U.S. officials and private companies have “to do better” at engaging allies across Central and South America to counter aggressive Chinese and Russian moves in the region, such as Moscow’s recent docking of warships in Cuba and Beijing’s establishment of secretive space facilities in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile and Venezuela.
That was the core message the commander of the Pentagon’s Southern Command delivered at the annual Aspen Security Forum last week, asserting that in the “strategic countries of Colombia, Brazil and Chile, we’re going on two years now without a U.S. ambassador.”
“It was three years in Chile. It was three years in Brazil, five years in Panama — five years,” said Gen. Richardson, who suggested the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is outcompeting the U.S., with 22 of the 31 countries in the region having signed on to China’s signature Belt and Road program financing critical infrastructure projects, including deep water ports, 5G, cybersecurity, energy and space. “I worry about the dual use nature of that,” she said. “These are state-owned enterprises by a communist government and I’m worried about the flipping of that to a military application very quickly if something were to happen, maybe in the [Indo-Pacific] region.”
A recent Center for Strategic and International Studies commentary warned that China’s growing network of space ground-control sites in South America could provide Beijing with “critical support for the potential deployment and guidance of hypersonic missiles over the Western Hemisphere, with the United States a likely target.”
