warned on a tour of the region in April that “predatory” lending practices and other “malign or nefarious” behaviour by Beijing had injected “corrosive capital into the economic bloodstream, giving life to corruption and eroding good governance”. As the Americans see it, Chinese companies are harming Latin America by investing mostly in the extraction and transportation of its precious raw materials. This, they say, has led to a greater dependence on commodities as opposed to US companies which focus on manufacturing and services. Many in Latin America share these concerns, but for others the difference between the long-standing American influence and the growing Chinese role is not so black and white. The Middle Kingdom may be seen as a 21st century coloniser, but it has also presented alternative investment options. The main problem, some argue, is that local governments across the continent have not been able to take full advantage. Latin America has for centuries grappled with different forms of foreign influence. The grievances and wounds created by hundreds of years of Spanish and Portuguese rule are today still present in the collective psyche, despite formal foreign control ending more than a century ago. The US then quickly became the hegemonic power, but its strategic control has been hard to sustain over the past two decades, partly because of China, whose growing economy has driven up demand for commodities. Trade between China and Latin America has surged, from US$12 billion in 2000 to almost US$306 billion last year, and China has become a major investor. The value of its loans – mostly for energy and infrastructure projects – has surpassed financing from the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank. But America and international financial institutions say transparency is lacking and the recipients of these loans face growing debt traps. Others bristle at what they see as attempts by China to leverage its newfound economic power for geopolitical gain. In recent years several nations, including Panama and the Dominican Republic, have severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan, which Beijing views as a renegade province.
LOCAL BACKLASH The importance of the region was acknowledged last year when Beijing invited Latin American and Caribbean countries to join its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative – a global trade strategy that aims to expand economic links through ports, roads, airports, pipelines and other infrastructure projects. China’s foothold can also be seen on the streets of cities across the region. In Ecuador, a country of more than 16 million which some say has been a laboratory for Sino-Latin American investment, Chinese characters can be found sewn into the white covers on seat headrests inside new long-distance buses. In the capital, Quito, Chinese-made CCTV cameras are perched on street corners and inside buildings. The devices have been installed across the country since 2011, when Ecuador introduced a monitoring system to public spaces that includes facial recognition technology. According to the local authorities, the system has proved a powerful tool in combating crime, but experts suggest the images captured have also been used for surveillance and intelligence gathering. The adoption of Chinese technology elsewhere on the continent has given rise to similar human rights concerns:
Despite many of these projects having been met with opposition from locals, Chinese interest in the region shows no sign of slowing. “We have found most projects in Latin America have faced a local backlash because of environmental concerns about pollution and harm to residents and livelihoods,” Argentinian scholar Ariel Armony and Mexico-based researcher Enrique Dussel Peters wrote in an essay published last year. The pair, along with Shoujun Cui – director of the Research Centre for Latin American Studies at Beijing’s Renmin University – produced the book Building Development for a New Era: China’s Infrastructure Projects in Latin America and the Caribbean. “For example, there have been concerns about the environmental impact of Sinopec’s oil refineries in Moín, Costa Rica. The national secretary of the environment objected to the first evaluation for serious omissions,” Armony and Peters wrote, referring to China’s state-owned oil and gas enterprise. “The beginning of construction for the Condor Cliff and La Barrancosa hydroelectric dams in Santa Cruz, Argentina, without an environmental impact assessment, led to the Argentine Supreme Court ordering the suspension of the projects.”
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