By JOSE MONTEROJO
The inter-imperialist rivalry in which the dominant imperialist powers (primarily the United States and China) attempt to reestablish social/political control and profitable capital accumulation is re-shaping Latin America’s political, social, and economic realities. The drive to reestablish profitability across the world is deepening Latin America’s dependency on imperialist powers, creating social conditions that give birth to far-right movements, working-class rebellions, and a new wave of reformist or “pink-tide” governments.
Across Latin America, the imperialist powers are increasing Latin America’s role as supplier of cheaply priced raw materials and importer of manufactured and technological products at a great human and environmental cost. While historically the U.S. and Europe have been the primary exploiters of the continent’s resources, China’s emergence as a rising imperialist power has motivated it to expand to Latin America to meet its growing energy and food requirements. Today, China has become the largest trading partner across South America, including in the region’s largest economies, such as Brazil and Argentina—with significant inroads in Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico. This has displaced the United States in that role as the U.S. becomes further enmeshed in conflicts in Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific.
China’s relationship to Latin America has evolved over the last 15 or so years. After its admission into the World Trade Organization in 2001, China accelerated its commercial relationship with the continent by utilizing Latin America as a market for its cheaply manufactured goods and as a source of energy and food to feed its growing domestic market. In these years, China began to make inroads into the South American agricultural, petroleum, and energy sectors. The flood of Chinese products in places like Mexico, for example, played an important role in displacing smaller, local capitalists in a process of capital accumulation and centralization, which continues to this day.
In 2008, China published a strategic plan aimed at expanding its economic power across the world. Thus began China’s lending spree throughout the semi-colonies, offering cheaper loans in exchange for raw materials, where the dominant financial institutions, such as the IMF, refused to do so or offered loans under conditions of drastic structural readjustments. The global economic crisis starting in 2008 made Chinese loans attractive to deeply indebted countries in Latin America, such as Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuel a, with the latter now China’s largest debtor. Economic crises and the Covid-19 pandemic have since made it difficult for these semi-colonies to repay these loans. And around 2013, China began to develop its now infamous mega-infrastructure projects, including the construction of ports, hydroelectric dams, and railways.
Since around 2017, however, China has changed its approach. Rather than large infrastructure projects and loans, it is moving towards smaller investments with faster returns in so-called green technology, artificial intelligence, and telecommunications, both at the heart of the imperialist rivalry with the United States. In the case of Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, Chinese electric vehicle corporations such as BYD, Geely, and Stellantis are increasing investments in raw materials and industrial EV production, seeking to utilize these nations as key footholds from which it can access broader EV markets across the Western Hemisphere, while taking advantage of U.S. disinvestment across the region. One of China’s current infrastructure projects to complement and support these investments is a port in Chancay, Perú , slated to become the South American Pacific’s largest port and in which China will own the majority of shares.
In the United States, the CHIPS act and Inflation Reduction Acts implemented by the Biden administration is a U.S. attempt at developing a domestic technological and energy system separate from China. This policy places greater importance on Latin American countries such as Mexico, which has become the focus for “nearshoring,” a term used to describe the move by U.S. industrial corporations to Mexico due to Mexico’s strategic location and greater profitability. The U.S. government, for instance, has considered Mexico, Costa Rica, and Panama as potential sites for production and distribution of semiconductor technology, although its emphasis is still on developing a national semiconductor base within the U.S. Brazil is the only country in Latin America with a significant semiconductor manuacturing facilities and is looking to China for further investment in this area.
U.S. imperialism views China’s dramatic investment in Latin America with concern. It considers China’s infrastructure—from its ports, railways, to satellite systems—as threats to U.S. national security and its economic growth as a challenge to U.S. capital. American imperialism uses various tools at its disposal to check China’s advance; in Ecuador, for example, the U.S. promised to provide credit to pay off Ecuador’s debt with China in exchange for the Ecuadorian government’s rejection of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei from doing business in the country. In the case of Mexico, the Biden regime—hoping to grow an American industrial base—forced Mexican officials to deny Chinese EV companies an industrial foothold in the country, which, the U.S. says, China uses to evade steep U.S. tariffs on Chinese products.
Besides maneuvers to counter Chinese growth—which the U.S. is ultimately unable to stem—American imperialism has proposed its own economic projects with Latin America in response to the BRI’s encompassing of 20 Latin American nations. Trump attempted as such with América Crece and Biden with America’s Partnership for Economic Prosperity , both of which have gone nowhere as China continues to develop closer economic ties with Latin American bourgeoisies.
The imperialist drive for power and profit in Latin America is causing structural changes that continue to devastate workers’ living conditions, political freedoms, and ecological habitats. The social crises resulting from growing precarity and violence have produced a polarization in society between far-right movements and parties and left-wing mobilizations and reformist parties. A case in point is the darling of the far right around the world, Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s recently reelected president. His first term was marked by the declaration of a still-in-force state of emergency, the imprisonment of dozens of thousands of Salvadorans—most of whom cannot be verified as members of criminal gangs—the construction of massive prisons, and the curtailing of democratic and political freedoms for activists and the media. At his inauguration in the June of 2024—for which Bukele had to manipulate his country’s constitution—far-right figures such as Tucker Carlson (formerly from Fox News), Donald Trump Jr., Javier Milei from Argentina, and Florida Senator Matt Gaetz appeared.
These figures represent a cross-section of the international far-right wing of the bourgeoisie, who are responding to the crisis that capitalism produces with the most reactionary social, economic, and political projects, including authoritarian measures that eschew bourgeois democratic norms, such as the state of emergencies in El Salvador and Ecuador; anti-women and LGBTQIA+ legislation; massive cuts to public services, as under Milei in Argentina; and intensified fossil fuel exploitation, as Donald Trump joyously announced at his recent rally in Nevada. The rise of the far right across the European Union elections demonstrates a pattern of growth that represents a danger to workers, the oppressed, and the organizations of our class.
On the other hand, the conditions of exploitation and barbarism produced by capitalism’s crisis also generate resistance and rebellion among Latin America’s oppressed. The waves of uprisings in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru express a left-wing polarization that points towards the possibility of democratic and socialist revolutions aimed not only at challenging the immediate conditions of repression and poverty but also the structural realities of imperialist domination. These rebellions engaged millions of Latin Americans in intense conflict with their oppressors, created many independent organizations of the working class, and inspired workers around the world.
The lack of a revolutionary political leadership, however, has allowed reformist parties to channel these rebellions into the bourgeois state through what Marxists call the “democratic reaction,” where the bourgeoisies in power save themselves by offering legislative and electoral routes to redress the masses demands in order to avoid a revolutionary situation from developing. In Chile and Colombia, for instance, nationwide rebellions calling for the ouster of Sebastián Piñera and Ivan Duque, respectively, were both violently repressed and successfully dismantled via reformist parties’ promises of electoral reform.
Gustavo Petro and Gabriel Boric, Colombia’s and Chile’s new “progressive” regimes, use leftist and nationalist rhetoric but are in reality unable to change the basic reality Latin Americans face. Whereas the earlier wave of “socialist” governments like those of Chávez in Venezuela and Morales in Bolivia offered significant concessions to workers and the poor via subsidies resulting from high commodity prices, economic crises around the world have foreclosed this possibility for these newer regimes. Claudia Sheinmbaum’s victory i n Mexico’s presidential elections has reignited excitement throughout the reformist left, but her nationalist and feminist rhetoric can do little—as with her predecessor, López Obrador (“AMLO”)—to change Mexico’s exploitation by foreign capital; wanton narco, politica,l and social violence; and the inequality and poverty that mark the nation.
While Mexican and Brazilian capitalism (Latin America’s two largest economies) live through a moment of relative social peace in relation to other countries, this is but a transitional period that the bourgeoisie cannot maintain indefinitely. In Mexico, AMLO’s Keynesian policies did improve conditions for the poorest half of the Mexican population while Lula’s relatively new mandate has yet to yield comparable figures. Both bourgeoisies, however, have benefitted from the influx of Chinese capital because they’ve been able to leverage this against American capital, momentarily strengthening their national currencies and growing a middle class tied to Chinese and U.S. investments in technology and resource extraction. The decades-long downward trend in capitalist profitability across the world, combined with the intensified exploitation and austerity that these governments will continue to apply, augur new periods of political instability, polarization, and revolution.
As socialists in the heartland of imperialism, Workers’ Voice stands with the struggles of workers, the oppressed, and the Indigenous people across Latin America, who face an onslaught of poverty, instability, repression, and environmental degradation. We place no faith in pink-tide regimes, which cloak their states’ exploitative nature with leftist rhetoric to placate the revolutionary impulses of the working masses. We support the ongoing fights against austerity in Argentina, environmental destruction in Panama, narco-capitalist violence in Mexico, etc.
China’s increasing presence in Latin America does not make us rejoice; we recognize the shifting dynamics towards intensified rivalry between Chinese and U.S. imperialism but do not take the side of Chinese imperialism because it does not, as some reformist parties want us to believe, represent a progressive solution for the semi-colonial world. China is a new colonizer with a different style and rhetoric. Lastly, we fight for an end to the colonial foreign debt that shackles Latin America’s economies and for the decriminalization of addictive drugs—which could put an end to the scourge of narco violence for millions of Latin Americans.
