Important Takeaways:
- While the US Wasn’t Looking, China Became the Dominant Power in Latin America, Right on Our Doorstep
- Latin America took on a new trading partner: China. The region has also begun to shift in an anti-American direction, creating a big strategic problem for the United States.
- Evan Ellis, a Latin American expert at the U.S. Army War College, Twenty Latin American nations have joined China’s Belt and Road initiative, in which China invests in a nation’s infrastructure, like the new container port China is building for Peru at the Port of Chancay.
- China will also be supplying nations with civilian nuclear technology, helping them develop space programs, and providing them with Chinese 5G technology that experts have warned is a surveillance tool of the Chinese military.
- China is establishing a growing number of Confucius Institutes in the region, which are school programs that teach young people Chinese language and culture and push Chinese government propaganda.
- Ellis said China is also cultivating military ties here which it could use in any future conflict with the United States.
- “If war ever broke out over Taiwan, they would probably not make it a war that was fought just in Asia, but they would have ways of thinking about how to use operations in the hemisphere,” Ellis warned. “It’s entirely possible that there would be certain anti-US states in the region that might welcome China in.”
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