We should fear, then embrace, Latin America. But not for the reasons you think

The U.S-Mexico border is America’s window to Latin America.

As we look through it today many of us see chaos – a mass of humanity or roughly 7,800 migrants a day – showing up at our doorstep and trying to cross over. That’s nearly five times the number it was five years ago.

Forty-one percent of Americans surveyed in March tell pollsters they worry “a great deal” about illegal immigration, the highest percentage since 2007, Gallup reports. Another 19% are worried “a fair amount.”

As leaders of North, South, Central American nations and the Caribbean meet this week in Los Angeles for the Ninth Summit of the Americas, expectations could not be lower. Many believe the host-nation United States will face-plant.

“The threat is not simply that this year’s summit will be a flop – yet another example of feckless U.S. policy toward Latin America,” wrote Christopher Sabatini, a Latin American expert, in Foreign Policy. “Rather, the real risk is that – after nearly three decades of summitry – this year’s event may be interpreted as a gravestone on U.S. influence in the region.”

We don't understand the Latin American threat

For decades the American people have viewed the world south of us as a constant irritant, pushing northward and putting pressure on our national sovereignty, wages, hospital emergency rooms and broader welfare net.

We often ignore that Latin America is a source of enormous economic bounty. Among the top five U.S. export markets to the Western Hemisphere were Mexico ($256.6 billion), Brazil ($42.9 billion), Chile ($15.7 billion) and Colombia ($14.7 billion), reports the Office of the United States Trade Representative.

Our anxiety about the border and human and drug smuggling often lead to policies to shutter our southern window and Katy bar the door. Our impulse is to build walls, beef up U.S. Border Patrol, deploy National Guard to the border, expand high-tech deterrents and alerts.

All to confront a threat in Latin America.

But Americans don’t understand the greater threat in Latin America, one far larger than our inability to control the human surge at the U.S.-Mexico border. It is potentially more destabilizing and grows more ominous by the day.

Our policy prescription to meet this new challenge requires not roadblocks and fences, but an approach completely counter to today’s impulse. We need to embrace Latin America as never before if we are going to ensure our own national security and the stability of our side of the world – the western hemisphere.

China is growing more belligerent

As the United States welcomes the region’s leadership to talks in one of our great international cities, this would be a good time to pivot.

The nations of the Americas come to Los Angeles this week with an expanded understanding of the world and how it might evolve in the near future. Authoritarian powers in Asia have shown their hand through multiple world crises over the last five years.

In China, Xi Jinping has consolidated power and hardened his control of a nation that grows more militaristic and expansionist. In 2020, China completed the authoritarian takeover of Hong Kong, as millions there protested and later submitted to their Communist overlords.

The Chinese government was slow to tell the world of an emergent and deadly virus that originated in one of its important trade cities – Wuhan – and perhaps in a government laboratory. They stonewalled inquiries into the origins of COVID-19 and were unwilling to meet the transparency standards of democracies even as the virus killed 6.2 million people worldwide.

Unbowed by its role in the pandemic, China became more belligerent and threatening to its neighbors with what came to be called “Wolf Warrior diplomacy,” named for a chest-thumping jingoistic film about Chinese military commandos. In the same month COVID-19 was revealed, a Chinese ambassador threatened Sweden, “We treat our friends with fine wine, but for our enemies we got shotguns.”

In February, China stood aside as Russia invaded its neighbor Ukraine, obliterating large cities with bombs and committing crimes against humanity through summary executions of civilians.

As most of the advanced world protested, the Chinese sat idle. Xi, had after all, just signed a pact with Russian President Vladimir Putin in opposition to the United States and the West – a “friendship” with “no limits.”

The democracies began to worry that China would invade Taiwan.

Latin America embraces China's investments

As the world has become alert to the gathering threat of China and Russia, it is time for us to start listening to the Pentagon brass who have been warning for years that the Chinese and Russians, but particularly the Chinese, have taken an intense interest in Latin America and have begun to pour strategic foundations throughout our southern neighborhood.

In less than 20 years (2002 to 2021), Chinese trade with Latin America has rocketed from $18 billion annually to $450 billion. “Today, China is the second-largest trading partner for Latin America as a whole and the biggest trading partner for Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay,” wrote Brian Winter, editor of Americas Quarterly, in Foreign Affairs.

“Throughout this dramatic rise, the Chinese have been welcomed by many as ‘the new gringos’ – a fresh-faced, alternative partner to the United States, free of the baggage accumulated over 200-plus years of often imperialist U.S. behavior.”

Gen. Laura Richardson, combatant commander of U.S. Southern Command, told a U.S. Senate panel that the “Chinese have 29 port projects” across the command, which includes Central America, South America and the Caribbean, reports U.S. Naval Institute News.

Twenty-one nations in the region have “signed up” for China’s Belt and Road infrastructure projects, Richardson said. Belt and Road projects are widely seen as a strategic expansion of Chinese power with possible dual military uses.

Adm. Craig Faller, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2021 that China used the COVID-19 pandemic, “to rapidly expand its ‘corrosive, insidious influence’ – from money laundering for transnational gangsters to using its own ships to illegally fish protected waters and benefit from illegal logging and mining,” U.S. Naval Institute News reported.

“... ‘I can’t stress enough the full-court press’ China has put on the Western Hemisphere by promoting itself as an effective vaccine distributor to combat the pandemic, underwriting 40 port expansions or developments, offering questionable loans and pressuring the few remaining countries who recognize Taiwan as an entity to drop diplomatic recognition of the island.”

Meanwhile, democracy is eroding in Latin America

If the U.S.-China rivalry were to become a “hotter conflict,” China could also leverage these strategically located ports to disrupt U.S. commercial and naval access in the Western Hemisphere, wrote Leland Lazarus and Ryan C. Berg, in Foreign Policy.

“In recent years, China has wielded its commercial might to retaliate against Australia for demanding an investigation into the origins of COVID-19, India for ongoing territorial disputes, and Lithuania for increasing ties with Taiwan.”

For their part, Latin Americans nations remain open to widening Chinese investment and influence.

“The idea we are hearing more now – that China poses more risks to us than other big powers – is not convincing to me,” Andrés Rebolledo, a Chilean trade diplomat, told the Christian Science Monitor.

“My advice for Chile and Latin America is the same. Be the sweethearts of everybody, but married to no one.”

Democracy is in decline in Latin America. Venezuela has collapsed. Mexico is slowly sliding away. A few other nations are following Cuba’s lead toward more authoritarian models. All of this has led to resistance to this week’s Summit of the Americas.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador refused to attend after the White House left Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua off the guest list.

That caught the attention of the Chinese, who responded with glee. The Chinese foreign ministry argued the Summit of the Americas should not “be reduced to a ‘Summit of the United States of America,’ ” adding: “Instead of benefiting Latin America . . . the U.S. has brought Latin America wanton exploitation, willful sanctions, inflation, political interference, regime change, assassination of politicians and even armed aggression,” reports the Financial Times in London.

U.S. must raise its game in Latin America

How does the U.S. get back into the game with Latin America? Our nation has broken with its troubled history in the region and begun to treat those south of us more as partners than as subordinates.

We need to work with those countries to reaffirm our commitment to democracy. The democracies in the Americas have on several occasions signed such declarations going back to the 1940s. Time to call on those old values at the Summit of the Americas.

The United States can point to its immigrants from the south to show that the people of the region vote with their feet for liberal democracy and free market economies. Ours is the most welcoming country in the world to immigrants, notes the U.S. State Department. More than a million people a year arrive from abroad to become permanent legal residents.

The nations of the Americas need to condemn what the Russians did to Ukraine, to affirm our commitment to democracy and to dissuade the Chinese from invading Taiwan.

With supply chains roiled by the pandemic and the aggressive moves of Asia’s authoritarian powers, we need to build upon what has already begun – to bring back more manufacturing to the hemisphere to create here shorter, more efficient, more robust supply lines.

We need to invest more in Latin America and help it recover from the pandemic, beginning with greater vaccine distribution.

None of us wants a New Cold War, but we are in a contest of great powers and we will need to again promote democracy heavily to ensure that our own democracy remains secure.

That doesn't begin with construction of a wall.

It starts by making common cause with our fellow democrats in Latin America.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist at The Arizona Republic. Reach him by email at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Latin America poses a threat worse than a 'border invasion'