Brazil could help US stem the Chinese tide in South America

by Joel Gehrke
| December 28, 2018 03:13 PM





Brazilian President-elect Jair Bolsonaro could stem the rising tide of Chinese influence in South America, a senior State Department official suggested Friday.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will attend Bolsonaro’s inauguration this weekend, a trip that will permit high-level meetings between the top American diplomat and the only major emerging economy in the Western Hemisphere. Brazil’s membership in an economic blocwith China and Russia lends significance to the meetings, as both U.S. rivals have made recent in-roads into Latin America.That rebuke of China resonates with Bolsonaro’s complaints about the leading communist power, which has used infrastructure loans to gain sovereignty over strategically significant territory in poor countries.

“The Chinese are not buying in Brazil,” Bolsonaro said throughout his campaign. “They are buying Brazil.”
That kind of language from the developing nation’s incoming president is a rhetorical windfall for the United States, which has established an anti-propaganda team focused in part to warn impoverished countries about China’s “treasury run empire build,” asPompeo has put it.

“Brazil’s relationship with China are a sovereign decision of Brazil,” the senior State Department official told reporters on condition of anonymity. “We just want to be sure that there is in fact a level playing field and that when Chinese investors come that they do things that end up being in the interests of the country in which they were investing.”

“They would be likely to discuss China and China’s predatory trade and lending practices, which the Bolsonaro administration or President-elect Bolsonaro has indicated run counter to Brazil’s sovereignty in some cases,” the senior State Department official said of Pompeo’s upcoming trip. “I think there’ll be a broad conversation about that, but at the end of the day, decisions about investment are sovereign decisions of Brazil.”
China has made significant progress in the Western Hemisphere over the last year, using the potential for economic investment to induce nations to cut ties with Taiwan and establish relations with Beijing instead. A flurry of of diplomatic wins over Taiwan, which the mainland Chinese government regards as a breakaway province, caused “grave concern” among President Trump’s team andprompted a trio of top U.S. diplomats deployed to Central America to meet in Washington.
While Pompeo’s team stressed Bolsonaro’s independence in such matters, but the hope of a rebuff for China from a major economic partner was obvious. “We have noted some of the president-elect’s comments about his concern about the role of China in Brazil, and that is a conversation that we’re having — the role of China in the Western Hemisphere — that we’ve had in Panama, that we have with Canada, that we have with Mexico,” the official said.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/p...-south-america