‘Conquering Latin America With A Smile’: Chinese Influence Met With Inadequate US Resistance, Experts Say

China could not have asked for a better gift than the Biden Administration.

President Biden must not underestimate President Xi’s desire to replace the U.S. as the world’s superpower. China is threatening us on our own doorstep. Now is the time to double down and make sure our Latin American allies know we have their backs. https://t.co/cVVPYc99FL

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) November 13, 2021

‘Conquering Latin America With A Smile’: Chinese Influence Met With Inadequate US Resistance, Experts Say

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By Daily Caller, November 13, 2021

• China has become the number one trading partner for several countries in Latin America and its influence continues to grow, but experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that America’s efforts to combat it fall short.
• “Not a single diplomat in the region ever approached the governments here in trying to push back on China,” Mario Duarte, former Secretary of Strategic Intelligence of Guatemala, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
• “It just seems to me we’ve had a failure of leadership across the board and that’s Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives,” Gordon G. Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” told the DCNF.
• “They’re conquering Latin America with a smile … and Latin Americans are buying it up,” Joseph Humire, a global security expert for the Center for a Secure Free Society, told the DCNF.

China’s campaign to grow its presence in Latin America has brought the country’s influence dangerously close to the U.S., but experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that America’s efforts to combat it fall short.

The communist goliath has become the number one trading partner for several countries in the region, with Cuba becoming the latest country to sign onto Xi Jinping’s Belt And Road Initiative (BRI), a massive global project launched in 2013, in October.

“It goes in and just buys and corrupts elites like it does everywhere,” Gordon G. Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” told the DCNF.

“There’s a lot of infrastructure that Beijing is building,” Chang said. “It makes those countries dependent on China and we should be making sure that the debt trap traps not the debtor but the creditor.”

“The United States is not doing anything to counter it, to be honest with you. At all,” Mario Duarte, president for Latin America for Stryk Global Diplomacy and former secretary of strategic intelligence of Guatemala, told the DCNF.

‘This is not a good story for us’

Chang argued China’s success in the region has less to do with the determination of the Communist Party and more to do with American neglect.

“People have known about the problem of China’s penetration of a number of these countries and for a very long time we paid more attention to the Middle East or Asia or even Europe and we’ve neglected, traditionally, not only Latin America but also the Caribbean,” he said.

“This is not a good story for us,” Chang added. “It just seems to me we’ve had a failure of leadership across the board and that’s Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. It’s just a failure to understand what’s going on and to defend the American republic.”

Duarte described Chinese attempts to woo Guatemalan officials as “very aggressive,” with the entire government structure eventually ordered not to engage with Chinese emissaries.

“They were trying to reach former President Morales and they were offering moneys left and right and they were offering to take people … with all-expense paid trips to China and Hong Kong,” he alleged.

Joseph Humire, a global security expert for the Center for a Secure Free Society, told the DCNF that the U.S. was late to realize the extent of China’s campaign in Latin America, only being a “topic of discussion” through the Bush and Obama administrations.

 

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