After a new summit with the closest neighbors of the United States, Chinese communist-party officials disclosed an "action plan for cooperation" with Latin American countries, which amounts to a "comprehensive" plan to control the region and threaten US interests, reports Washington Examiner.
A former member of State Department policy planning staff and research professor at the US Army War College, Evan Ellis, told the Washington Examiner, "The Chinese don't say 'We want to take over Latin America', but they clearly set out a multidimensional engagement strategy, which, if successful, would significantly expand their leverage and produce enormous intelligence concerns for the United States."
At a recent summit with countries from Latin America and the Caribbean, Chinese officials outlined their goals. Founded by Venezuela's late president Hugo Chavez in 2011, the intergovernmental forum aims to compete against the Organization of American States and challenge U.S. influence in Latin America. According to the report the platform now offers Chinese President Xi Jinping a chance to assemble a coalition of leftists and authoritarians favorable to Beijing.
In a statement to the Washington Examiner, Florida senator Marco Rubio, a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Select Committee, said that "The Chinese Communist Party and government are actively looking to strengthen their ties throughout the Western Hemisphere, in particular with anti-American elements. Beijing is seeking to surpass the United States in every sector, and we must take this threat seriously."
As Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega closed the Taiwanese Embassy earlier this month in support of a new relationship with Beijing, China's exploitation of ideological fault lines in Latin America came into sharp relief. This was after the OAS General Assembly rebuked him for presiding over elections that "were not free, fair, or transparent and had no democratic legitimacy" just weeks earlier.
Earlier a State Department spokesman said on December 9 that "The Ortega-Murillo regime has announced it has severed diplomatic relations and ended official contact with Taiwan, but the sham election on November 7 did not provide it with any mandate to remove Nicaragua from the family of American democracies."