China Behind Super Highway That Targets US With Mass Migration, Economic Warfare

Mike Howell, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, believes China’s economic development in the region threatens America’s influence and security.

“If China displaces the U.S. in the Western hemisphere as the dominant economic power, then we lose our leverage,” Mr. Howell, formerly an attorney with the Department of Homeland Security, told The Epoch Times.

China is encircling the United States with infrastructure in Latin America and the Caribbean, Mr. Howell said.

“It’s like a boa constrictor that’s tightening and tightening around the United States,” he said.

In the 2019 book, “China’s Belt and Road and Panama: A Strategic and Prospective Scenario between the Americas and China,” author Eddie Tapiero touts the rise of China’s BRI in utopian terms.

Mr. Tapiero, a Panamanian professor and international economist who wrote his book after a BRI meeting in China, called the initiative a catalyst for “global public good,” envisioning a world where “borders no longer exist, nor do countries.”

The book includes a BRI scenario with a map titled “Globalized Belt and Road,” showing Panama and its canal connected to Colombia by rail through the Darién Gap.

On the Colombian side of the Darién Gap, Chinese companies are working to build highways and ports.

Roadwork near the Pan American Highway in Turbo is part of the “Autopistas al Mar 2” highway project.

The project will connect Colombia’s second-largest city of Medellín to ports in Urabá, including Turbo, where the Pan American Highway ends.

The project was delayed until late 2019, when the Chinese-led consortium obtained the necessary loans from the China Development Bank.

Mr. Tapiero sees Panama, bookended by Colombia and Costa Rica, as a central hub in Latin America for the BRI. He suggests the United States could “reduce geopolitical uncertainty” if it, too, joins the BRI.

His globalized BRI map also showed rail routes slicing through the United States, to significant markets on America’s east and west coasts.

Infrastructure “connectivity” through air, land, and sea is a central theme of the book, which is playing out in Panama.

The bridges into the Darién are part of a contract for the rehabilitation, improvement, and maintenance of the East Pan-American Highway.

It was awarded to Intervial Chile, S.A. under a public-private partnership with the government of Panama, according to government documents.

The investment for the project stands at more than $262 million as part of Panama’s Performance Standards Maintenance Program, which aims to promote agricultural, commercial, and tourist development.

The canal was returned to Panama in 1999 under a treaty brokered in the 1970s with President Jimmy Carter.

The Darién Gap by land is similar to the Panama Canal by sea as a choke point, which holds military and economic value.

China’s attempt to minimize or control the canal’s strategic importance to the United States could be significant should a conflict break out over Taiwan in terms of China’s ability to shut down sea lanes, said Andrés Martínez-Fernández, the Heritage Foundation’s senior policy analyst for Latin America.

“That’s a very concerning issue in particular,” he told The Epoch Times.

Mr. Martinez-Fernandez noted that Chinese companies have been busy building infrastructure on either end of the U.S.–built Panama Canal.

The canal has become a point of tension between China and the United States, which has retained the right to enforce operational neutrality on the Panama Canal.

The Panama Canal Authority controls the administration and maintenance of the waterway’s resources and security, independent of the Panamanian government.

Chinese businesses invested heavily in the canal zone under former Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela, but projects have been dropped or limited under the current administration of President Laurentino Cortizo.

Two of Panama’s five principal ports are controlled by China through Hong Kong-based Hutchison, with one at Balboa on the Pacific side and another at Cristobal on the Atlantic side, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.

Work conducted by Chinese companies on the enormous Amador Pacific Coast cruise terminal is nearing completion.

These projects followed the China-based Landbridge striking a $900 million deal in 2016 to control Margarita Island, Panama’s largest port on the Atlantic side, to build a deepwater port.

The state-owned China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) is building the port for mega-ships. CCCC was involved in constructing China’s man-made islands in the disputed South China Sea and is part of the China Harbor Engineering Company (CHEC).

In 2018, a Chinese consortium headed by CHEC and CCCC was awarded a $1.4 billion contract for the Canal’s fourth bridge.

In 2019, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned President Varela about state-owned Chinese businesses that engaged in “predatory economic activity.”

Criticism has grown that China’s BRI is a debt trap plagued by waste and questionable loan repayment tactics. Detractors claim it allows China to control or own projects when governments cannot repay their loans.

China’s growing influence in Latin America should not be underestimated, Mr. Martinez-Fernandez said.

“So what happens in the Western Hemisphere, I would argue, has more direct impacts on the United States than in most parts of the world because of those direct ties on the avenues of migration, economy, and security,” he said.

Of the 31 nations in Central and South America, Panama was the first of 22 that have formally signed onto China’s BRI program, with Honduras being the latest.

“The Panama Canal—China has always wanted to control that,” Mr. Yu told The Epoch Times.

That’s because canals have both military and commercial significance, said Mr. Yu, a professor of East Asia and military and naval history at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

Beijing is also intent on controlling the Suez Canal and the Strait of Malacca between Indonesia and Singapore, he said.

Controlling sea routes has always been an obsession for China because of their dual value, he said.

In the past decade, a Chinese businessman explored the idea of cutting a canal through Nicaragua to bypass the one in Panama, an idea the United States abandoned in the early 1900s.

The United States favored digging the canal in Panama because the route was shorter and it avoided a string of active volcanoes hindering the Nicaraguan route.

Deepwater ports are also an integral part of the BRI.

Currently, China is backing the construction of a massive shipping port in Peru that military experts worry could serve as a base for warships.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is scheduled to visit Peru in the later half of 2024 to mark the completion of a $3.6 billion port near Chancay, which is financed, built, and owned by China or Chinese-backed companies.

Closer to home, Chinese companies with ties to the CCP are operating on America’s doorstep—in countries such as Canada, Mexico, Jamaica, Cuba, and the Bahamas.

Right above the U.S.-Canadian border, China and Vancouver’s former Premier Christy Clark signed a memorandum to build the Vancouver Logistics Park, originally dubbed the “World Commodity Trade Center.”

Phase one of the $190 million, 470,000-square-foot complex, billed as a BRI project, has been completed.

The deal was a joint venture between a Chinese state-sponsored company and a local development firm, according to trade publication Business Intelligence for BC.

The Canadian subsidiaries North America Commerce Valley Development Ltd. and Shing Kee Godown Holdings Ltd. are in partnership with local development firm Pollyco Group, according to the trade publication.

In Mexico, Chinese companies operate mines and provide 80 percent of Mexico’s telecommunications equipment. China’s CCCC is also building part of the Maya Train rail system across five states in Mexico.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico’s left-of-center president, has pushed the rail project that fits with the UN’s 2030 goals as a way of promoting social justice for impoverished areas.

In the Caribbean, China built a colossal embassy in the Bahamas, where the U.S. last had a permanent ambassador in 2011. Meanwhile, Chinese companies have poured billions into ports and roads  on the islands just 50 miles from the U.S. coast.

Trade and investments in sea, space, telecommunications, minerals, and energy between China and Latin American countries will match the U.S. by 2035, according to estimates from the U.S. State Department.

More troubling, China’s warships now make port visits to Venezuela, Cuba, Peru, and Chile, which are expected to mature into base agreements in 10 years.

Experts say that the U.S. needs to catch up to the challenge of Chinese influence.

At the G20 summit in 2023, the United States and its partners revealed an economic corridor linking India, the Middle East, and Europe.

Last November, President Joe Biden hosted 11 leaders from the Western Hemisphere at the first Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity Leaders’ Summit to discuss strengthening critical supply chains focusing on clean energy, semiconductors, and medical supplies.

Heads of state from Canada, Barbados, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, Mexico, and Panama attended the White House event.

The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and the Inter-American Development Bank will establish an innovative joint investment platform to channel billions of dollars in financing for sustainable infrastructure and critical economic sectors in the Americas.

The investments of the Americas Partnership Platform will help build modern ports, clean energy grids, and digital infrastructure, according to the White House.

Mr. Martinez-Fernandez said that while the program is a start, it lacks trade commitments and solid investments from the United States.

“That’s what regional leaders and partners are looking for,” he said.

“Certainly, for the level of risk that we’re seeing, the level of attention is not sufficient,” he said.