China Accuses US of Interfering in Its Latin America Ties

The United States is increasingly interfering in China’s relations with Chile, seeking to restrict Beijing’s access to resources in the minerals-rich Latin American nation and pressuring it to curtail space cooperation with China, the Chinese embassy in Chile has said.

The accusations in a statement posted on the embassy’s website this week reflect deepening competition between the two powers in the Latin American region where the U.S. has traditionally been dominant, but where China now is the biggest trading and infrastructure partner for some nations including in ports and electrical grids.

Recently, the Chilean government said it was reviewing a space project between a private Chilean university and a Chinese state space institute, at Cerro Ventarrones in the Atacama desert. Newsweek had reported exclusively on concerns in Chile and in the U.S. that it could be “dual-use,” or have military as well as civilian uses. The Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

China blames the U.S. for the sudden switch. America’s “true intention” was to “hinder normal technological cooperation between China and Chile,” the embassy said in the comments published on Wednesday. “This constitutes open interference in Chile’s independent choice of cooperation partners.”

The U.S. was engaged in “a pure and simple manifestation of hegemony and a new Monroe Doctrine. We trust that the Chilean people will not be fooled and that the U.S. attempts will not succeed,” it said.

A U.S. State Department spokesperson referred Newsweek to comments by Secretary of State Marco Rubio: “As stated by Secretary Rubio, we can’t live in a world in which China has more influence and more presence than we do in our region. The expanding role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the Western Hemisphere threatens U.S. interests.”

China also hit out at the U.S. ambassador nominee to Chile, Brandon Judd, a former Border Patrol agent and president of the National Border Patrol Council. In a Senate hearing in Washington, D.C., last week, lawmakers asked Judd how he would manage China’s growing presence in Chile in areas such as trade and science.

Judd said that China’s rapid expansion of trade across the world was “a very important issue for the Trump administration,” and noted that most of the lithium—vital for modern technologies such as car batteries—mined in Chile was exported to China. Overall, about 40 percent of Chile’s exports including copper, lithium, fish and cherries go to China.

“My concern is that 71 percent of lithium that was mined in Chile went to China last year, so we need to look for ways that we can further our investments, open up business opportunities for companies here in the United States to go into Chile,” Judd said.

“We are the better trade partner; we are the better partner in everything, whether it’s Antarctica, fisheries, marine conservation—in all of the areas that are very important to Chile, also in our foreign direct investment,” Judd said. “We need to continue to build on what we already have, and as we build on that, we will continue to strengthen our ties to Chile and limit China’s access to all of the resources that Chile might have available.”

Judd had “openly challenged Chilean sovereignty and its autonomous right to choose cooperation partners during his appearance before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, stating that he would seek to ‘restrict China’s access to Chilean resources,” the embassy said.

China’s comments come against a background of deepening geopolitical and geoeconomic competition between the U.S., a traditional regional power in Latin America, and China, which in recent decades has struck scores of business deals in the region, including in critical sectors such as energy, ports and minerals, and has swiftly expanded its space cooperation with regional government, with about 16 projects ranging from observatories to launch sites.

The growing rivalry has recently been most evident in a dispute over the control of ports at either end of the Panama Canal, with a deal by a U.S. business consortium to buy ownership from the Hong Kong-based Chinese company Hutchison Ports provoking a furious reaction in Beijing, which says the investments were purely commercial in nature.