Latin American economic recovery has been stronger than expected, and growth forecasts by the World Bank and IMF have improved since six months ago. Vaccination campaigns and fiscal support have sparked an economic rebound since the second half of last year, despite an apparent loss of momentum in the third quarter of this year.
But the future looks uncertain. Latin America is caught between two major global forces that threaten the region’s growth: a potential drop in capital flows from the U.S. as pandemic stimulus tapers off; and decreasing growth in China, where an energy crunch is hitting just as the country’s exhausted property markets begin to go into reverse.
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China's "Belt and Road Initiative" continues to gain traction all around the world. The communist behemoth nation, who has recently struck a deal with the Taliban, continues to vie for economic hegemony in Central and South America, as well as the Caribbean.
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According to the Daily Caller, Gordon G. Chang, the author of the book "The Coming Collapse of China," said in an interview: "There’s a lot of infrastructure that Beijing is building. It makes those countries dependent on China and we should be making sure that the debt trap traps not the debtor but the creditor. [China] goes in and just buys and corrupts elites like it does everywhere."
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"People have known about the problem of China’s penetration of a number of these countries and for a very long time we paid more attention to the Middle East or Asia or even Europe and we’ve neglected, traditionally, not only Latin America but also the Caribbean."
"We have the Chinese building a container port … in the Bahamas, a $3 billion project, which seems to me to be much too large to be justified as an economic measure," mentioned Chang, citing a specific case of how a Chinese presence so near the US can potentially become a strategic threat. Chang goes on to mention that in many possible scenarios where the Chinese end up seizing the port, "we’ll have a Chinese naval base 87 miles east of Palm Beach."
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"This is not a good story for us. It just seems to me we’ve had a failure of leadership across the board and that’s Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. It’s just a failure to understand what’s going on and to defend the American republic.” Chang concluded.
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Mario Duarte, former Secretary of Strategic Intelligence of Guatemala, concurred, exclaiming, "Not a single diplomat in the region ever approached the governments here in trying to push back on China. The United States is not doing anything to counter it, to be honest with you. At all."
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