Tag Archives: Latin America

New warfare includes theft of intellectual property, hacking, spying, and militarizing islands: China checked all those boxes, now looks to control ports in Latin America

CHINA-MILITARY-POLITICS

Important Takeaways:

  • China’s “Unrestricted Warfare” Against the US
  • The Chinese Communist Party, led by China’s President Xi Jinping, has, over the years, by espionage, intellectual property theft, hacking, spying and militarizing artificial islands, initiated a bitter conflict between China and the US.
  • China appears determined to “neutralize” states that might challenge its claim to the South and East China Seas. If successful, China’s naval assets will dominate a large portion of the world’s commercial sea lanes, if the US is unable — or unwilling — to knit together a serious formal military alliance of democratic states in the Indo-Pacific.
  • Rather than fight a war, China apparently is hoping to envelop the US in Latin America by establishing Chinese-controlled ports and numerous bilateral Belt and Road Initiative projects in Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Brazil and Argentina.
  • Is the US ready?

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Migrant caravan organizer says immigration “is being weaponized” against the U.S.

Migrants-Chiapas-Mexico

Important Takeaways:

  • Migrant caravan organizer claims Latin American nations ‘conspiring against the US,’ ‘fueling’ border crisis
  • One of the organizers of a migrant caravan of thousands of people traveling through Mexico toward the U.S. southern border claims that Latin American countries are “conspiring against the United States” to fuel the immigration crisis, adding that he believes the “Biden administration has dropped the ball.”
  • “This is not normal. This is being used by the countries to make sure they get what they want from the United States,” caravan organizer Irineo Mujica told Real America’s Voice on camera. “And Joe Biden has lost. I’m completely stunned. Where is the American intelligence? Don’t they know that all the countries are conspiring against the United States to make sure they have this crisis being made so that they can charge for that crisis?”
  • The United States has lost the respect of all the countries. Obrador has more power to pull them in and make sure he gets what he wants from the United States.”
  • Mujica estimated that the group consisted of about 5,000 people originating from Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras and Venezuela
  • Recalling how he witnessed about 7,000 people cross the Darién Gap, a treacherous migrant route through the jungle from Panama to Colombia, in just one day, Mujica asked Real America’s Voice, “Do you think [Colombian President Gustavo Petro] really cares about the United States when this makes in one day 7,000 people paying 500, 300, 800 [dollars]? Of course, he makes more money with the cartels, the cartels in Sinaloa than all the power the United States might give him.”
  • He agreed that immigration “is being weaponized “against the U.S. and the Biden administration, adding that Mexico is “ganging up” with other countries to demand money from the U.S.

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US influence diminishing; China fills the void in Latin America

Revelations 6:3-4 “when he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” 4 And out came another horse, bright red. Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people should slay one another, and he was given a great sword.

Important Takeaways:

  • Under Biden, U.S. Pushed Further Back in Latin America
  • “… U.S. influence has been diminishing in the continent.” — Martha Bárcena, former Mexican ambassador to the United States, The New York Times, June 9, 2022.
  • The odds of Biden’s new plan winning over Latin American countries — where China has already massively invested in building roads, railways, harbors, bridges and a host of other infrastructure and communications projects, with no questions asked on the environment, climate or “inclusivity” — are probably low. Even Biden administration officials do not seem to harbor any illusions about the new plan’s ability to change facts on the ground….
  • China also has another advantage: No regard for human rights or democracy. It is more than happy to invest in and trade with authoritarian dictatorships like itself.
  • “The U.S. is losing Latin America to China without putting up a fight, Ecuador’s ambassador to Washington told Axios.”

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Twenty Latin American Countries Have Joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative

Important Takeaways:

  • While the US Wasn’t Looking, China Became the Dominant Power in Latin America, Right on Our Doorstep
  • Latin America took on a new trading partner: China. The region has also begun to shift in an anti-American direction, creating a big strategic problem for the United States.
  • Evan Ellis, a Latin American expert at the U.S. Army War College, Twenty Latin American nations have joined China’s Belt and Road initiative, in which China invests in a nation’s infrastructure, like the new container port China is building for Peru at the Port of Chancay.
  • China will also be supplying nations with civilian nuclear technology, helping them develop space programs, and providing them with Chinese 5G technology that experts have warned is a surveillance tool of the Chinese military.
  • China is establishing a growing number of Confucius Institutes in the region, which are school programs that teach young people Chinese language and culture and push Chinese government propaganda.
  • Ellis said China is also cultivating military ties here which it could use in any future conflict with the United States.
  • “If war ever broke out over Taiwan, they would probably not make it a war that was fought just in Asia, but they would have ways of thinking about how to use operations in the hemisphere,” Ellis warned. “It’s entirely possible that there would be certain anti-US states in the region that might welcome China in.”

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Chile lawmakers knock down bill to ease abortion rules

By Fabian Cambero

SANTIAGO (Reuters) – Chile’s lower Chamber of Deputies rejected a bill on Tuesday that sought to expand legal access for women to get abortions, legislation that was opposed by the South American country’s center-right government.

At the end of September, legislators in the chamber voted in favor of studying and debating the bill, that proposed legalizing termination of pregnancy up to 14 weeks.

Chile in 2017 legalized abortion for women under conditions where their life was in danger, a fetus was unviable or when a pregnancy had resulted from rape.

“The Chamber rejected a motion that modifies the Penal Code, to decriminalize consensual abortion by women within the first 14 weeks of pregnancy. The project is shelved,” the lower chamber posted on Twitter after the vote.

Deputy Maya Fernández, who had promoted the bill, criticized the rejection and said it would push women into more risky illegal abortions.

“Many still prefer that there be clandestine abortions where women are subjected to inhumane conditions,” she wrote on Twitter.

A number of countries around conservative Latin America have taken steps to decriminalize abortion, including Argentina last year and Mexico, where the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in September that penalizing abortion is unconstitutional.

(Reporting by Fabián Andrés Cambero; Editing by Adam Jourdan and David Gregorio)

Latin America’s resurgent left and Caribbean spurn U.S. policy on Cuba

By Sarah Marsh

HAVANA (Reuters) – The United States doubled down on its tough stance and sanctions on Cuba after historic protests in the Communist-run island last month and said it would seek to support protesters.

But many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, a region which is still scarred by Washington’s backing of coups during the Cold War and has shifted leftwards in recent years, are asking it to back off instead.

President Joe Biden branded Cuba a “failed state” in the wake of the July 11-12 protests over an economic crisis and curbs on freedoms. His administration imposed new sanctions on those who cracked down on protesters and promised the politically important Cuban-American community more actions were coming, like efforts to help Cubans circumvent “censorship”.

While the fresh sanctions are largely symbolic, they suggest a return to a period of détente under former President Barack Obama is not forthcoming.

The right-wing governments of Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Honduras joined the United States last week in issuing a statement condemning mass arrests and calling for full restoration of disrupted internet access.

Yet only 20 foreign ministers worldwide joined in signing the letter, signaling how relatively isolated Washington is on its Cuba policy, analysts said. Even U.S. allies like Canada who have condemned the Cuban crackdown and supported protesters’ right to freedom of expression did not sign.

Meanwhile, Cuba’s leftist allies in Latin America and fellow Caribbean island nations have focused their reaction on the contribution of the U.S. embargo to the country’s current humanitarian crisis, urging Washington to lift sanctions. Mexico, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Bolivia have sent aid.

Some countries in the region have also warned against U.S. meddling in Cuba’s domestic matters.

These regional divisions came to the fore last week when the Organization of American States had to postpone a meeting on the human rights situation in Cuba due to objections by more than a dozen member states.

“Any discussion could only satisfy political hawks with an eye on U.S. mid-term elections where winning South Florida with the backing of Cuban exiles would be a prize,” wrote Antigua and Barbuda’s ambassador to the OAS, Ronald Sanders, in a column published on digital platform Caribbean News Global.

“The task of the OAS should be to promote peaceful and cooperative relations in the hemisphere, not to feed division and conflict.”

He had sent a letter on behalf of 13 countries from the Caribbean Community or CARICOM – which though small, represents a significant voting block in the OAS – urging the body to reconsider the “unproductive” meeting, while other countries sent similar missives.

REJECTION OF OAS, FOREIGN MEDDLING

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said last month the OAS should be replaced “by a body that is truly autonomous, not anybody’s lackey”, sentiments echoed by Argentinian President Alberto Fernandez.

He also said he thought Biden must make a decision about the embargo against Cuba given that “almost all countries of the world” are against it, while Fernandez said it was up to no other country to decide what Cubans should do.

Mexico, Argentina and Bolivia all shifted left in recent years, while Peru last month voted in a socialist leader and Chile and Brazil appear poised to move to the left in elections due this year and next.

“We appreciate countries that defended the Latin American and Caribbean dignity,” said Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez, who has accused U.S.-backed counterrevolutionaries of being behind the protests following years of open U.S. funding of democracy programs on the island.

The Chair of the OAS Permanent Council described the objections to the Cuba meeting as particularly unusual.

A U.S. State Department spokesperson said it was “deeply disappointed” the OAS meeting did not take place, adding: “The people of the Americas have a right to hear from the Inter-American Commission on Human rights about the situation in Cuba”.

“We will continue to work within the OAS to press for democracy and human rights in Cuba and throughout the Americas and are confident this informational meeting will indeed take place in the coming days.”

William LeoGrande, a professor of government at American University in Washington, said the problem was the OAS had under Secretary-General Luis Almagro “adopted a strident partisan stance totally aligned with U.S. policy”.

Biden was inheriting a regional foreign policy from former U.S. President Donald Trump focused mainly on Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela, that had alienated much of Latin America, said LeoGrande, pointing out the Latin barometer opinion poll showed a sharp decline in the image of the United States.

The OAS General Secretariat declined to comment while the State Department spokesperson said “Almagro’s leadership in supporting democracy and respect for human rights in the Americas” had returned the OAS to its original purpose.

Biden, a Democrat, had vowed during his presidential campaign to ease some of the sanctions on Cuba tightened by his predecessor Donald Trump, a Republican, raising hopes of a return to the Obama-era détente.

But analysts say the protests have complicated his leeway to do so, especially after he made a poorer-than-expected showing with voters in south Florida’s anti-communist Cuban-American community, which backed Trump’s tough policies toward Havana and helped him win the presidential election battleground state.

The Democratic National Committee last week launched a digital ad campaign in Florida highlighting Biden’s “commitment to the Cuban people and condemnation of communism as a failed system.”

(Reporting by Sarah Marsh; Additional Reporting by Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Alistair Bell)

COVID-19 cases worsen in Latin America, no end in sight – health agency

By Anthony Boadle

BRASILIA (Reuters) -Cases of COVID-19 may be declining in North America but in most of Latin America and the Caribbean the end to the coronavirus pandemic “remains a distant future,” the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said on Wednesday.

While infections in the United States, Canada and Mexico are falling, in Latin America and the Caribbean cases are rising and vaccination is lagging badly. Only one in ten people have been fully vaccinated, which PAHO director Carissa Etienne called “an unacceptable situation.”

“While we are seeing some reprieve from the virus in countries in the Northern Hemisphere, for most countries in our region, the end remains a distant future,” she said.

Noting that the hurricane season in the Caribbean is arriving at a time when outbreaks are worsening, Etienne urged countries to outfit hospitals and expand shelters to reduce the potential for transmission. Social distancing and proper ventilation become difficult during storms, she said.

The highly transmissible Delta variant has already been detected in a dozen countries in the Americas, but so far community transmission has been limited, said PAHO viral disease advisor Jairo Mendez.

However, it has been found in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Peru, the United States and Mexico, where it has spread in Mexico City, according to PAHO.

Given the presence of such variants, countries in the region should step up vigilance and consider the need to limit travel or even close borders, PAHO health emergencies director Ciro Ugarte said.

According to a Reuters tally, there have been at least 37,441,000 reported infections and 1,272,000 confirmed deaths caused by COVID-19 in Latin America and the Caribbean so far, one third more than in Asia and Africa combined.

(Reporting by Anthony BoadleEditing by Sonya Hepinstall)

Latin America’s pandemic tragedy as death toll nears one million

By Anthony Marina

PISCO, Peru (Reuters) -Hellen Ñañez has suffered enough tragedy for a lifetime. The Peruvian 28-year-old mother has mourned the death of 13 close relatives since the pandemic struck last year: uncles, cousins, a grandfather. Now her dad is fighting for his life.

On a recent day in a dusty cemetery in the Pacific port town of Pisco, Ñañez visited the graves of relatives lost to COVID-19.

“The truth is, I don’t have any more tears,” said Ñañez, who dropped out of studying psychology to work and help pay her father’s medical bills. “This is taking away our family. It’s taking away our dreams, our tranquility and stability.”

Ñañez’s story is a grim reflection of the tragedy unfolding in Latin America, a resource-rich but politically volatile region of some 650 million people stretching from Mexico to the near-Antarctic southern tips of Chile and Argentina.

The region has recorded 958,023 coronavirus-related fatalities, a Reuters tally shows, some 28% of the global death toll. It is set to hit the 1 million mark this month, which will make it the second region to do so after Europe.

But unlike wealthier Europe and North America, Latin American nations have lacked the financial firepower to keep people from sliding deep into poverty; underfunded healthcare systems have strained and inoculation programs have stalled.

Regional leaders from Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro to Argentina’s Alberto Fernandez and Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador have come under fire for their handling of the pandemic, while a string of health ministers have been fired.

“We Peruvians are dying, Mr. President. We are dying every day,” Miriam Mota, a relative of a coronavirus patient in Lima told Reuters, beseeching the country’s leader, Francisco Sagasti, to do more to help bring the crisis under control.

“There are no vaccines. There are no intensive care beds. There are no medicines. Please, for humanity’s sake, help us!”

Peru has officially confirmed 1.85 million COVID-19 cases and some 64,000 deaths, but that toll could be three times as high in reality, experts say. The country’s national death register has linked 171,000 deaths to the virus.

‘PEOPLE ARE FED UP’

Latin America’s crisis has been driven by regional juggernaut Brazil, which has recorded the most deaths globally after the United States and where right-wing President Bolsonaro has long railed against lockdown measures and backed unproven cures.

The emergence of virus mutations in the country, including the more transmissible P1 variant, has been linked to the severity of Brazil’s outbreak. It has also driven surges in infections in neighboring countries, including Uruguay and Bolivia.

Now there are signs that the pandemic, which has torn through regional economies and driven a spike in poverty, will have a longer-term ripple effect, stoking unrest, rattling industries and driving voters at the polls.

Colombia has been roiled by deadly protests over a now-shelved tax reform and poverty; Chile is moving towards a sharp tax hike on copper miners; Peru’s polarized presidential election race is being led by a socialist teacher who is a political outsider.

“People are fed up and obviously tired of everything that has happened lately,” Paula Velez said in front of a burned-out police station in Colombian capital Bogota, set on fire in the protests.

‘I DON’T WANT TO LOSE HIM’

Public health experts say Latin America has suffered an outsized hit from the pandemic, both in terms of health and growth, rattling fragile economies with high debt levels, steep inequality and where many work in less secure informal jobs.

Unlike North America, Europe or Asia, the region has also lacked the high-tech infrastructure to rapidly develop or manufacture vaccines.

A deal to produce the Oxford University-AstraZeneca Plc COVID-19 vaccine by firms in Argentina and Mexico has been stalled by manufacturing hold-ups, and many Latin American countries are reliant on insufficient supplies of Chinese and Russian vaccines.

A cottage industry has developed for wealthier Latin Americans to travel to Florida and Texas to get their shots. But for the less affluent, that is not an option.

“I have been looking for work for a year and a half and I can’t wait for my vaccine,” said Rio de Janeiro resident Marco Antonio Pinto, who like others in the city was disappointed last week when an immunization center quickly ran out of vaccines.

“They are playing with the people, thinking that we are animals. We aren’t animals: we are human beings. We pay taxes. We pay for everything,” he said.

Back in Peru, Ñañez is now fighting to save the life of her father, who has been in the intensive care unit of a hospital for more than two weeks, receiving medicine to reduce the ravages of the disease and on a mechanical respirator.

Ñañez, who has a two-year-old child, has turned to making soap at home and selling it on the street or in shops in Pisco, a coastal town set amid arid desert landscapes.

She said her bank loans had run dry and the family had incurred enormous debts of some 100,000 soles ($26,500) to buy medicines, medical oxygen – and funeral expenses. While hope was low, she was determined to battle for her dad.

“I’m not going to lose him. I don’t want to lose anyone else. My dad can’t leave me,” Ñañez said, sobbing, outside the hospital where she has come to check on the health of her father, who is in a coma.

“I have been standing here for 17 days in front of the hospital and I know that he is going to make it. I do not think that life can be so unfair if it has taken so much from me and now it also wants to take away my father.”

(Reporting by Anthony Marina in Pisco; Additional reporting by by Herbert Villarraga and Javier Andres Rojas in Bogota, Enrique Mandujano in Lima and Sergio Queiroz in Rio de Janeiro; Writing by Marco Aquino and Adam Jourdan; Editing by Adam Jourdan and Rosalba O’Brien)

Brazilian firm to produce Russian vaccine without regulatory approval

BRASILIA (Reuters) – The Brazilian pharmaceutical company that plans to produce Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine will start making it next week even before health regulator Anvisa gives approval for use in Brazil, the company’s chief executive said on Friday.

União Quimica’s facility in São Paulo has been certified by Anvisa for good production practices and the vaccine will be made for export to countries that have approved it, said CEO and founder Fernando Marques.

“We intend to start production next week with a view to export,” Marques said. He said Sputnik V will not be used in Brazil until it is approved, but neighboring Latin American countries have approved the vaccine and want deliveries.

Anvisa last week held off approving imports of Sputnik V sought by Brazilian state governors amid a second wave of the virus that has killed more than 415,000 Brazilians.

In a setback for the Russian vaccine, the regulator’s technical staff warned of “flaws” in the development and clinical testing of Sputnik, said the data presented on the vaccine’s safety and efficacy was incomplete.

Marques on Friday told a Senate commission on COVID-19 that União Quimica expects to receive a batch of active ingredient from Moscow next week to start making the vaccine for export at its plant near São Paulo’s Guarulhos airport.

“So, the situation today is this: we will start production, obviously when we receive the active ingredient, and we will wait for the registration to make the local production available for use in Brazil,” he told senators.

The Russian Direct Investment Fund that is marketing Sputnik V developed by Russia’s Gamaleya Research Institute has plans to supply the vaccine to Latin American countries from Brazil.

(Reporting by Anthony Boadle; editing by Grant McCool)

Brazil’s P1 coronavirus variant mutating, may become more dangerous: study

By Pedro Fonseca

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – Brazil’s P1 coronavirus variant, behind a deadly COVID-19 surge in the Latin American country that has raised international alarm, is mutating in ways that could make it better able to evade antibodies, according to scientists studying the virus.

Research conducted by the public health institute Fiocruz into the variants circulating in Brazil found mutations in the spike region of the virus that is used to enter and infect cells.

Those changes, the scientists said, could make the virus more resistant to vaccines – which target the spike protein – with potentially grave implications for the severity of the outbreak in Latin America’s most populous nation.

“We believe it’s another escape mechanism the virus is creating to evade the response of antibodies,” said Felipe Naveca, one of the authors of the study and part of Fiocruz in the Amazon city of Manaus, where the P1 variant is believed to have originated.

Naveca said the changes appeared to be similar to the mutations seen in the even more aggressive South African variant, against which studies have shown some vaccines have substantially reduced efficacy.

“This is particularly worrying because the virus is continuing to accelerate in its evolution,” he added.

Studies have shown the P1 variant to be as much as 2.5 times more contagious than the original coronavirus and more resistant to antibodies.

On Tuesday, France suspended all flights to and from Brazil in a bid to prevent the variant’s spread as Latin America’s largest economy becomes increasingly isolated.

The variant, which has quickly become dominant in Brazil, is thought to be a large factor behind a massive second wave that has brought the country’s death toll to over 350,000 – the second highest in the world behind the United States.

Brazil’s outbreak is also increasingly affecting younger people, with hospital data showing that in March more than half of all patients in intensive care were aged 40 or younger.

For Ester Sabino, a scientist at the faculty of medicine of the University of Sao Paulo who led the first genome sequencing of the coronavirus in Brazil, the mutations of the P1 variant are not surprising given the fast pace of transmission.

“If you have a high level of transmission, like you have in Brazil at the moment, your risk of new mutations and variants increases,” she said.

So far vaccines, such as those developed by AstraZeneca and China’s Sinovac, have proven effective against the Brazilian variant but Sabino said further mutations could put that at risk.

“It’s a real possibility,” she said.

(Reporting by Pedro Fonseca, writing by Stephen Eisenhammer; Editing by Daniel Flynn and Steve Orlofsky)