Last week, Argentine President Javier Milei donned a camouflage-gray combat uniform and flew more than six hours from Buenos Aires to Ushuaia, the capital of the state of Tierra del Fuego, to meet with the top authority of the US Southern Command, five-star general Laura Richardson.
The reason for the meeting: the new agenda shared by the new Argentine government and the US to prevent more Chinese investments in sectors considered of strategic importance in the Southern Cone and especially in the vicinity of Antarctica.
Richardson has become the most active hawk of US military diplomacy in South America. In appearances, both on Capitol Hill in Washington and in interviews in the Latin American media, she warns, with strong doses of drama, about the danger of China and Russia in a region that she describes as “our neighborhood.”
In the case of Argentina, the general has repeatedly warned about the alleged danger posed by the Chinese space base in the east of Neuquén, in western Argentina, used for launching satellites and, through a 35-meter wide antenna, for China’s space exploration and lunar projects. Built in 2014, the Chinese State has a license based on a 50-year duration.
The United States has multiple military installations in Latin America and uses the Alcântara space base, in the Brazilian state of Maranhão, to launch its own satellites, either in collaboration with businessmen such as Richard Branson and Elon Musk.
But Chinese competition in that strategic area is raising eyebrows in Washington – and for a few years now in Brussels as well – as a new cold war once again entangles Latin America in the battle for Western strategic objectives and strategic mineral resources.
The Chinese base in Neuquén, Richardson stated in a US Congressional appearance in February, is part of “a network of at least ten Chinese space facilities in Latin America in five countries.”
The Pentagon has not presented any evidence that the space base in Argentina has military uses. As reported on Friday by the newspaper Clarín, after 40 scientific visits, one of them with the presence of US diplomats, the consensus is that the antennas are not useful for tracking missiles or for espionage.
Despite this, Richardson insists on American concern on each visit to the region. Space facilities in Latin America like the one in Neuquén “could translate into global military capabilities to support the tracking, surveillance and targeting of our armed forces,” the general warned in February in Washington.
Likewise, US ambassador Mark Stanley said in an interview with the newspaper La Nación two weeks ago: “It is a problem that Argentina allows operations by the Chinese armed forces in Neuquén.” Milei has hinted that she will carry out a new inspection of the base.
So that the anti-China charge is more of a geopolitical rivalry, Richardson accuses Beijing of having zero sensitivity to human rights and the environment in its investments in the region and even of being a beneficiary of organized crime in Latin America that – According to him, it is used as a “cradle” to facilitate the entry of Chinese companies into the region. They “do not have the same concerns as us when it comes to freedom and a free, secure and prosperous Western Hemisphere,” he said in Argentine media last year. .
These are comments that produce disbelief in many sectors of a country whose freedom was savagely repressed in the first Cold War, with the full support of the United States.
But the discourse of a new cold war fits perfectly with the position of the new Milei government that has whitewashed the crimes of the 1976-1983 military dictatorship while classifying China – Argentina’s second trading partner after Brazil – as a communist danger to regional democracy. The governor of Tierra del Fuego, however, refused to meet with Richardson and announced that he would be persona non grata on the island.
Richardson has also expressed the Pentagon’s concern regarding China’s role in the extraction of critical minerals, specifically the world’s largest lithium deposit in the enormous Andean salt flats that Argentina shares with Chile and Bolivia. Two Chinese companies are already participating in projects in Bolivia and Chile. “(The Chinese) have come only to extract,” Richardson warned, despite the fact that in the Bolivian case, at least, Chinese investment in the Uyuni Salt Flats has been conditioned on a strong transfer of technology to the local partner.
Richardson’s visit to Tierra del Fuego is also based on an alleged Chinese danger, in that case, even more hypothetical than at the Neuquén base. This is an alleged Chinese plan to convert Tierra del Fuego into a strategic pole for the export of raw materials, energy and the entry of imports.
It is true, according to sources consulted in Tierra del Fuego, that China studied 20 years ago in collaboration with the government of the state of Tierra del Fuego, the construction of a port and logistics center with the supposed purpose of supporting the transportation of raw materials to China. by the Chinese group Sanxi, was announced almost 20 years ago but nothing has been built yet.
This plan unleashed a wave of warnings in Washington think tanks about Chinese geostrategic plans in the Southern Cone. But, so far there is no Chinese investment in Tierra del Fuego. “There is a media setup about the presence of a Chinese base in Tierra del Fuego,” said Daniel Guzman of Malvinas Libres, a geostrategic analysis group in Tierra del Fuego. “They never put a screw or a nail in Tierra del Fuego; there are rumors of Chinese investments but, at the moment, there are none.”
Milei during his visit to Tierra del Fuego said that “a great Argentine logistics center” will be created. This will constitute “the closest development port to Antarctica and will make our countries the gateway to the white continent. This work will allow us to develop the local economy, provide a logistics service that allows repairs and support for ship cruises that operate in the South Atlantic,” said the Argentine president.
It is logical to think that, if this plan is carried out, the US will enter as a partner. The warnings about Chinese activity serve to convey support for the “development of an Antarctic logistics hub with North American investment,” said Guzmán.
Ironically, the US refusal to allow Chinese investments may have complicated the plans of the electronics company Mirgor – whose main partners are former president Mauricio Macri, an ally of Milei, and the cousin of Luis Caputo, the current economy minister – which He wanted to participate in the construction of a port in Tierra del Fuego that would have been used by a Chinese state petrochemical company, and thus establish a logistics center for electronics manufacturers and a container port.
It is another example of the problem with the new anti-China alliance between Washington and Buenos Aires. In reality, China is the only country with real interest in investing in infrastructure, technology, food production and mineral extraction in accordance with its long-term vision to guarantee the supply of critical raw materials for its own development. No other economic power, much less the US, has shown comparable interest in investing in South America as Africa has. Through the Belt and Road initiative – strongly criticized by the US and Europe for putting countries into debt – the aim is to provide financing and execution for the large infrastructure projects needed in the region. China overshadows the US in investment volume, from the new container port north of Lima to Chinese electric car manufacturing plants in Sao Paulo.
This has been recognized by Richardson herself. “We have to be competing for contracts and works awards,” said the general in Congress. Latin American governments “are going to go with whoever has the money and the loans,” she added..
Argentina, which suspended payments on its debt and depends on an IMF financing program, is a paradigmatic case. After Milei’s inauguration, Beijing provisionally suspended a swap credit line for almost $5 billion to Argentina due to the president’s inflammatory statements against Chinese communism.
Milei has already made clear its preference between the US and China by purchasing 24 US F16 aircraft from Denmark after strong pressure from the US embassy in Buenos Aires and the promise of a US loan for 40 million dollars to help pay for the acquisition. . The previous government of Alberto Fernández had considered the possibility of purchasing the most modern Chinese war fighters of the JF17 model.
