Mapping China's Influence in Latin America

... Starting with near-negligible investment levels in 2000, China has become a dominant force in Latin America and the Caribbean, with trade exceeding $500 billion in 2024. For many individual nations, such as Brazil and Peru, China has overtaken the United States as a key trading partner...

Along the way, Beijing has built enormous leverage, said Ding Hung-bin, associate dean at Loyola University Maryland’s Sellinger School of Business and Management.

“The Chinese Communist Party is playing the long game in Latin America,” he told The Epoch Times...

Washington is now making clear that this can’t continue. In its national security strategy released in November, the Trump administration made the region its top priority, describing a “great American strategic mistake of recent decades” in allowing “non-Hemispheric competitors” to take hold in the Western Hemisphere...

... China attracted more than 20 Latin American and Caribbean countries to join the Belt and Road partnerships. Hundreds of infrastructure projects followed...

Chancay Port, a $1.3 billion project nearly 50 miles from Lima, is at the top of that list. The deepwater port, covering about 445 acres of Peruvian territory, is the primary Chinese logistics hub on the Pacific side of Latin America...

In the event of a military crisis—say a conflict with the United States in the Indo-Pacific—COSCO’s officials would “use their exclusive control over that port in any way they could to resupply PLA warships,” said Ellis...

China’s senior military leaders have visited the region hundreds of times in the past two decades, according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission...

[See animated maps in the original article.]