China in Latin America: April 2025
from China Strategy Initiative and China 360
from China Strategy Initiative and China 360

China in Latin America: April 2025

Farmers harvest soybeans on a farm in Maringa in Parana state, Brazil, March 3, 2025.
Farmers harvest soybeans on a farm in Maringa in Parana state, Brazil, March 3, 2025. Rodolfo Buhrer/Reuters

In April, Argentina renewed a $5 billion currency swap line with China despite objections by the United States. Latin American countries stand to gain as China orients away from U.S. agricultural suppliers amid escalating trade tensions. The Panamanian Comptroller-General announced plans to file criminal charges against the Hong Kong company that operates two ports in the Panama Canal.

April 30, 2025 6:03 pm (EST)

Farmers harvest soybeans on a farm in Maringa in Parana state, Brazil, March 3, 2025.
Farmers harvest soybeans on a farm in Maringa in Parana state, Brazil, March 3, 2025. Rodolfo Buhrer/Reuters
Article
Current political and economic issues succinctly explained.

Currency Swap: Argentina renewed a $5 billion currency swap line with China, despite comments by U.S. Special Envoy for Latin America Mauricio Claver-Carone that the agreement was “extortionate.” Claver-Carone called on Argentina to end the long-standing swap agreement, originally signed with China in 2009. China defended the currency swap as playing a stabilizing role in the Argentine economy. Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Lin Jian urged the United States to “make more tangible contributions to the development of Latin American and Caribbean countries, rather than make an effort to drive a wedge.” The currency swap is Argentina’s largest source of foreign reserves and China’s biggest yuan swap line in the world.

More From Our Experts

Panama Canal Tensions: Panama’s comptroller authority found irregularities in the contract extension granted to Hong Kong company CK Hutchison in 2021 to operate two ports in the Panama Canal. The audit revealed payment defaults and accounting miscalculations, alleging that CK Hutchison failed to pay $300 million in fees. Panamanian Comptroller-General Anel Flores announced plans to file criminal charges.

More on:

China Strategy Initiative

China

Latin America

China 360

During a visit to Panama City, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the United States was determined to eliminate China’s “malign influence” over the Panama Canal. The Chinese Embassy in Panama accused the United States of using blackmail to further its own interests and attempting to sabotage China-Panama cooperation.

Trade: China is shifting purchases of agricultural commodities to Latin America amid its escalating trade war with the United States. Chinese soybean crushers bought an unusually large quantity of Brazilian soybeans in April. Upwards of 40 cargoes of Brazilian soybeans totaling 2.4 million tons are set to arrive in China in May, June, and July. Bloomberg reported that Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay will also benefit from U.S.-China trade tensions, especially as China looks to find alternate cereal suppliers.

Mexico imposed tariffs on Chinese steel nails in a move intended to bolster its domestic industry. An antidumping investigation by the Mexican Secretariat of Economy found that steel nails had been imported from China at prices below fair market conditions.

More From Our Experts

Colombian authorities seized forty-nine tons of illicitly extracted tin and coltan that was headed to China. Valued at $1.2 million, the seizure of coltan, a mineral used in the making of smartphones and other electronics, was one of the biggest in Colombia in recent years.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Chilean President Gabriel Boric said they did not want to pick sides in a U.S.-China trade war and pointed to the need to strengthen intraregional ties.

More on:

China Strategy Initiative

China

Latin America

China 360

Diplomacy: At a recent summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in Honduras, a Chinese delegation held bilateral meetings with representatives from fifteen countries. Chinese President Xi Jinping underscored CELAC’s role in maintaining regional stability and affirmed China’s willingness to partner with Latin American countries.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro met with Chinese ambassador to Colombia Zhu Jingyang to prepare for the upcoming China-CELAC forum, which will be held in Beijing in May. Petro assumed the pro tempore presidency of CELAC on April 2. The China-CELAC forum will prioritize discussion of renewable energy and trade integration, according to Colombian Foreign Minister Laura Sarabia. Business leaders in Latin America have expressed their concern over the bloc’s meeting with China amid escalating U.S.-China trade tensions.

Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez met with Chinese Vice President Han Zheng during a visit to Bejing to review the status of over 600 bilateral agreements and strengthen trade relations.

Infrastructure: A Chinese delegation of eleven officials from China State Railway Group and the Chinese transport ministry visited Brazil to discuss infrastructure projects. During the seven-day trip, the delegation explored the idea of a potential railway to connect Brazil to Peru’s Chancay megaport. If it comes online, the project would allow Brazil to bypass Atlantic shipping routes, lowering transit times and logistics costs for Brazilian exports.

Peru’s National Institute for the Defense of Competition and the Protection of Intellectual Property (INDECOPI) announced that rates for port services at Chancay must be regulated, citing a lack of competitive market conditions. Chinese company Cosco Shipping, which operates the megaport, said it could respond with legal action. INDECOPI seeks to apply rates similar to those at Peru’s Port of Callao, weighing factors such as the type of service, destination of shipment, and weight of cargo.

China’s Guangzhou port opened a direct route to Chancay, which will reach Peru in around thirty days and reduce logistics cost by 20 percent.

Investments: Brazilian Mines and Energy Minister Alexandre Silveira traveled to China to seek additional investment in the energy sector, with a focus on batteries, data centers, and electric mobility. Silveira met with executives from BYD, China General Nuclear Power Group, and Huawei during his visit.

The Chilean government invoked an anti-terrorism law in response to an arson attack on a Chinese-owned hydroelectric project that injured two guards and damaged fifty vehicles and pieces of machinery. The Chinese Embassy said the incident undermines companies’ confidence in Chile.

Uruguay and China launched a joint bio-nano-pharma laboratory to advance scientific research. The initiative builds on an existing partnership between Uruguay’s University of the Republic and China’s Qingdao University.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega met with Huawei’s president for Latin America and affirmed Nicaragua’s intent to expand cooperation with Chinese companies. 

Creative Commons
Creative Commons: Some rights reserved.
Close
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License.
View License Detail
Close

Top Stories on CFR

Europe

On the eighty-first anniversary of D-Day, CFR President Michael Froman and senior fellows discuss the Trump administration’s diminished appetite for engagement in European security affairs—even as the Russia-Ukraine war drags on.

Ukraine

The Sanctioning Russia Act would impose history’s highest tariffs and tank the global economy. Congress needs a better approach, one that strengthens existing sanctions and adds new measures the current bill ignores.

China Strategy Initiative

At the Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore last week, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that the United States would be expanding its defense partnership with India. His statement was in line with U.S. policy over the last two decades, which, irrespective of the party in power, has sought to cultivate India as a serious defense partner. The U.S.-India defense partnership has come a long way. Beginning in 2001, the United States and India moved from little defense cooperation or coordination to significant gestures that would lay the foundation of the robust defense partnership that exists today—such as India offering access to its facilities after 9/11 to help the United States launch operations in Afghanistan or the 123 Agreement in 2005 that paved the way for civil nuclear cooperation between the two countries. In the United States, there is bipartisan agreement that a strong defense partnership with India is vital for its Indo-Pacific strategy and containing China. In India, too, there is broad political support for its strategic partnership with the United States given its immense wariness about its fractious border relationship with China. Consequently, the U.S.-India bilateral relationship has heavily emphasized security, with even trade tilting toward defense goods. Despite the massive changes to the relationship in the last few years, and both countries’ desire to develop ever-closer defense ties, differences between the United States and India remain. A significant part of this has to do with the differing norms that underpin the defense interests of each country. The following Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) memos by defense experts in three countries are part of a larger CFR project assessing India’s approach to the international order in different areas, and illustrate India’s positions on important defense issues—military operationalization, cooperation in space, and export controls—and how they differ with respect to the United States and its allies. Sameer Lalwani (Washington, DC) argues that the two countries differ in their thinking about deterrence, and that this is evident in three categories crucial to defense: capability, geography, and interoperability. When it comes to increasing material capabilities, for example, India prioritizes domestic economic development, including developing indigenous capabilities (i.e., its domestic defense-industrial sector). With regard to geography, for example, the United States and its Western allies think of crises, such as Ukraine, in terms of global domino effects; India, in contrast, thinks regionally, and confines itself to the effects on its neighborhood and borders (and, as the recent crisis with Pakistan shows, India continues to face threats on its border, widening the geographic divergence with the United States). And India’s commitment to strategic autonomy means the two countries remain far apart on the kind of interoperability required by modern military operations. Yet there is also reason for optimism about the relationship as those differences are largely surmountable. Dimitrios Stroikos (London) argues that India’s space policy has shifted from prioritizing socioeconomic development to pursuing both national security and prestige. While it is party to all five UN space treaties that govern outer space and converges with the United States on many issues in the civil, commercial, and military domains of space, India is careful with regard to some norms. It favors, for example, bilateral initiatives over multilateral, and the inclusion of Global South countries in institutions that it believes to be dominated by the West. Konark Bhandari (New Delhi) argues that India’s stance on export controls is evolving. It has signed three of the four major international export control regimes, but it has to consistently contend with the cost of complying, particularly as the United States is increasingly and unilaterally imposing export control measures both inside and outside of those regimes. When it comes to export controls, India prefers trade agreements with select nations, prizes its strategic autonomy (which includes relations with Russia and China through institutions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS), and prioritizes its domestic development. Furthermore, given President Donald Trump’s focus on bilateral trade, the two countries’ differences will need to be worked out if future tech cooperation is to be realized.