China’s Quiet Quest to Dominate Latin America

For years, U.S. officials have fretted about Chinese megaprojects in Latin America. Successive administrations have, for example, sounded the alarm about Peru’s Chancay Port, which is controlled and operated by a Chinese shipping giant, and about the Chinese-built Coca Codo Sinclair Dam, in Ecuador. In response, Washington has issued diplomatic condemnations against Latin American officials, revoked visas, and even threatened to use force against the region’s governments.

It is easy to see why the United States is so worried about major infrastructure being built and operated by China. In the eyes of many U.S. officials, these projects are a way for Beijing to accumulate leverage over Latin American governments—a concern that Washington has voiced since 2017, when the first Trump administration’s National Security Strategy warned that China sought to “pull the region into its orbit through state-led investments and loans.”

But Washington is stressing about yesterday’s challenge. Beijing is no longer betting on multibillion-dollar megaprojects to improve its position in the Western Hemisphere. Instead, it is embedding itself in the region by fostering smaller, quieter endeavors, often at the municipal or provincial level. Chinese firms are developing lithium projects in multiple Argentine provinces. They operate every power distributor serving the Peruvian city of Lima. And they are providing gear to Latin American police officers in many municipalities across the region, as well as installing surveillance camera systems.

Individually, these actions might seem superficial. But in aggregate, they are making recipient states dependent on China. Beijing’s security provisions, for example, mean that plenty of Latin American cities and provinces now effectively rely on China for their law enforcement and emergency response infrastructure, and, in Lima’s case, electricity infrastructure. It is a dependence that many national politicians never intended and may not even have seen coming. They may not be aware of the potential risks associated with this level and type of dependence, nor prepared to manage the potential fallout.

These endeavors are not unique to Latin America. China is engaged in similar efforts in other parts of the developing world, as well. They are, after all, much cheaper than many of its earlier initiatives—and more difficult to identify. Beijing, in other words, is pioneering a kind of statecraft that privileges quiet, subnational capture over big, flashy projects.

SMALL BUT BEAUTIFUL

During much of the 2010s, Beijing poured billions of dollars into in Latin American infrastructure, such as ports, massive dams, and even a transcontinental railway meant to link Peru’s Pacific coast to Brazil’s Atlantic. (The railway was never constructed, but versions of it are still under discussion.) These investments came as part of China’s famous Belt and Road Initiative, in which it has spent enormous sums on megaprojects across the global South. In doing so, China hoped it could secure commodity supplies, open markets for Chinese firms, and then convert its economic weight into diplomatic alignment—including convincing countries that still recognized Taiwan to switch recognition to the mainland.

But starting in the early 2020s, China changed course, particularly in the Western Hemisphere. Big projects, it concluded, cost too much at a moment when the Chinese domestic economy was under strain, and drew too much geopolitical backlash. Instead, it opted to focus on what it calls “small but beautiful” endeavors. These are investments that do not have an imposing physical presence and are typically aimed at smaller national and subnational systems. Beijing itself applies this label narrowly: its 2025 white paper on Latin America reserves the term for small poverty-reduction projects. But the phrase is a useful lens for this newer kind of Chinese statecraft—one of bottom-up investments that compound into interdependence and leverage.

To see how important this model has become, simply follow the money—or at least the parts that can be counted. Traditional Belt and Road loans to the region have faded from nearly $25 billion in 2010 to an average of $1.3 billion a year. But judging by estimates that track deals firm-by-firm, Chinese companies still invested $8.5 billion in Latin America in 2024, down just a tenth from the year before—and that figure is likely an undercount. The difference is that this money now flows through commercial transactions rather than through sovereign loans from Beijing. Much of it manifests in Chinese firms acquiring existing assets, such as power distributors and mines, rather than the Chinese government spending on new megaproject construction. Other times, it still manifests as new hardware, but of a much smaller kind—such as policing gear. Because these deals are for items that investment statistics do not usually capture—equipment sales, training programs, donations, and maintenance contracts are procurement, not investment—they attract less notice. They are sometimes shrouded in confidentiality clauses, and often surface only when a local journalist finds the contract.

The Chinese government is still involved in this ecosystem, including, sometimes, through top-down directives. But its role can be more oblique. It often subsidizes its firms at home, which then go on to sell their wares to Latin American governments at low costs. As such sales and contracts pile up, China comes to recognize that the accumulated deals are strategic assets. Eventually, Beijing folds various commercial projects within a country into formal cooperation agreements with that state’s government. For example, in Argentina’s lithium-rich Jujuy Province, a research exchange between the two countries’ geological agencies grew into an explicit state partnership focused on surveying the province’s salt flats. Eventually, a Chinese company took a majority stake in a local lithium project.

China has worked its way into all sorts of local systems to build up its influence. Chinese firms, for example, have provided thousands of electric buses across cities in South America–a necessary addition in one of the world’s most urbanized regions. Chinese-made trains carry commuters on all three of Buenos Aires’ main electric rail lines. And perhaps most notably, China has been involved in providing internal security assistance. Safety is a major political issue in Latin America, where the homicide rate is around 20 per 100,000—three times the global average. Cartel and gang violence, cargo theft, and ransomware attacks loom large for most citizens, and so politicians repeatedly promise more action. China has offered itself as an affordable supplier of policing equipment.

Recipient countries often start by acquiring rudimentary provisions—donated anti-riot gear and armored vehicles for Bolivia’s armed forces, donated motorcycles for Caribbean police—each deal meeting the needs of officials short on equipment and under pressure to be seen as stopping crime. Eventually, the relationship progresses to more sophisticated items. In April 2025, for example, Rio de Janeiro’s governor flew to China and signed deals with the Chinese surveillance technology companies Hikvision and Dahua for more than 27,000 body and vehicle cameras. In the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from the U.S. city of El Paso, local officials bought 1,000 facial-recognition cameras from the same two vendors (both of which were then on the U.S. Federal Communication Commission’s prohibited list). By 2018, 62 percent of Argentina’s surveillance equipment imports came from China, compared to just five percent from the United States. Today, at least 35 Latin American cities use Chinese surveillance systems.

Once these deals are made, cooperation accelerates. Sometimes, it reaches the highest levels of government. Consider, for example, the development of ECU-911—Ecuador’s nationwide emergency response system. The project began in 2011, when Ecuador’s government contracted with CEIEC, a Chinese state-owned defense-electronics company, to create a surveillance network running on Huawei cameras. A $240 million China Development Bank loan financed the system, secured not by sovereign collateral but by an oil sales contract committing PetroEcuador, Ecuador’s state oil company, to ship 72,000 barrels a day to PetroChina over the system’s operating life. In time, the project eventually attracted high-level attention from Beijing. In 2016, Chinese leader Xi Jinping visited Ecuador, where he personally inaugurated a joint security laboratory at ECU-911’s headquarters. Beijing followed up by donating 10,000 AK-47s to the Ecuadorean armed forces. By early 2018, Chinese facial-recognition technology was in use at ECU-911 sites. And in 2024, Ecuador’s independent municipal and private cameras were routed into the network. What began as one contract became the backbone of Ecuador’s domestic security apparatus.

Finally, China has been training Latin America’s law enforcement officials. Argentine, Brazilian, Cuban, and Panamanian delegations have all studied at the China Criminal Investigation Police University in Shenyang. In September 2024, China’s public-security minister signed a training agreement with Nicaragua’s police director covering narcotics, cybercrime, and terrorism; previously, China had given Nicaragua equipment for riot control. The United States still trains more Latin American police officers than does Beijing. But unlike Washington’s courses, China’s are bundled with cameras, platforms, and judicial exchanges that make the rest of its architecture stick.

Most important for China, these initiatives attract relatively little attention. Most projects, after all, start small—a municipal equipment contract, a provincial memorandum, a maintenance agreement. They are, relatedly, relatively inexpensive for China. A camera contract, for example, costs a fraction of what a dam costs, in addition to earning little attention. As a result, a country’s national politicians may not even be aware that cities are steadily handing over more and more services to Chinese businesses. U.S. officials might not realize it, either. Beijing can thus make investment after investment almost undetected until, suddenly, it has built much of a state’s critical security infrastructure.

DURABLE BY DESIGN

Once China’s interlocking systems are in place, they are difficult to remove. This is deliberate. Over the course of its engagement with Latin America’s fickle democracies, Beijing learned that it needed a strategy that outlasts political cycles, as this one can. Once a city’s law-enforcement infrastructure is mostly made in China, its police and prosecutors have studied in Shenyang, and its courts have signed a cooperation framework with Beijing—as Venezuela’s did in 2023—the relationship acquires institutional memory and interpersonal ties. By cutting deals with regional officials, for instance, China builds durable political relationships that can quickly grow more valuable, should these politicians win higher office.

Moving away from Chinese systems is also financially difficult for recipients. A Latin American municipality that has inked multiple contracts with China and wants to diversify could probably find affordable, non-Chinese contractors for specific needs, like anti-riot equipment. But it is hard to move off integrated systems. It is also hard to find alternative suppliers for slightly more sophisticated items. China, for example, builds the world’s most economical and widely adopted surveillance systems. In the countries where it sells them, Chinese companies often drive domestic competitors out of business thanks to generous government subsidies. Chinese cameras are, in turn, often impossible to service without continued Chinese assistance because most camera designs that the country produces are proprietary. Replacing them is extremely expensive and difficult. That means that when the cameras break, cities have to seek assistance from Chinese businesses. There is a reason why a 2020 study was unable to locate a single government that adopted a Chinese surveillance and policing platform and then completely got rid of it. Governments were more likely to restrict specific features than to rip the systems out.

As a result, many Latin American countries are highly vulnerable to economic coercion. If a state takes a position contrary to Beijing’s interests, China can tighten the screws on it by withholding spare parts, software updates, and technicians, turning a commercial partnership into a tool of leverage. Even absent coercion, depending on China has frustrated many regional politicians. Ecuador provides a case in point. ECU-911 never measurably reduced crime; in fact, homicides in Ecuador rose from about 1,000 in 2016 to over 4,800 in 2022. The system also proved fragile. By 2022, roughly 1,100 of its 6,500 cameras were offline. Today, it barely functions, and Ecuadorian officials have grown unhappy with it. But the country has no alternative, and replacing the current system with a new one would be prohibitively costly and inconvenient. As a result, ECU-911 limps on, leaving the country reliant on Beijing for help managing its faltering emergency response mechanism. The same lock-in has already played out in telecommunications. The 4G networks of three of Brazil’s four major carriers, for example, were built by and are still serviced by Huawei, which made it impossible for former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to ban the company from 5G networks, despite his best efforts.

But for other officials, the trade is well worth it, given the lack of timely alternatives. In fact, many regional leaders actively seek out Chinese systems, which provide pragmatic solutions to their countries’ security and governance challenges. They also offer up solutions for regional politicians so quickly that it overwhelms more careful responses. Some Latin American states even make preemptive political concessions to China in the apparent hope of quickly acquiring its goods. In March 2023, for instance, Honduras broke off formal relations with Taiwan and established ties with Beijing. Three months later, it signed 17 cooperation agreements with China, including one for smart city work, and it expressed support for China’s Global Security Initiative (a framework designed to help contest the U.S.-led international order). Within a year, Honduras’s 911 system awarded an uncompetitive contract for a Chinese video-management system, and the country installed 3,500 Huawei-made cameras.

The result is a sovereignty question that is uncomfortably familiar to the region: What happens when local and national governments work against their own citizens for the benefit of foreign actors? Often, the answer is that the foreign interests win. When indigenous populations blockaded Argentina’s salt flats over the environmental impact of Chinese-backed lithium projects (and over not being consulted before the deal took effect), Jujuy’s governor fast-tracked a constitutional reform to ban road blockades. According to human rights groups, provincial police also assaulted and illegally detained protesters.

BOTTOM UP

Beijing’s efforts in Latin America have created risks that no one is properly accounting for. By building governance systems on Chinese systems, the region is trading short-term affordability for dependence—and, with it, Chinese leverage over their decisions.

But for China, the results are clear. Beijing has gained new influence in Latin America. It now has standing relationships in its municipal, provincial, and national governments, including nearly 180 sister-city agreements with 17 Latin American countries. China’s strategy also has no single point of failure. It bypasses the high-visibility sectors, such as ports, where it is most exposed to pushback, and instead embeds itself in the everyday needs of mayors, governors, provincial agencies, and low-profile central government departments.

Little wonder, then, that China runs the same model in other regions. In the Pakistani city of Lahore, the Punjab Safe Cities Authority installed Huawei-built command centers and 10,000 surveillance cameras on an $84.7 million contract. Kenya’s surveillance system runs on Chinese technology. China’s Ministry of Public Security has signed policing or security agreements with some 74 countries—featuring more than 200 deals in all. It has verifiably trained more than 12,000 foreign officers since 2000. Even in the United States, China made subnational inroads—namely, by selling port cranes to local authorities and operators—for years before the federal government moved to stop it.

In Chinese statecraft, doctrine does not always precede action. It can also follow the country’s choices, legitimizing and scaling what began as experiments. China’s first two Latin America policy papers, in 2008 and 2016, treated regional security as a sidebar to deals on trade and Taiwan. But its most recent one, published in December 2025, made security cooperation a central component. It did this because Chinese contracts and programs focused on Latin American policing and security were already functioning.

Because China’s doctrine ratified practice, the United States has been caught behind. To this day, it remains focused on guarding against a Chinese playbook based on building big, noticeable assets—ports, 5G networks, space infrastructure—rather than Chinese deals with municipal procurement offices and police academies. If the United States is serious about curbing Chinese influence in its hemisphere, it needs to pivot. It must figure out how to supply these actors with durable, effective solutions to their problems. Otherwise, China will remain the partner of choice for many in Latin America.

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