Megaport Opens Up Latin America to Chinese Trade as US Looks On
Megaport Opens Up Latin America to Chinese Trade as US Looks On
"The U.S. needs to up its game in the region," said AS/COA's Eric Farnsworth to the BBC.
As the world waits to see how the return of Donald Trump will reshape relations between Washington and Beijing, China has just taken decisive action to entrench its position in Latin America.
Trump won the US presidential election on a platform that promised tariffs as high as 60% on Chinese-made goods. Further south, though, a new China-backed megaport has the potential to create whole new trade routes that will bypass North America entirely.
President Xi Jinping himself attended the inauguration of the Chancay port on the Peruvian coast this week, an indication of just how seriously China takes the development. [...]
Eric Farnsworth, vice-president at the Washington-based Council of the Americas, feels that there is still much goodwill towards the US in Latin America, but the region's "massive needs" are not being met by its northern neighbour.
"The US needs to up its game in the region, because people would choose it if there was a meaningful alternative to China," he tells the BBC.
Unlike many others, he sees some rays of hope from the incoming Trump administration, especially with the appointment of Marco Rubio as secretary of state.
"Rubio has a real sense of a need to engage economically with the Western Hemisphere in a way that we just haven't done for a number of years," he says.
But for successive US leaders, Latin America has been seen primarily in terms of illegal migration and illegal drugs. And with Trump fixated on plans to deport record numbers of immigrants, there is little indication that the US will change tack any time soon...
