At the beginning of last week, the president of Argentina, Alberto Fernández, and the dictator of China, Xi Jinping, consecrated the most recent step in the rapprochement between the two countries: Argentina’s accession to the so-called Silk Road.
It is a Chinese investment program in infrastructure, started in 2013 and which has already invested hundreds of billions of dollars in around 140 countries. According to Telam, Argentina’s official news agency, the country will obtain funding of more than US$23 billion. In addition, 13 cooperation documents were signed between the Argentine government and the Chinese dictatorship.
Earlier, in 2015, China deployed a space station in the Argentine province of Neuquén, a structure that Washington suspects has military purposes. In early February, a Chinese state-owned company announced the construction of the Atucha III nuclear plant in the city of Lima, in the province of Buenos Aires, a project worth US$8 billion.
Other Latin American countries had already joined the Silk Road, but the results in many cases are problematic. According to a survey released in September by the American research and innovation laboratory AidData, 35% of the program’s global portfolio of infrastructure projects had major implementation problems, such as corruption scandals, labor violations, environmental risks and protests.
In Latin America, suspensions and cancellations of Silk Road projects totaled US$1 billion in Bolivia, US$889 million in Costa Rica and US$417 million in Ecuador, according to the report.
Even so, for the West, especially for the United States, Fernández’s trips in early February were a worrying sign, because, days before formalizing the adhesion to the Silk Road, the Peronist president had met in Moscow with the Russian President Vladimir Putin and suggested that his country become Russia’s “gateway” to Latin America.
US congressmen asked President Joe Biden to get closer to countries on the continent. “While the Biden administration, the media and many members of Congress are beating the drums of war for Ukraine, there is a far more significant threat to our rapidly accelerating nation close to home in Argentina,” warned Republican Representative Matt Gaetz, in a statement. speech reproduced by the newspaper Clarin.
Republican Senator Jim Risch said he was “concerned about plans to install unproven Chinese nuclear technology in Argentina and its implications for regional security and Argentine sovereignty.” “Given the bad experience with the Las Lajas space station, Argentina should reverse direction,” he argued.
Two US senators, Republican Marco Rubio and Democrat Bob Menéndez, chairman of the House International Relations Committee, this month introduced a bill to increase security cooperation in Latin America and curb what they called “destabilizing” and “maleficent” of China and Russia in the region.
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