Strategic Overview: China’s Expanding Footprint in Latin America
A range of works have been written regarding the threats, or alternatively, opportunities presented by the activities of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), its companies, and other agents in Latin America and the Caribbean. This work provides a strategic level overview for both business and security professionals regarding the current state of those activities and their impacts.
China’s Focus in the Region
During the past two decades, engagement by the PRC and its state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and other agents have expanded across a broad range of economic sectors and penetrated political, security, and other strategic engagement at all levels. Under China’s current President Xi Jinping, and particularly in the post-COVID-19 era, however, that engagement has focused on a narrower range of sectors and evolved in important ways. Those patterns and developments are consistent with the priorities and evolution of PRC engagement globally, although also they also reflect the impact of the particular geographic, political, economic, and other characteristics of the region, including China’s historic relationships with its members, as distinct from its historic relationships with other parts of the world such as the Indo-Pacific or decolonized Africa.
Seven areas of focus are evident in PRC activities in the region, approximately following the lists of priorities expressed by President Xi and the Chinese government in its recent official policy documents such as the China-CELAC 2025-2027 Joint Action Plan: digital technologies, new energy sectors, strategic minerals, agriculture, other commodities, maritime logistics, and space.
Digital Technologies. Although PRC-based telecommunications companies such as Huawei have had a presence in the region for over 25 years, it is currently deepening that relationship and expanding into new areas. Multiple PRC-based digital technology companies are now important players across the region in smartphones and telecommunication devices as well as in other infrastructure, including Huawei, ZTE, Xiaomi, Oppo, and Honor, among others. Huawei is making particular advances in cloud services, including providing storage and computing for governments and others across the region. In the process, its advance raises significant issues about the protection of sensitive data regarding government deliberations, functionaries, and citizens alike. In Mexico, Huawei has invested over $1.3 billion in infrastructure. Even the Mexican Presidency uses Huawei cloud services. In the digital security sector, PRC-based companies such as Hikvision and Dahua provide surveillance systems, integrating cameras and other sensors with biometrics and other capabilities. These systems are increasingly deployed to a broad range of commercial residential clients across the region, further expanding the range of data that the PRC government could have access to through its companies.
PRC-based firms are also increasingly doing work in artificial intelligence in the region, including a PRC-Brazil artificial intelligence agreement signed between the two governments during President Lula’s May 2025 trip to Beijing for the China-CELAC leaders’ summit. In May 2025, Peru and China similarly held an AI conference to explore collaboration in the arena.
New Energy Sectors. The PRC and its companies have made significant advances in recent years in electric vehicles, renewable energy generation, transmission, and distribution.
Chinese companies have become the dominant suppliers of both electric cars and buses to the region. BYD has made particular advances. Although limited in its progress by the lack of charging stations in most countries in the region, BYD is collaborating with PRC-based electricity production and distribution companies such as Power China in ways that, if successfully extended to Latin America, could lock-in the PRC advantage over Western competitors such as Tesla.
PRC-based companies have also captured a major share of green energy production in the region, including hydroelectric plants, photovoltaic (solar), and wind farms. In Brazil, PRC-based companies control over 304 renewable energy generation facilities representing 10% of the country’s production. In Cuba, PRC-based companies are currently building 92 solar parks to help the Communist regime address grave energy shortfalls.
Through a combination of acquisitions and construction, PRC-based companies State Grid, China Three Gorges, and State Power Investment Corporation (SPIC) have gained significant control over important segments of the region’s energy transmission and distribution, including control of 57% of Chile’s power grid, as well as 100% of electricity in the greater Lima area. Vulnerabilities for Latin America are highlighted by malevolent PRC activities in the US energy grid by the Chinese hacker group Volt-Typhoon.
Strategic Minerals. PRC-based companies have prioritized, and gained a significant foothold in the production and entire value chain for strategic metals in Latin America, albeit not without problems. In northern Argentina, the PRC has lithium extraction and refining projects in multiple provinces, although most are at a relatively early phase. PRC access to Argentine lithium is assisted by the relatively market-oriented nature of the Argentine economy and the concentration of decision-making on strategic minerals at the local level.
In Chile, the PRC-based firm Tianqi has a 24% participation in SQM, one of two major lithium players in the country, although it has recently entered into a dispute with SQM over the latter’s decision to cooperate with Chilean government pressures to renegotiate the terms of its concession and enter into a partnership with the Chilean state minerals firm CODELCO as part of the Chilean government’s desire to assert greater control over its mineral resources.
In Bolivia, two major consortiums, CITIC Gouan and CMC (whose dominant partner is the PRC-based battery maker CATL) are involved in lithium extractionBy comparison to Argentina and Chile, Bolivia has larger, albeit generally lower quality and harder to process, lithium reserves. The nation’s governance difficulties have also impeded China’s ability to exploit Bolivia’s lithium, including a June 2025 decision by the Bolivian Supreme Court blocking the CMC project, as well as Russia’s Uranium One, over a case brought by the local indigenous community.
Agriculture. In the agriculture sector, PRC demand, channeled through major buyers such as China Oilseeds and Foodstuffs Corporation (COFCO), have transformed PRC-based agrologistics firms, including COFCO subsidiaries Nidera and Noble, into significant competitors to the traditionally dominant Western firms such as ADM, Bunge, Dreyfuss, and Cargill, particularly in South American countries such as Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay.
Although each of these countries currently face production constraints, including a poultry virus in the southeast of Brazil that temporarily obliged China to suspend imports of chicken from the country, PRC-based companies and the Chinese government are pursuing investments to increase agricultural production across the region in support of expanded exports to the PRC.
Chinese agricultural demand is also driving complementary new infrastructure projects, usually also involving PRC-based companies, including as a railroad connecting the Brazilian interior, which passes through the agricultural state Mato Grosso, to the PRC-controlled Port of Chancay in Peru.
Other Commodities. PRC-based companies actively seek to expand access to other Latin American commodities through purchases, extraction, and refining operations in the region, as well as the construction of supporting infrastructure.
In the petroleum sector, PRC initiatives include the expanded pursuit of shale gas in Argentina, particularly in Vaca Muerte, where PRC-based companies already have a presence through Bridas. It also includes interest, alongside Russian companies, in gas drilling off Tierra del Fuego. PRC-based CNOOC also is a key minority player in the development of offshore petroleum in Guyana.
In Guyana’s neighbor Venezuela, the PRC, alongside Russia, continues to be the major operator on the ground and the principal customer for Venezuelan oil, often using ship-to-ship transfers and other measures to disguise the Venezuelan origin of its oil to avoid sanctions. US threats in March 2025 to impose secondary sanctions on countries importing Venezuelan oil, however, may have impacted PRC demand.
PRC-based firms are also major players in the oil sectors in Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador. In the latter, they have sought, to expand their presence through acquiring rights to the very large Sacha oilfield, operated by Petroecuador, although the deal encountered problems and has not yet been consummated. In Colombia, the PRC has operations through Nexxen, Emerald Energy, and Omimex, although it has had problems in each with criminal threats.
In traditional mining sectors, the PRC continues to be the major investor in Peruvian mining and a major participant in Ecuador’s mining sector, bolstered by the 2025 $421 million acquisition by China’s CMOC of the Cangrejos mine in El Oro and Jianxi Copper’s acquisition of Solgold, including the Cascabel mine in Imbabura.
The PRC is also the major purchaser of Chilean copper and potassium nitrate and an important player in the Brazilian mining sector. It has also worked with Venezuela’s mining company Corporacion Venezolano de Guyana (CVG), albeit with many problems. Furthermore, PRC-based companies have a limited presence in the bauxite industries of Jamaica and Guyana, although its companies have experienced difficulties with operations in both.
Logistics. PRC-based companies are pursuing an expanding number of interconnected investments in commercial shipping, ports, rail and highway connectivity that support their capture of the transportation component of the value added from the extraction of commodities and servicing of markets in the region. The most significant and high-profile of these initiatives is the Port of Chancay in Peru, controlled by the PRC-based logistics company COSCO. As of June 2025, COSCO was not only expanding operations of the port, which it inaugurated in November 2024, but leveraging the efficiencies from its advantageous geographic position and potential operational efficiencies to offer service to Asia through Chancay to other ports in the region such as Buenaventura, Colombia. In addition, the PRC is seeking to leverage Chancay as a PRC-controlled nexus between Latin America and China to capture further value added from soy and other commodity exports to China. It is, as noted previously, seeking to build a railroad connecting Chancay to the interior of Brazil for exporting that nation’s commodities and accessing its markets.
Beyond COSCO, Chinese firms have also advanced in their control of multiple other ports and supporting infrastructure across the region. These include a China Merchants Port (CM Port) acquisition of interest in a logistics terminal for Very Large Crude oil carriers (VLCCs) in Açu in the northeast of Brazil, the largest port of its kind in the region. CM Port also has a facility in Santos, Brazil (Paranagua) and is building a new port in Sao Luis, Maranhao. The latter is to be connected to future Chinese built infrastructure for the export of agricultural and other goods to Chinese customers.
The PRC port presence in the region further includes Kingston, Jamaica, 49.9% controlled by CM Port, as well as the $1.2 billion port of Posorja, built by China Harbour for the operator DP World. In the south of Argentina, a Chinese consortium seeks to upgrade and operate a commercial port at Rio Grande, Tierra del Fuego, which could potentially be used to put secondary flows through the Straits of Magellan or the Drake Passage in times of war.
The Hong Kong-based firm Hutchison, which has ports on both the Atlantic and Pacific side of the Panama Canal, also has multiple other port operations in the region close to sensitive military facilities in the United States that could be targets for the PRC in time of conflict. These Hutchison-operated ports include two in Freeport, the Bahamas. The facilities are 70 miles from the southeast of the US. Hutchison also has ports in Mexico in Ensenada, Manzanillo, Lazaro Cardenas, and Veracruz. The much-discussed $22.8 billion offer by Blackrock, and later Mediterranean Shipping (MSC), to acquire 43 Hutchison ports globally, including those in Panama and some in Mexico, continues to be in danger of falling through due to opposition from the PRC government, including a threatened anti-trust investigation by the PRC government against Hutchinson. Given that the original Blackrock deal for Hutchinson’s ports was partly driven by US concern over a PRC presence in Panama, it is ironic that PRC-based logistics giant COSCO, even more closely tied to the PLA than Hutchison, may have a part in the deal.
Space. The PRC very publicly pursues expanded space engagement with Latin America. This includes the launch of three satellites for Venezuela, one for Ecuador, the construction of the space launch infrastructure for both, and the training of its personnel. It also includes the construction and operation of a controversial deep space radar in Neuquen, Argentina, presence at the Santiago Space Station (Calan Hill) in Chile, and plans in progress to build the 40-meter China Argentina Radio telescope (CART) in San Juan province of that country as well as another space facility, Ventarrones, in the Atacama desert of Chile. The PRC has built and launched 5 satellites under the China Brazil Earth Research Satellite Program (CBERS) with plans to launch another by 2026. Currently, the Brazilian telecommunications Agency Telebras is collaborating with a Chinese commercial company to launch a constellation of microsatellites, Space Sail, which would compete with the SpaceX constellation Starlink. The Chinese rockets launching the Space Sail satellites would launch from Brazil’s strategic equatorial launch facility Alcantara, to which the PRC did not previously have access.
In its space engagement with Latin America, the PRC is also pursuing collaboration with Latin American governments in its construction of a manned lunar base, indirectly in competition with the U.S. Artemis program. The PRC has also actively sought relations with the fledgling Mexico-based Latin America Space Agency (ALCE), and has reached out to the Mexican Space Agency, the Colombian Space Agency, and others, seeking to build relationships and to bring its personnel over to the PRC.
Countries of Interest. Countries in which PRC-based companies have arguably focused significantly on during the past several years include Brazil, Argentina, and Chile in South America; Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador in Central America; and various smaller states in the Caribbean. Others which are notable with respect to PRC interest, but in which its advance have been limited for varying reasons, include Mexico, Guyana, Venezuela, and Peru.
For the past two decades, Brazil has been one of the key recipients of investment by PRC-based companies in the region and one of the first countries to establish a strategic partner relationship with the PRC, coordinated through the ministerial level binational China-Brazil working group COSBAN. The China-Brazil Business Council (CBBC) estimates that between 2007 and 2022, the PRC invested more than $71 billion in at least 235 projects in Brazil, more than half of all PRC investment in Latin America prior to 2020.
Current Brazilian president Lula de Silva led a very large delegation to the China-CELAC leaders summit in Beijing in May, where Brazil expanded its collaboration across an array of areas, signing a total of 20 agreements, including the promise of $4.5 billion of new PRC investments.
Argentina, despite the anti-communist, libertarian orientation of its president Javier Milei, has been open to PRC investment including in the lithium, petroleum, mining, oil, agricultural, telecommunications, and other sectors. The country has the combination of strategic minerals, agricultural resources, and markets of interest to the PRC and is disposed to work with the PRC in commercial and financial matters, even while President Milei pursues a close political relationship with the United States.
Chile, like Argentina, continues to have a strong commercial relationship with the PRC, despite relatively good governance. China’s strong relationship with Chile in the minerals sector persists despite Chilean government leadership of the sector through the state mining company CODELCO, which has limited PRC investments in traditional mining industries such as copper. Like Argentina, Chile has the combination of minerals and markets of interest to the Chinese, while its strategic location on the Pacific has historically led to look toward the PRC among other markets in Asia.
Only Chile's upcoming November 2025 election, in which the left-oriented government of Gabriel Boric is at risk, raises questions about a change to a political orientation less welcoming to the PRC. Even a more right-oriented government, like that of Sebastian Pinera prior to Boric, however, would likely continue to take advantage of the PRC’s role as the principal purchaser of Chile's copper and potassium nitrate, as well as of agricultural goods including cherries, table grapes, and Chilean wines.
In Central America, strategically close to the United States, the PRC has made significant advances with virtually all countries in the region except Guatemala and Belize, which do not maintain political relationships with it.
The PRC’s political, economic, and other activities in the region have arguably advanced most quickly in Nicaragua, under the increasingly isolated dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo. A key aspect of the PRC advance in Nicaragua has been to work through family members, principally Laureano Ortega, with whom it has signed loan-based deals for work to be done by PRC-based companies on the strategically important Punta Huete airport, the port of Corinto, improvements to various roads along the Nicaraguan coast and interior, railroads, plus concessions for 21 mining projects, among others. Nicaragua is also sending police and journalists for training in the PRC as well as strengthening collaboration in digital technologies as a complement to its deepening security cooperation with Russia.
In Honduras, the left-oriented Libre party government of Xiomara Castro has similarly moved to embrace deepening political and economic engagement with the PRC. Initiatives include work by PRC-based companies on dams for electricity generation as well as electricity transmission, work by Huawei on the country's digital infrastructure, and contemplated work on improvements to the Central America Highway 5 corridor connecting the Pacific near the port of San Lorenzo, to possibly be improved by PRC-based companies, to Puerto Cortes on the Atlantic, near the border with Guatemala and Belize. As with Nicaragua, Honduras has also sent journalists to the PRC and recently opened a Confucius institute. In Honduras, as in Nicaragua, Chinese retail establishments, whose financial backing and operations exhibit little transparency, have multiplied across the country.
In El Salvador, despite the close political relationship that the government of Nayib Bukele has maintained with the Trump administration in the United States, it has embraced multiple Chinese projects, including water purification facilities, a new national library, a very large new national stadium, a tourist pier at La Libertad, a new Surf City project, and the possibility of the development of the Port of La Union, on the northern side of the Gulf of Fonseca.
In the Caribbean, China has made quiet but important advances through major hotel, port, and other infrastructure projects totaling an estimated $7 billion since 2005. In the process, the PRC has built strong relationships of influence with Caribbean leaders and their parties and affiliated business elites and security officials across the spectrum. As in other parts of the region, they have courted them through trips to the PRC, benefits for the individual Caribbean elites and their families and friends tied to the projects, plus donations of goods to governments and security forces.
For the PRC, the position of the Caribbean as a strategic logistics hub for the United States, close to sensitive U.S. military facilities, and geographically situated in an area through which US warships and military supply ships would have to travel as part of a deployment to the Indo-Pacific, makes the area strategically important to the PRC, just as the PRC wishes to keep US rivals out of its own southeastern maritime areas.
The PRC has achieved particularly strong relationships in the economies and political systems of a number of small but strategically well-situated islands in the Caribbean. These include the Bahamas, Grenada, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, Jamaica, Barbados, and increasingly others such as Trinidad and Tobago. Indeed, Grenada’s Prime Minister Dikon Mitchell made a state visit to the PRC in January 2025, meeting with Xi Jinping, the first Western Hemisphere leader to be received by Xi in the new year.
On the South American edge of the Caribbean basin, both Guyana and Suriname have longstanding economic and political relationships with the PRC. As often overlooked Suriname experiences new oil wealth, it is likely that Suriname’s new President, Jennifer Geerlings-Simons, could expand work with Chinese companies on oil, infrastructure, and other commercial projects. This is particularly likely since President Simmons headed Suriname’s Congress as part of then President Desi Bouterse’s National Democratic party from the 2010 to 2020, the period in which PRC engagement in Suriname expanded most significantly.
The PRC is also poised to advance in important ways, although cautiously, with Mexico, Guyana, Venezuela, and Peru.
In Mexico, driven ironically by US-China “decoupling” and the accompanying pressures on firms for “nearshoring,” PRC-base firms companies have invested significantly to preserve access to the US market. The Rhodium group calculates that between 2013 and 2023, PRC-based firms have invested $13 billion in the country with a particular focus on the auto parts industry, although actual Chinese auto assembly in Mexico has remained limited. PRC-based firms have also explored investments in the Trans-Sismic corridor from Veracruz to Salinas Cruz, Oaxaca. The corridor contemplates 10 industrial and distribution clusters benefitting from the expanded logistics access to both the Atlantic and Pacific and has been a key initiative promoted by Mexico’s current president Claudia Sheinbaum. In the face of pushback against PRC investment in Mexico by the Trump administration, however, those projects have been slow to move forward.
In Guyana, the PRC has had a long-standing relationship with the currently governing People’s Progressive Party (PPP) dating back to its previous period in office from 1992 through 2015. The PRC is now poised to continue advancing projects in multiple sectors including petroleum, telecommunications and “smart city” infrastructure, energy, infrastructure and other construction, retail, and others. Still, since returning to power in 2020, the PPP government has maintained a close relationship with the United States, particularly the Trump administration which supported its return to power. Nonetheless, Guyana’s national elections, to be held in September 2025, have a small but non-zero chance of bringing political change and at least temporarily impacting the relationship with the PRC.
In Venezuela, the PRC has maintained a close, but cautious relationship with the leftist authoritarian Maduro government in Venezuela, recognizing the country as an “all-weather strategic partner.” The PRC has loaned it and its predecessor almost $60 billion since 2005 as well as being a key investor in Venezuela’s petroleum sector and the main purchaser, along with Russia, of its oil and mining products, albeit sometimes in a surreptitious fashion to avoid sanctions.
The strong PRC-Venezuela relationship will likely continue, driven both by PRC resource interests and its strategic interest in the continuation of a regime that causes difficulties for the United States in its own near abroad. Still, as during the first Trump administration, PRC-based companies will probably continue to keep a low profile in Venezuela, trying to limit their vulnerability to U.S. sanctions, wary of criminal violence, poor administrative performance on projects, and regime change, as U.S. policy towards Venezuela evolves under the second Trump administration.
In Peru, the PRC is also likely to continue to build on its deep commercial presence and cultural ties, including its companies being the principal investors in Peru’s mining sector with over $11 billion in ongoing projects. PRC-based firms also have a major role in Peru’s telecommunications sector. In addition, as noted previously, the newly opened and expanding Port of Chancay, operated by the PRC-based logistics giant COSCO, serves as the PRC hub for trans-Pacific shipping to Latin America, with the firm seeking to capture the value added from that trade. Still, the PRC is arguably wary of high levels of corruption and political paralysis in Peru, with its president Dina Boluarte having only 3% popularity, balanced by an equally unpopular and fragmented Congress as the country moves towards April 2026 elections in which virtually anything could happen.
Trends in PRC-Latin America Engagement
Three trends stand out in the engagement by the PRC and its companies in Latin America: the acceleration of growth in PRC trade with the region, particularly PRC exports to Latin American countries, the shift of piracy investment to a smaller more targeted, but smarter array of projects, plus an increasingly political component of PRC engagement with the region.
In the post-COVID-19 period, PRC commerce with Latin America took off at a rate even more rapid than its growth prior to the pandemic. PRC trade with the region reached $518 billion in 2024 according to Chinese state media and is expected to reach $700 billion by 2035. The most significant element of that expansion arguably is the region’s growing import of Chinese products. Mexican imports of Chinese products, for example, exceeded 20% of its total imports in 2024, the first time it has crossed that threshold.
As part of expanding its commerce with the region, the PRC has focused on negotiating free trade agreements (FTAs), particularly with smaller countries and those with which it has recently established relations. In addition to the recently completed FTA with Ecuador, it has also completed a FTA with Nicaragua and is finalizing one with Honduras. Prior to US pressure on the Panamanian government of Jose Raul Mulino over the presence of PRC-based companies in the canal zone, that government had also expressed interest in restarting FTA talks that the preceding government of Nito Cortizo has allowed to lapse, which had been been launched by the preceding Juan Carlos Varela regime. In addition, Uruguay, El Salvador, and even Colombia have also expressed interest in FTA talks with the PRC, leveraging those nations’ hopes of gaining expanded access to the PRC market.
The objective, or at least the practical effect, of such PRC FTAs with the region has been to expand the penetration of Chinese goods and services into the countries signing them. On the other hand, the results of most of the Latin American FTA signatories in expanding their own exports to the PRC has been disappointing. In the case of Ecuador, and Honduras, expected increases in exports of traditional products such as shrimp, for example, have not been achieved, in part because the PRC has been able to buy similar products from countries closer to it. By contrast, China’s free trade agreement with Nicaragua, and its engagement with the Sandinista government of that country in general, have facilitated a significant expansion of Chinese retail outlets across the country, adversely impacting local retail businesses.
In the investment domain, the weakness of the Chinese economy, the collapse of the real estate sector there, and other factors have obliged the PRC and its agents to move away from large, policy bank-funded state-to-state projects whose commercial logic for the partner country was dubious. In the post-COVID-19 era, PRC investment in Latin America has continued but has been more focused on smaller, more economically salient projects in areas of strategic importance to the PRC, particularly digital sectors, electric vehicles and supporting infrastructure, as well as renewable electricity transmission and distribution, among others.
PRC-based companies have invested at least $203.4 billion in Latin America over the past two decades in more than 670 transactions. Although loans from the PRC’s two major policy banks, China Development Bank (CDB) and China Export Import Bank (China Ex-Im), have fallen off since 2015, PRC-based companies are financing an increasing portion of their own projects, often working through Chinese commercial banks.
PRC-based companies are also becoming more sophisticated in their options in Latin America, including an expanded use of Public Private Partnership (PPP) vehicles to win public works projects. Prominent examples include phase one of the $4.3 billion Bogota Metro project, won by a China Harbour-led consortium. In addition, China Harbour has beenawarded concessions for two segments of Highway 5, the principal corridor connecting Chile from north to South. PRC-based companies are also becoming more effective in working with local governments, communities, and partners to avoid problems related to community consultations and regulatory issues, such as those that caused the construction of the Route 32 highway in Costa Rica to be significantly delayed in its completion.
Beyond its commercial activities, The PRC is also increasingly engaging in the region in political and other strategic domains.
China's bilateral political activities in Latin America and the Caribbean include strategic partner relationships with 12 countries in the region. The PRC also regularly engages at sub national and multilateral levels. In federated states such as Argentina and Brazil, the PRC courts state and provincial level governors. This approach worked, for example, with the governor of Sao Paulo state, Joao Doria, during COVID-19, with vaccines at a time when PRC interactions with the right-wing populist government of Jair Bolsonaro at the national level were tense. In a similar fashion, the PRC has worked with governments of Argentine provinces such as Jujuy that make key decisions over the approval of Chinese companies with respect to lithium and other sectors. In pursuit of such access, for example, PRC-based entities have provided generous gifts, including surveillance equipment and technology for local universities in Jujuy and have hosted its Governor in China. Through sister city and sister province relationships, the PRC also regularly brings local Latin American political figures to China as part of its building of influence networks and securing access and good treatment for its companies operating in the region.
At the multilateral level, the PRC has been an observer at the Organization of American States (OAS) since 2004 and has operated in institutions of the Interamerican system such as the Inter-American Development Bank since 2009. The PRC has previously sent a colonel-level military student to the Interamerican Defence College and has an observer seat at the IADC and Interamerican Defense Board (IADB), which although currenly unfilled, could be used to potentially expand its presence under the more China-friendly leadership of new OAS Secretary General Albert Ramdin. China also reportedly proposed significant financing for the 55th session of the OAS General Assembly, held in St. John's, Antigua and Barbuda, June 27-29, 2025.
Despite its presence in other parts of the Interamerican system, the PRC instrument of choice for engaging the region continues to be the China-CELAC forum, where the US and Canada are not present. The PRC held its 4th China-CELAC forum in Beijing in May 2025, where it put forth a three-year 2025 to 2027 Joint Action Plan, outlining its proposals for bringing more students, government personnel, journalists, party officials, and others to the region, for loaning money to the region for projects to be completed by China, and for conducting other forms of engagement.
The China-CELAC 2025 to 2027 Joint Action Plan highlights the focus areas of the increasingly political PRC engagement with the region. The scope of this engagement may be seen in the five pillars of that plan: Solidarity, Development, Civilization, Peace, and People-to-People engagement.
The “Solidarity” pillar may be understood as PRC outreach to Latin American political parties across the spectrum. This may be in part a Chinese effort to take advantage of disillusionment in the region with the aggressive new “America First” orientation of the US government.
The PRC term “solidarity” associated with this engagement may also be a type of PRC hedging against political change in the region, with ten upcoming national elections in Latin America and the Caribbean between July 2026-May 2026, where the outcome of each could impact the relationships that the PRC and its companies have carefully constructed with current governments. These elections include those in Bolivia in August 2025, Jamaica by September 2025, Guyana in September 2025, important Congressional midterm elections in Argentina in October 2025, Presidential elections in Chile and Honduras and national Parliamentary elections in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in December 2025. They further include Presidential elections in Costa Rica in February 2026, in Peru in April 2026, as well as in Colombia in May 2026.
In the current China-CELAC plan, the PRC proposes to bring 300 Latin America and Caribbean party officials to the PRC to be wined and dined, generating goodwill and possibly compromising relationships. In a similar fashion, the PRC also works with congressional caucuses throughout the region, oftentimes targeting their leaders for special favors or bringing delegations of these legislators over to the PRC. SPecific beneficiaries and targets of influence include the China caucus and the Colombian Congress, led by Gloria Flores of President Gustavo Petro’s “Historic Pact” movement, as well as the China caucus in the Ecuadoran National Assembly, led by Silvia Patricia Nunez Ramos, among others.
In the “Development” pillar of China’s new Joint Action plan, the PRC is arguably shifting away from its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), without abandoning it, in order to focus more on its Global Development Initiative (GDI). In the GDI, the PRC doubles down on its Mao-era “south-south engagement” theme with the region, suggesting that Latin America and the Caribbean should give it special treatment based on the bond between the PRC and the nations of the region as fellow “developing nations.” Implicit in this PRC advocacy, the US and European Union are presumably not positioned to understand the region as well as the PRC due to their status as “developed” countries. In support of GDI and the “Development” pilar, the PRC included a $9.2 billion line of credit in its new Joint Action Plan. Ironically, however, that amount was actually less than the $20 billion line of credit the PRC offered in 2015, most of which was not used because the region found that the terms unacceptably favored the PRC and its companies.
In its “Civilization” pillar, the PRC continues to advance its ambiguous Global Civilization Initiative (GCI), in which it endorses concepts like democracy and rights, but argues against western attempts to define what those concepts mean in a manner that may be enforced through cooperation and established international institutions. GCI has arguably been very popular with illiberal states from Venezuela and Nicaragua to Iran, as it undermines concepts of legal and commercial accountability that have underpinned the functionality of the western system since World War II.
In its “Peace” pillar, the PRC continues to expand its pursuit of security engagement with the region. The pillar builds on the recently unveiled “Global Security Initiative” (GSI) and the official “white paper” explaining it. They notably define security engagement in very broad and ambiguous terms. The PRC, for example, advocates for not only traditional military cooperation, but also the region’s cooperation in terms of access to and management of sensitive data, space cooperation, and other issues. It further argues for conducting such security engagement with Latin America through institutions in which the US is not present, such as CELAC and the BRICS, rather than the traditional Interamerican system, which houses the region’s established security cooperation mechanisms.
In the new Joint Action Plan, the PRC advocates for expanded cooperation in counter narcotics as well as cybersecurity. Expanded cooperation in the latter domain would create particular risks for the region given the significant and expanding presence of PRC telecommunications, data, and other digital architectures there. Indeed, in its plan, the PRC even advocates for its access to the CERT system for cyber security in the region, potentially opening up significant vulnerabilities given past track records of PRC-based hackers such as Volt Typhoon as well as PRC-based attacks on the data of Costa Rica’s ministries through the Conti virus.
Although not mentioned in the plan, the PRC is also expanding its traditional military engagement in the region, including stepped up attempts to market its J-10 fighter aircraft to Colombia and Brazil, among others. Those initiatives followed the J-10’s positive performance in the brief conflict between India and Pakistan, in which it was credited with shooting down several French-made Rafaele fighters. The PRC has further advanced from training of Latin American and Caribbean military officials and providing gifts for military and police, to also training police officials from the region in China, including a 2024 agreement to host members of the Nicaraguan National Police in the PRC.
With the “People-to-People” pillar, the PRC continues significant engagements to bring thousands of Latin Americans to China for training, presentations, and other activities in an effort to build goodwill, obtain current and future information from them, and in some cases, create compromising relationships that could ensure secure access to those figures in the future.
Next, through its 44 Confucius Institutes in Latin America, the PRC identifies promising future Latin American leaders interested in the Chinese language and culture and orients them towards PRC government scholarships as well as those available through commercial companies such as Huawei’s “Seeds of the Future” program. Through such scholarships, the PRC brings these youths to China for language and technical studies, and in the process, builds relations of goodwill and possibly future obligation with them. The 2025-2027 China-CELAC Joint Action Plan promises 3,500 PRC government scholarships for Latin American students plus 500 language teaching scholarships and 10,000 “training opportunities.”
The PRC has been conducting such engagements with the region for some time, bringing thousands of academics, think tank personnel, businesspeople, government officials, and others to the PRC for presentations, training, and other engagements, even including training engagements for judges and police personnel.
In the media domain, the PRC continues to build relationships of influence, nurturing favorable messaging about China by journalists or at least restraint in writing about PRC abuses. It does so through a multi-pronged approach. It brings journalists to the PRC on a regular basis for training and orientation, including leading figures such as Alma Paola Wong of the Mexican newspaper Milenio and Claudia Menendez of the Guatemalan program “Con Criterio.” The PRC also buys regular advertising in Latin American newspapers, providing a lucrative income stream that sometimes makes editors reluctant to put at risk by saying things too critical about China. The PRC also provides free newsfeeds, including images, and stories about topics such as Chinese Communist Party events. Such free material about the PRC, along with free images and other materials are arguably welcome and needed gifts for Latin American news services that find it difficult to maintain their own correspondent in the PRC. In the process, such feeds from the Chinese government, often reproduced in the region verbatim and without qualifiers that they have been produced by the Chinese Communist Party, influences the information that Latin American audiences receive, or don’t receive, about the PRC from their own country’s trusted news services.
Impact of PRC Engagement on the Region
The current and potential impacts of Chinese engagement on Latin America are both positive and negative, and may be divided into three categories: economic, political, and wartime issues.
Economic Engagement. In the economic domain, competition from Chinese imports, facilitated by PRC-based companies operating on the ground in Latin America, is displacing local producers in sectors from consumer products and other manufactured goods to the construction sector. The tendency of PRC-based companies to prefer employing Chinese subcontractors where possible compounds this effect.
The PRC’s expanding role as an employer and an operator in local communities also increases its influence. Both politicians and businesspeople are impacted not only by interactions from PRC-based companies currently on the ground, but also from the prospect of attracting Chinese investment, securing a Chinese business partner, or obtaining access to the PRC market for their products. While such influence is not necessarily coercive in a traditional sense, the expectation of benefit arguably increases the region’s receptivity to PRC-based firms and initiatives, a reluctance to take action against PRC-based firms in the country, and avoiding talking critically about the behavior of the PRC and its companies in ways that may negatively impact Chinese willingness to provide loans, business partnerships, or market access.
Beyond influence, PRC-based companies continue to capture the increasing portion of value added from their operations as they integrate vertically and horizontally. This Chinese behavior is particularly the case in extractive sectors, where they work to obtain the primary product at the lowest possible price and then realize the gains from transforming it and shipping it to China itself, selling higher value-added finished products back to the region.
Through their economic engagement in the region, PRC based companies have also captured significant portion of the strategic minerals value chains, including niobium in Brazil and lithium in Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia. China's dominant positions in strategic minerals value chains in Latin America and elsewhere has become increasingly important as the PRC seeks to use this dominance to deny access to strategic minerals to the US and its companies.
Political Impacts. In the political domain, the role of the PRC as an alternative source of demand for Latin American products, investment, and finance, often without imposing political requirements on their Latin American partners, indirectly undercuts U.S. policy influence in the region.
PRC presence also arguably undermines the US role in the institutions of the Interamerican system. These include supplanting US influence in the Interamerican Development Bank where the PRC has had a voting presence since 2009, as well as in the bureaucracy of the OAS itself. The May 2025 election of new OAS Secretary General Alberto Ramdin, whose style is arguably more consensual and also arguably more open to working with China than that of his predecessor, Luis Almagro, may facilitate further PRC access to influence in Interamerican institutions. These include OAS military institutions such as the IADC, to which as noted previously, the PRC once sent representatives, or the Interamerican Defense Board (IADB) where China reportedly has an unused observer seat.
PRC engagement in the region is also progressively undercutting the position of Taiwan, with seven of the remaining 12 nations in the world that diplomatically recognize the Republic of China (ROC) found in the Caribbean, Central and South America.
PRC efforts to cause governments to abandon Taiwan includes not only lobbying through its network of PRC-sympathetic political and business figures in the region, but also arguing, inaccurately, how much more Latin Americans could export if they only switched relations.
Since the end of the informal diplomatic truce between the PRC and Taiwan in 2016, five nations in the region have abandoned Taiwan for the PRC: Panama, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras. Each change has been associated with a rapid advance in PRC presence in those states, including the opening of Confucius Institutes, training programs for government personnel in the PRC, seminar programs for local journalists, PRC negotiation of new free trade agreements (as mentioned previously), plus accelerated penetration by PRC-based companies of strategic sectors of the countries changing recognition, including advances in their telecommunications and electricity sectors, among others.
Although the PRC engages with Latin American governments on both the left and the right, its support for authoritarian regimes has arguably impacted the political trajectory of the region. This includes PRC support for Venezuela, the populist Rafael Correa regime in Ecuador, the Evo Morales and Luis Arce governments in Bolivia, and most recently, the rapidly deepening PRC engagement with the Daniel Ortega Rosario Mario government in Nicaragua. In each case, PRC economic, security, and digital systems support have helped these regimes to survive. It has also helped other regimes consolidating power, turning away from Western models of governance and the rule of law, such as the Libre government in Honduras.
The PRC has also provided resources for elites tied to authoritarian governments through the purchases of commodities and loan-based programs. Examples include almost $60 billion of loans to Venezuela and almost $12 billion to Ecuador. The PRC has further provided security equipment such as riot control vehicles to the Bolivarian National Guard, and surveillance systems, including facial recognition cameras used to identify and track down protesters in Venezuela, the ECU 911 surveillance system in Ecuador, BOL 110 in Bolivia, and the telecommunication system in Cuba, all of which have supported the repression of those people.
Wartime Impacts. If the United States and West goes to war with the PRC in the Indo-Pacific over Taiwan or over another issue, the PRC commercial presence, military relationships, and technology infrastructure in the Western Hemisphere will give the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) important options to threaten the US homeland as well as to put US deployment to and sustainment operations in the Indo-Pacific at risk, even without the PRC securing formal military alliance and basing agreements in the region.
In time of war, an important part of US supply ships and naval combatants destined to be deployed to the Indo-Pacific would come from the Atlantic or US East Coast ports. From those locations, they would have to pass through the Caribbean to reach and traverse the Panama Canal. This substantial commercial presence of PRC-based companies in this area, as noted previously, including in the islands of the Bahamas, Jamaica, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Barbados, and increasingly Trinidad and Tobago, would give the PRC options to deploy and sustain intelligence assets or special teams from those locations in order to observe or disrupt those critical US flows. In a similar fashion, electronics intelligence facilities, such as Bejucal and other PLA assets in Cuba, as well as PRC embassy facilities with significant electronic capabilities, such as that in Antigua and Barbuda, could be used by the PLA to monitor activity in proximity to US East Coast military installations and possibly disrupt them.
The PRC presence in the Panama Canal, including not only the operation of ports on both sides of the canal by Hutchinson (Panama Ports Company), but also the regular operation of ships by the PRC-based logistics giant COSCO, the-PRC based construction firm China Harbor (which is building the 4th bridge across the Panama Canal), plus numerous PRC-based companies with warehousing and distribution operations in or near the canal zones in sites like Colon and Panama Pacifico could all be exploited to give the PLA the combination of physical access, technical knowledge, and relationships that it needed to temporarily shut down the canal in time of conflict.
The possibilities for the PRC to temporarily close the canal during a war in the Indo-Pacific are numerous and generally well known, from scuttling a ship in the narrowest part of the canal, the Culebra Cut, to sinking a vessel in the locks themselves, using explosives carried in the vessel or other means to damage the locks, attacking the lock control or water management systems, mining the canal, putting ships waiting to enter the canal at either end at risk from submarines or other threats, or a myriad of other possibilities.
The closure of the canal, or the reluctance of warships and commercial traffic to transit it, even for a few days, could be decisive in the success of a PLA invasion of Taiwan, including denying the US from having the firepower to prevent their amphibious and other ships from crossing the Taiwan Straits, then overcoming the island’s land defenses to occupy the country and present the West with a fait accompli.
Were the Panama Canal to be shut down, the alternative transit through the Straits of Magellan or the Drake Passage in the southern tip of South America could become critical to support Taiwan’s defense in a timely fashion. To this end, the proposed Chinese commercial port in in Tierra del Fuego, if built, could be used by the PLA to observe and store weapons that could also disrupt shipping transiting these alternate routes in the region.
In time of conflict, PRC access to the skies over the Western Hemisphere could be used to locate US satellites to later blind or destroy them and also to communicate with PRC's offensive space assets. These include the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS), which the PRC successfully tested in 2021, that could carry nuclear or conventional projectiles in orbit, launched towards strategic US targets. Such PRC ability to exploit space over the Western Hemisphere could potentially be decisive in the struggle to protect and exploit space in a war in the Indo-Pacific. Options for the Chinese in this regard include the much-discussed Deep Space Radar facility in Neuquen, Argentina, operated by the PLA organization China Satellite Launch, Tracking and Control (CLTC). Beyond Neuquen, however, the PLA could also leverage facilities that the PRC built and whose personnel they trained in both Venezuela and Bolivia. The PRC also has access to other space observation and communication sites, including the Calan Hill facility near Santiago, Chile (which it shares with European Space Agency researchers); the China Argentine Radio Telescope (CART) in the province of San Juan, Argentina; the near-polar quasi-commercial Emposat facility in Ushuaia, Argentina; and its more recently acquired access to the Alcantara Equatorial launch facility in Brazil, where it is collaborating with the Brazilian telecommunications agency Telebras to launch a new constellation of Chinese microsatellites through the PRC-based company Space Sail.
In the later phases of a war in the Indo-Pacific, PLA access to the deep water port of Chancay in Peru, operated by the PRC-based logistics giant COSCO (which has repeatedly supported the PLA over the years in operations in Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere), could be used to resupply PLA warships for operations in the eastern Pacific against the United States and its naval forces.
If PLA victories in the Pacific and against US homeland defenses allowed the PRC to project power closer to the continental United States, it could also leverage access to commercial facilities in Central America to support attacks against the US. These could include the Nicaraguan Port of Corinto that PRC-based companies are servicing and possibly expanding, Nicaragua’s Punta Huete airport, the future PRC-operated port of La Union in El Salvador, and a possible interoceanic rail and a highway corridor in Honduras that PRC companies are interested in expanding from the port of San Lorenzo in the Gulf of Fonseca on the Pacific Coast to the Port of Cortes on the Atlantic Coast.
Conclusion
The PRC and its companies and other entities continue to expand in their activities in Latin America, as in other parts of the world. That engagement in some areas has become more tailored and, in some areas, more effective. It is transforming the region to which the US is most closely connected through bonds of geography, commerce, and family in important ways. It has strategic effects in economic, political, and military domains among others.
While not all PRC engagements are necessarily negative for the region, it is important for both actors in Latin America and the Caribbean, and in the US, to evaluate in a more objective and sophisticated way the combination of potential opportunities and associated risks.
