Chinese Influence on the Rise in Latin America (excellent article)

[Gloria]

From the new World Media Watch up now at http://www.zianet.com/insightanalytical
Tomorrow at Buzzflash.com


5//Global Politician, US 6/30/2005

http://www.globalpolitician.com/articledes.asp?ID=939&cid=5&sid=30



CHINESE INFLUENCE ON THE RISE IN LATIN AMERICA

Saul Landau



(Saul Landau is a Foreign Policy In Focus scholar (online at www.fpif.org). He wrote Dangerous Doctrine: National Security and U.S. Foreign Policy. He is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and teaches at CalPolyPomonaUniversity. This is a revised version of an article that originally appeared in Progreso Weekly.)



(SNIP)


In early March, a U.S. Embassy official confided to a visiting businessman that he believed that Chinese leaders viewed the United States as a declining superpower whose time had passed and will be forced to share world power with other powerful nations, including China.

Latin American Invasion

To demonstrate how China ’s strategic position has changed in the last two decades, the Embassy official explained that China not only captured the U.S. consumer market, but has invaded Latin America, a region that the U.S. has traditionally dominated.

He referred to two high-level visits. In November 2004, Chinese President Hu Jintao signed 39 commercial agreements with five Latin American nations. Chinese investments in Argentina alone totaled some $20 billion. He then made an investment trip to the Caribbean as well.

(SNIP)

So far, official Washington has ignored or denied the significance of China’s Latin America strategy. Indeed, “President Hu Jintao spent more time in Latin America last year than President Bush,” Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer has observed. “ China’s vice president, Zeng Qinghong, spent more time in the region last month than his U.S. counterpart, Vice President Dick Cheney, over the past four years.”


(SNIP)



Why did Chinese leaders choose late 2004 and early 2005 to make their whirlwind spending tour of several Latin American nations? First, they may well have noticed that Latin American governments no longer race to sign onto the U.S.-backed Free Trade of the Americas agreement as they did previously to NAFTA in the 1990s.

Because the free-trade-free-market model failed to perform as predicted – in Argentina it led to bankruptcy -- governments that question Washington’s economic model now sit in Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela and Cuba. Bolivia and Ecuador may be next. Indeed, if the radical populist Mexico City mayor Lopez Obredor succeeds in winning the 2006 Mexican presidential election – he is currently the leading contender -- U.S.-sponsored trade agreements in the region may all be doomed.

Second, the petroleum mavens don’t expect supply to rise above demand in the near future. So, given this climate, China’s gaining access to oil and gas sources in the U.S. backyard has flustered the Bushies, who remain preoccupied with Iraq Afghanistan, North Korea and Iran, social security privatization and abortion criminalization.


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