out that 2015 showed the lowest level of equity fund sales of holdings in the region since the world economic crisis in 2009. Ambrose predicted 2016 would see the number fall again.

"Many firms are aggressively putting more money to work today to offset the lower valuations they had a few years ago." But fundraising for private equity has slowed, down from a record $10 billion in 2015 to $7.2 billion in 2015 in Latin America.

And the bearish outlook, together with devalued local currencies, makes private equity mostly a waiting game in Latin America, for now.

"That is why you see long-term investors... extremely bullish," noted Ambrose, "because they are not as concerned about things like currency effects."

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