South of the border is a lot more than Mexico. For me, it's Mexico and everything else down to Argentina. Unfortunately, we've let China grow their influence and it's time to do something about it.

An article by Michael Scott really caught my attention. I guess it did because I'm talking to a lot of friends in Latin America who think that there is too much China and not enough USA. This is what Scott wrote:

The superpower contest matters because the resources at stake are vast. Latin America has 57 per cent of global lithium reserves, 37 per cent of the copper, nearly a fifth of the oil and almost a third of the world’s fresh water and primary forest.

Keenly aware of the region’s importance, Xi added a state visit to his schedule in Peru last week, heading a delegation of several hundred Chinese business people and inaugurating the first phase of what will be a $3.5bn giant port intended to revolutionise shipping from Latin America’s Pacific coast to China. 

Biden, by contrast, announced nine Black Hawk helicopters for a $65mn anti-drug programme and a donation of second-hand trains from California for the Lima metro system.

It gets worse on a country-by-country basis, as the article points out.

You see a huge Chinese mega-port project in Peru, a country full of resources and on the Pacific coast. What a nice place for the growing Chinese Navy to visit?

In Brazil, one of top 10 GDPs in the world, President Biden was talking climate change in the Amazon, but the Chinese are busy with multibillion-dollar investments. Here is the bottom line. Conservation is a big deal for the climate change crowd in the U.S. but creating jobs with huge plants is more important for Brazilians.

In the last 20 years, Chinese investments have gone from $12 billion to $450 billion. I'm not good in math but that's a big jump, to say the least.

What's funny is that most of my Latin friends say that they'd rather do business with the U.S. They all say something like "we know you, we trust you and you respect contracts." Again, they are not saying that about China, a country with no history of investing in the region.

So there is a great opportunity to change the trajectory and pay attention to our growing neighborhood. Why? Because China is focusing on mining of critical minerals, electricity generation and transmission, and digital and transport infrastructure.

It sounds like China is thinking 50 years forward and we are not.

This is something for the future Secretary of State to focus on.

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Image: RawPixel.com