Until recently the U.S. seemed serious about enforcing the Monroe Doctrine, but China has now established a foothold throughout Latin America. What gives?
Time magazine reported earlier this year that China is South America’s top trading partner. Chinese companies, according to correspondents Ciara Nugent and Charlie Campbell, invested nearly $13 billion in Latin America in 2019, while China is a major consumer of Latin American exports, purchasing “beef from Uruguay, copper from Chile, oil from Colombia, and soya from Brazil.” State-controlled Chinese tech companies (Huawei, ZTE, Dahua, Hikvision) have made inroads in Latin America, Time reports, that will allow “Beijing to dictate the rules of commerce for a generation.” And China’s political influence has spread to the Caribbean Sea and Central America, where the Dominican Republic, Panama, and El Salvador switched their formal recognition from Taiwan to China.
