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June 15, 2025 - Epoch Times
49:08
How the Sino-Iranian Alliance Destabilizes Countries Around the World: Joseph Humire
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We have this issue in Latin America where the region is going towards a much more autocratic direction and Russia, China and Iran are positioning themselves to take advantage of all that.
Joseph Humeyer is executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
An expert on asymmetric warfare, he has, for 20 years, been looking closely at Latin America.
In this episode, we dive into how the China-Iran-Russia coalition is influencing the region and North America.
The Sino-Iranian connection, in many respects, is probably the most dangerous one, even more so than the Sino-Russian connection, which is more talked about, I think, in foreign affairs.
Fundamentally, China is making Latin America a region more inhospitable to the United States.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yannick Kelly.
Joseph Humeyer, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
It's a pleasure to be back.
So when we sat down last time, we were planning to talk about the Chinese influence in South America, the impacts on the U.S., also how Iran fits in there.
This is another area of your expertise.
And of course, increasingly Russia.
But in the end, we ended up talking about the Venezuelan election, which had just happened.
Can you kind of update me very briefly on what the situation is since we talked about a month ago?
Well, I think we talked right after the election.
So right after the election there was an effort by the opposition, Venezuela, Marie Carina Machado, I think they did a good job.
I think they basically got about two-thirds of Latin America to either recognize Enmundo Gonzalez as the president-elect of Venezuela, which is, you know, per the results of the ballots that she demonstrated, or to at least not recognize Nicolas Maduro as the president-elect.
There's only been a handful of countries that have recognized Nicolas Maduro as the president-elect.
They're the same countries that recognize him immediately after.
Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, Bolivia.
The big countries, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, the ones we talked about, they haven't gone the full distance of recognizing Edmundo Gonzalez, but they haven't recognized Edmundo Maduro either, and I think that's somewhat of a diplomatic victory on Maria Carina.
But now, I'd say almost two months later, I don't know how much more Maria Corina is going to get from the international community on this.
I know that there's still an effort to kind of galvanize the Venezuelan people around the results.
And I think most people in Venezuela are very clear what happened.
They understand that Enmundo Gonzalez won, but they understand that they don't have the guns, and so the guns are in the hands of the regime, and so there's very little they could do.
And the regime has become much more draconian on the repressive apparatus.
One of the updates is that they've actually had a reshuffling.
And one of the individuals that's most notorious in the Maduro regime, his name is Diosdado Cabello He has become kind of the head of internal security, in that he's one of the individuals that's responsible for all of the repression that's going on, that's incarcerated thousands of people inside Venezuela, that's killed more than dozens, and has really gone after Maria Corina herself and her team.
Enmundo Gonzalez, the president-elect of Venezuela, has left the country.
He went to Spain, so he's now effectively in exile.
Basically, the chances that you're going to see him as the president of Venezuela are becoming dimmer by the day.
That's what you're telling me here.
It's growing.
It's becoming much more sophisticated in its methods and measures.
It has a lot of external support from the typical actors, Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, and others.
And I think we're hitting a point where Nicolas Maduro, his regime, is sending a message.
We care only about And I think that that's the message that they've sent.
And as long as they have Russia, China, and Iran backing them up, I think they're content to keep it that way.
And you're basically foreseeing that this process will just continue.
Yeah, well, we talked about it in our interview.
We talked about the Nicaragua option.
Daniel Ortega took this option back in 2018 in Nicaragua, where he basically isolated himself from the international community and basically just clamped down on the freedoms inside the country, including the Catholic Church.
And so Maduro is very much going in the same direction.
He's basically saying, you know, I don't care what the international community says, and he's clamping down and showing his control, complete control.
Overall elements of power inside Venezuela.
Tell me a little bit about your background and how you got interested in how these various repressive regimes were focusing on South America.
I think I started to cut my teeth academically looking at Iran's networks in Latin America, later Russia's networks, later China's networks.
And I like to describe that as I was kind of looking at three separate problems, and now I realize it's all the same problem.
So it's all just one big problem.
But if I go back to my own interests, even beyond my academic interests, I go back to my time in the military.
When I was in the Marine Corps, you know, I did a military exercise in Latin America.
That's probably the only thing I did.
Most of it was Middle East.
The only thing I did in Latin America was a naval exercise called UNITAS.
It's essentially a circumnavigation around parts of Central and South America where you do bilateral trainings and sometimes multinational trainings with host nation militaries.
And so in that, you have to pass the Panama Canal.
And when I passed the Panama Canal, I was, A, briefed, but also observed the portal.
The port holding companies that were controlling both sides of the canal.
And this is back in 2004.
And I realized then that they were Chinese state-controlled companies.
It was Hutchinson-Wampoa.
We had a whole briefing on Hutchinson and Lee Ka-Shing and the owner and how they've expanded their presence in Latin America.
And this is 2004.
This is 20 years ago.
And so that sparked my interest because I was there visiting Latin America as a military officer, looking at doing training with our host nation counterparts.
And I didn't know that China had that much of a presence in this part of the world.
And I remember, you know, when we were crossing the canal, there's a typical kind of naval situation.
And I remember I was observing that.
That was part of one of the jobs I was doing.
And you would notice that the frights that they were paying to the Chinese port holding companies were in large sums of money.
So I right there just got my first glimpse at understanding that there's big business involved in how China's operating on this side of the world.
And of course, you know, their influence in that region and on the Panama Canal has only increased since that time.
Yeah, exactly.
And not just in the canal.
I mean, back then, I don't have the full number of what it was back then, but they probably had a handful of ports that they were working on, port construction, mostly expansion.
But today they have more than 40 port construction projects in Central and South America.
They have major deepwater ports in South America.
They have port expansion projects to create alternative canals in Central America and in Mexico.
And then they have the ability now to operate both on the Pacific and the Caribbean Atlantic side of the Western Hemisphere.
So they've expanded tremendously in this domain.
What are the implications of these 4D deepwater ports on national security of Canada, my home nation, the U.S., and North Korea?
So to do that, let me actually go to 2004, because this is what I didn't realize at the time when I was doing this training with the militaries down there.
So in 2004 was actually an inflection point for China and Latin America, because Hu Jintao came to Latin America, I think it was the first visit of a Chinese president in the 21st century, and he came down with a bold statement and a bold promise.
He said that he was going to invest $100 billion in the next six years, and that got everybody's eyes in it.
Everybody's attention inside Latin America.
You say you're going to spend $100 billion in Latin America, you're going to get a lot of people that are going to ask you or invite you to come to their country.
So he made this promise, and he wasn't lying.
By 2010, I think the number was actually $110 billion in trade loans and investment that China had done in Latin America.
And that's ballooned to today, where it's over $450 billion, right?
So that story, what I'm describing, to me is a story of both malign intent and U.S. neglect.
And I'll unpack that.
The malign intent is that the way that Hu Jintao phrased it, and obviously we changed it to Xi Jinping, but when he phrased that, he kind of created a narrative that's taken hold of Latin America, that China's only interest was economic, it's commercial, it's business.
I remember being at conferences and they even changed the imaging of China to the panda, to make China have a softer look and say this is about trade, this is about diplomatic relations, about cultural exchange.
we don't have military intentions whatsoever.
In fact, if you try to allege that China had military intentions, you would get So, in essence, we had this era where I think that they misled Latin America and they made Latin America think that everything was going to be about commerce and business.
But I also say there was a neglect aspect of it because the United States, I mean, this is the neighborhood where we live.
This is where, you know, I was there as part of a military exercise.
We have a tremendous amount of military partnerships.
We have diplomatic relations, cultural relations.
I mean, this is, you know, since the Menorah Doctrine is supposed to be the area.
That's off limits to external powers.
And so the United States made a lot of misguided policies on this.
And I'll describe one that was recounted to me and I'll tell you because it has to do with the largest multilateral finance institution in Latin America.
It's called the Inter-American Development Bank.
It's like a mini world bank just for Latin America.
And so the IDB, as the acronym goes, during the 2008-2009 financial crisis was in a tremendous amount of economic trouble.
In fact, they were pretty much going to be bankrupt.
They were a billion dollars in the red because they had been subjected to subprimes.
Because as a lending institution, they were lending a lot on construction projects, on housing projects.
Some of that had gone through nationwide, which went defunct, and so they had a billion dollars in default that they didn't have the ability to pay.
So they went for bailouts.
The problem was the United States was not in the business of recapitalizing everybody, and they were already bailing out bigger banks like Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and some other ones that were in financial trouble.
So essentially what the IDB says, they did not get the recapitalization by the United States, that opened the opportunity for China.
Now, China was at the time not a member of the Inter-American Development Bank, and I think because of the breakup of Yugoslavia or one of these smaller countries withdrew their membership, it opened an opportunity for China to join the bank at a very minority shareholder.
I'm talking about 0.004%.
They would have paid no more than $20 million to become a shareholder.
But they did something that was unprecedented in the 60-year history of the Inter-American Development Bank.
They paid something called an entrance fee.
None of the members of the bank had ever paid this before China introduced this entrance fee.
They become a member of the IDB.
So it was recapitalizing the bank?
It was as the former head of the Inter-American Development that actually told me this story had called it an institutional kickback.
Basically, they co-opted the largest multilateral institution for Latin America.
And what did they do with that?
Well, they made conditions.
And some of those conditions were if they provide this, they call it a special development initiative, special operation funds that they created through the bank.
If they provide these loans to specific countries, they have to be matched by the IDB.
Meaning that if China's import-export bank starts to loan to these countries, the IDB has to match those loans.
That was a condition that happened.
So with the United States as close to 40% shareholder of this bank, it's not an exaggeration to say that the U.S. co-financed China's rise in Latin America.
That's how they got to that $150 billion.
That's how they got to that $450 billion.
So the United States misguided policies in not understanding what China was doing.
So I say my line in 10 because China misled Latin America to thinking this was just commercial when it was actually more military in nature.
And I say U.S. neglect because we just let it happen under our watch.
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With that, let's head back to the interview.
What would you say to the person who at this point will say, well, this all looks economic to me.
What are you talking about military?
Sure, there's a spaceport in Argentina.
Okay, that's clearly military.
But everything else, that looks commercial to me.
Well, that's a good question.
So let's go to there.
Basically, they created this special operations fund and they started financing very specific projects, right?
I'll give you an example.
Venezuela, and we always have to go back to Venezuela because Venezuela is kind of like the epicenter of a lot of this external actor support.
In Venezuela, before there was this space station in Argentina, there was a space station in Venezuela.
It's actually the same kind of satellite tracking station, same type of scientific, technological ambitions of looking at the far side of the moon, deep space exploration.
But in the case of Argentina, it was done in like the way they archetyped the station.
It was done through partnerships with the Ministry of Communications.
In the case of Venezuela, that same type of satellite tracking station is located inside a military base, inside a Venezuelan military base, an air base in the Guarico state of Venezuela, which is in the center of the country, an air base called the Capitan Manuel Rios Air Base.
So the fact that this air base existed, a military base from Venezuela existed with a Chinese satellite tracking station, and that was a very early project that happened, was part of these economic incentives that China So Venezuela became the most indebted country to China, probably in the world.
I'm not sure about the world, but certainly in Latin America, upwards of $60 billion in debt to China through these loans and credits that China was offering.
And most people, most analysts, thought that this was a bad economic move by China.
I mean, you're basically giving free money to the worst economic actor in Latin America, the one that's hit hyperinflation, that basically destroyed their economy, 60% of their GDP evaporated.
Unless you have other priorities.
Absolutely.
And I argued this, you know, maybe 10 years ago.
I said, if you think China's simply doing this for economic ambitions, you're not reading the tree leaves on how China operates.
They're buying a country.
They're buying the sovereignty of this country.
They're installing military installations.
They're creating dual-use infrastructure.
And that's where we go to the ports.
The ports, not all the ports, not all the 40 ports in Latin America have military objectives, but I think if you look at very strategically, We could point to at least three major port projects that, to me, are more militaristic than they are commercial.
Some of them have dual-use commercial.
Some of them probably have no-use commercial.
The one in Peru, the Chiang Kai mega port project, that's the one that's completely dual-use because, yes, it does make sense in terms of commerce.
It has the ability to receive what they call triple-E-class cargo ships, the largest cargo ships available.
So if you're going to have a major port on the Pacific that allows you to create all kinds of trade routes for cargo ships, That's going to be the one.
And not to mention a triple E-class cargo ship is about the same size as an aircraft carrier.
So that's a dual-use project that has both a commercial and military application.
But then there's other ports that, for instance, one in Chile, that's a deep water port, and it's so profound.
The only reason you would need that is for submarines.
And submarines obviously aren't commercial.
They're either militaristic or they're scientific.
China would probably argue scientific, but my argument would be it's probably more militaristic.
In the case of China, we go back to how the space station operates.
their science is their military.
And if we looked at the Western side of Latin America, I'd argue that in the sense, In the central, Peru, they're looking to have the ability to receive aircraft carriers.
And in the north, where I would say Central America is, in the Gulf of Fonseca, they're going to be able to develop the capacity for support ships.
And this is now an ambition.
I don't think this is near complete yet, but I think the idea is that And to have that destination, they need to build the infrastructure ahead of time.
So they did this for the last 20-something years in Latin America, deceiving them, saying that this is all about...
I think 2024 is the year they're starting to reveal this.
I mean, they just announced that they're going to be holding a joint military exercise with Brazil, in a part of Brazil that has a host of Brazilian Special Operations Forces.
They're going to launch the Peruvian port this year, supposedly, if things go on schedule.
And Xi Jinping may be visiting Peru to inaugurate this port.
What is it that made you see these military ambitions where others didn't?
Maybe part of it is because that first briefing I got in Panama, and obviously I was part of the military at the time, and the briefing that we got was related to Hutchinson-Wampoa, and they made us understand that Hutchinson-Wampoa had a very cozy relationship with the PLA.
And so that's what, you know, so I was anchored to understand that in China, it's very difficult to do business without having some kind of connections to the security, intelligence, or military apparatus, to where it's almost obligated by law that any commercial enterprise, both in and outside the country, if it's registered in China, has by law to cooperate with this intelligence and security apparatus.
Yeah, and just again to remind our viewers, which I like to often, is there's, the doctrine's been around for a while of military-civil fusion, but...
This is something that was lost in Latin America.
Most Latin Americans had no idea that they had this doctrine of military-civil fusion.
And I always emphasize when I would speak to them, I'd say, you know, in the United States we call this civil-military relations, right?
But we put the civil first.
They put the military first because they're actually signaling the true intention of what they're trying to accomplish.
But I would even further because a lot of the notion was that, you know, all this was about trade and that, you know, there's a huge consumer market inside China, you know, a billion people plus that they need to feed and that they need these raw materials.
And Latin America was a candy land for all kinds of minerals and agricultural products.
And, you know, basically it's very blessed in terms of resources.
So that was a natural fit and people understood it that way.
But now that China's economy is shrinking and they don't have the impetus to do these kind of big bonanza economic projects, the Latin Americans are starting to think, what's the angle here?
Why are we still talking?
Why are we still looking to advance?
And I think a big part of that is that they And I don't have the exact numbers on me right now, but in essence, I remember we were doing a study, this is about a year ago, looking at how China's economy is starting to construct, you know, both in terms of its demographics, housing, inflation.
The rest.
But their defense industry is growing.
So the percentage that the defense industry is growing in percentage of their actual GDP is actually growing quite significantly.
So the argument that we would make to a lot of our Latin American counterparts is you're not feeding the Chinese people.
You're feeding their military-industrial complex.
You're feeding their defense industry.
That's why they need your lithium.
That's why they need your coltan minerals.
That's why they need your minerals and all your resources.
Yes, the economy is undeniable.
At this point, I think even by their own admission, yet the military was expanding at the same time.
And that's the point that we try to make our Latin American friends understand.
That don't get suckered into another person's conflict, right?
Because, you know, this kind of extends into Taiwan and other things.
And you started to see where Latin American countries, irrespective of their own opinions on Taiwan, would have to break diplomatic relations because they felt they were too indebted to China.
And so this wasn't like a political calculation.
This was an economic calculation based on the loans, the credits, the trade, the investments that they had from China.
And so China was doing this with political calculations.
So I think at this point, the arguments They don't have that kind of economic carrot anymore, but maybe they don't need it anymore because a lot of these countries have already been co-opted.
And you can know that when you look at Costa Rica, Panama, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras, just in the last six years have broken diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
So we've been talking a lot about China, but how does Iran figure into this whole picture?
And I mean, it figures in a lot earlier.
It does, and we talked about that a bit before in terms of Venezuela.
Kind of where I began to see this nexus between China and Iran.
And let me say, Jan, that I think the Sino-Iranian connection in many respects is probably the most dangerous one, even more so than the Sino-Russian connection, which is more talked about, I think, in foreign affairs for two specific reasons.
and then I'll get into what I see in Latin America.
The first is because regardless of, you know, how we look at Russia, and there's a lot of things that I think Russia does that it's very destabilizing, Obviously, Vladimir Putin, he's kind of a kleptocrat, he's kind of a big thug, and he's evading Ukraine.
But fundamentally, the Marxist doctrine, the failed doctrine, I think, that's been trying to be exported throughout the world, it's come from a Western tradition, and it's been involved in their understanding of how they look at warfare.
Iran and China come from an Oriental, an Eastern tradition, more from Sun Tzu, a different whole lexicon on how they look at warfare and how they look at the world.
And then the second is kind of very practical because as we know China lost territory to Russia and I think at some point that border conflict will probably refurbish and start to get reignited.
But my point to that is not to say that Russia's less of a problem, and in Latin America they're a huge problem, but the Iranian-China connection less focused on and probably less point of a discussion.
And so I started to see this very early on, and again with Venezuela, because when China was doing all these big projects and giving Iran, at the same time, and I'm talking about circa 2005, 6, 7, 8, 9, the beginning part of the 21st century, Iran was also operating in Venezuela, but very, very covertly.
They did not have a lot of investments, well, pretty much had no investments.
They did not have a lot of commerce or a lot of business, couldn't give any loans.
Not to mention that in this period of time, essentially between 2006 and 2010, Iran was starting to face heavy economic sanctions, both by the United States, but also by the international community, most notably the United Nations.
The UN began to impose restrictions on the exports, especially if they had anything to do with defense, military exports, arms sales on Iran to the world.
And so because Iran had these restrictions on how they can maneuver internationally, but they had huge ambitions of being really relevant in Latin America, they used China's financial system.
And we saw this in Venezuela.
the defense industrial projects that were covert projects inside Venezuela, the same projects that built the drones, the Iranian drones that are now Venezuelan drones, that began in 2006.
And when those projects started to become developed, There's like invoices, right?
We saw the invoices, and Hugo Chavez would personally sign a lot of these invoices.
He would say, take it from the Chinese accounts.
He would write there on the invoices.
And then we would notice that, I guess, the concealment of a lot of these military projects was done through Venezuela's oil industry, Perevesa.
And Perevesa was using its oil agreements with China to shield the Iranian transfer of military technology into Venezuela.
So we saw this very early on.
I remember the question that dawned, I mean, this is now going back like 10 years or more ago, was like, well, China obviously knows what Iran's doing inside Venezuela.
And so the question was, are they helping, or are they just turning a blind eye?
And in the beginning, I might have thought they might have been just turning a blind eye, because I was thinking, this is a, Over time, I think I started to shift more towards they're helping them.
They're helping them do this.
And I'll say this very simplistically, but I think it's relevant, that Iran does not have political capital in Latin America, much less economic capital.
China has both.
They have both political capital, political legitimacy, and they also have a lot of economic capital, a lot of trade agreements.
They're probably the top trade partner most of South America.
So if China was to get caught destabilizing any country inside Latin America through this armament, through this agitation, through any of the methods that they use to be able to destabilize these countries, they have a lot to lose.
They could lose trade relationships.
They could lose political relationships.
They could lose their status.
But if Iran gets caught, and they have in the past, if they get caught doing any kind of these operations, they have almost nothing to lose.
Nobody's going to think of Iran as like some big influential actor inside the country, even if their influence is very covert.
So I think that China benefits from that.
China benefits from Iran's abilities to destabilize the region, create conflicts, create chaos, and use that chaos as an opportunity for change.
And so I see that connection very much.
Well, there's this other element, this is something I've referenced on a number of shows, is that the Chinese regime has an interest in keeping the U.S., which is its views as its primary enemy.
We're busy elsewhere.
And fundamentally it also, in the case of Latin America, allows China to have the ability to reach out and touch the United States in ways that they wouldn't be able to otherwise, right?
whether we're talking about fentanyl, whether we're talking about migration, whether we're talking about military posturing, however you want to cut the paradigm, fundamentally China is making Latin America a region more inhospitable to the United States.
And that will inevitably allow the United States to be less focused on, And so in many respects that plays a multitude of advantages and benefits to their strategic calculation and I think China deliberately understands this.
I mean this was described to me once in one of these seminars and I think it stuck with me, this idea that China, you know, they had for...
Growth of their military, growth of their economy, growth of their international relations.
And they did some of that.
But I think China's done growing.
Their military is not maintenance the way people think it is.
Their economy, as we were talking about, is constricting.
Their legitimacy is in question in many parts of the world.
I think since COVID, pretty much, their legitimacy is in question more than ever.
It never has been.
So if you're done growing, the only other way to project power is to suppress.
And so you may look more powerful if the rest of the world looks weaker.
And what are we experiencing today?
We're experiencing weakness throughout the world that's probably unprecedented in modern times.
what Russia's done in Ukraine, what Iran and its terrorist proxies are doing in Israel, what Venezuela's doing in Latin America.
It's making the world weaker and it's making the United States look weaker.
And by default, China looks stronger, even if, you know, They're not growing as much as they were.
So I think that that very much fits into their calculation onto how they want to project strength and project power throughout the world.
It's just all a matter of perception.
And China, I think, is all about manipulating perceptions.
How does Iran operate there?
We started talking about this a bit.
It operates much the way it does in many parts of the world, through intelligence apparatuses, through covert networks, through proxies, much the way they operate in the Middle East, with one fundamental difference.
So when Iran operates through Africa in the Middle East, they fundamentally approach it.
From kind of their theocratic side, right, from the representation they have in Shia communities worldwide.
And when they come to Latin America, not that they don't do that, they do do that, but they don't use it as their first sales pitch.
Their sales pitch is often that they describe themselves as a social movement that was lifted up to protect natural resources, referring to the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
So in that case, it would have been British Petroleum that they claimed that the Shah was going to basically take the oil away from Iran and give it to the British.
And so they use that as kind of a nationalist sentiment that they say we're protecting our resources and we had to create a civil society movement that lifted up.
the revolution and took power for the next decades to come.
So when you explain it that way in Latin America, There's a tremendous amount of social movements, indigenous movements, that are all about protecting those resources.
And there's a tremendous amount, there's kind of a communist Marxist history that's all about kind of going against imperialists and going against the state.
So they have this anti-imperialist rhetoric that allows them to come into Latin America with much more foray.
But once they get into Latin America, they start to build the Islamic side of it, the theocratic side of it.
They build the mosque.
They build the Islamic culture centers, and those function parallel to their embassies.
So Iran today has 11 embassies in Latin America.
At least four of those embassies have military attaches, so they have defense personnel in those embassies.
They have more than 100 Shia Islamic cultural centers and mosques that operate.
And this is an important distinction because previously, one of the prosecutors from the Ami attack, which is the largest Iranian We sponsored a terrorist attack in Latin America, which was in 1994 in Argentina.
The former prosecutor of that attack, Barton Isman, he once called these Islamic culture centers, he called them antennas of the Iranian revolution, meaning that they function mostly as intelligence centers to collect, to study, to analyze, to process, and to provide Iran with country studies of how that country operates.
I would, you know, observing this throughout this whole time, I would describe them less as antennas today and more as cell towers, because they operate much more like disinformation networks.
They've penetrated political networks, penetrated different parts of society, and disinformed about what Iran is trying to do and also disinformed about what the United States is.
And so now Iran has a satellite cable network called Hizban TV.
It's a television network that has presence in at least 16, if not more, countries in Latin America with 24 hours, 7 days a week programming in Spanish, full-time in Spanish.
They have influencer networks of digital activists, YouTube, social media.
This is where Russia comes in.
We cooperate with Russia to amplify their messages.
So the biggest disinformation network in Latin America is RT in Sputnik.
RT in Espanol and Sputnik Mundo are the Spanish versions of Russian state-owned media, and they are tremendously popular.
In Latin America.
And Iran, if you look at their media infrastructure in the region, it's intricately tied to the Russians.
And so that allows them to amplify their messages, whether it's on Gaza, whether it's on Israel, anti-Israel, anti-Iran, anti-Semitism, and projected even to the message that Russia is giving about the Ukraine war.
And then China looks at all that infrastructure and then couples it with their own messaging.
It's fascinating, because this was actually my next question.
How does this all work together?
Because originally it was Iran and Russia.
Russia has a much longer history of being interested in the region as a Soviet Union.
How does this nexus work today?
It's layered, and let me describe it at the core.
We talked about it a little bit last time.
A multilateral group called the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas.
And so this was a Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez-led initiative to create a multilateral group in Latin America that would be able to subvert the entire multilateral system.
In fact, the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas, which at its heyday was 13 countries.
I think it's down to 9 or 10 now, which is primarily Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua.
In Bolivia, at one time it was Ecuador, and then there's a handful of Caribbean satellite countries.
This multilateral group is the only multilateral institution in Latin America that has one of its member states and all of the other 16 multilaterals of the region.
So they were able to use this multilateral group, which is an authoritarian multilateral group, to basically subvert the rest of the multilateral system.
Well, if you go to the beginning of the ALBA, as it's called, the Bolivarian Alliance, in 2005-2006, Iran and Syria became observing members.
So they were observing members since the very early on of this, right?
So I call this the three-quarter standards because this helps me understand how China, Russia, and Iran cooperated.
And I should say that when I was looking at this 15 years ago, I saw this parallel.
I saw this nexus between Russia, China, and Iran.
And this is, you know, 15 years ago, people weren't talking about that nexus.
They were talking about them as isolated actors.
And then people would sometimes debate.
They say, well, you know, they don't have the same interests in different parts of the world.
And that might be true.
But in Latin America, we saw this synergy.
And we saw it because of the Bolivarian alliances.
So this three-quarter standard is three-quarters of China's credits and loans were given to those same four countries.
Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Bolivia.
Not trade.
They were doing trade with investment with a bunch of countries, but credits and loans.
We mentioned $60 billion to Venezuela.
That was one of the big recipients of that.
Three quarters of foreign military sales that Russia was doing in Latin America went to those same four countries: Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Bolivia.
Mostly to Venezuela and Nicaragua.
Upwards of 12 billion to Venezuela and upwards of 5, 5, 4, 5 billion to Nicaragua.
So Russia became a major foreign military salesperson inside Latin America.
And three quarters of Iran's bilateral agreements were the same four countries.
What does that show you?
That shows you synergy.
That shows you strategic cooperation, not strategic competition.
And so I saw that these three countries anchored themselves around this alliance, this authoritarian alliance that was basically used to subvert the multilateral system and basically shift the geopolitical alignment of Latin America more towards these three countries, Russia, China, and Iran, and away from the United States.
And so that's only grown since then.
That aptitude has only become bigger.
But we saw it very early on.
If you follow the Bolivarian Alliance, you would have seen that in the early days as well.
These four countries, are they just particularly authoritarian or particularly open for business?
Or was it there was some kind of strategic decision to engage?
And you could say Ecuador for the time being, those four countries had very entrenched networks that were growing.
to high levels of positions of power.
Let's use Bolivia for an example.
Bolivia is a country that has about half of its population that's indigenous.
It's always been one of the poorer countries in South America.
And so there's a laundry list of grievances that the people have both with their government and with the region at large.
And so if you study the evolution of these grievances and how this basically surfaced to become a political project inside the country, you're introduced to this gentleman named Evo Morales.
And so before Evo Morales was the president of Bolivia, he was a congressman, and he got kicked out of Congress.
Before he was a congressman, he was an activist.
He was the head of the COCA federations.
So he had a long history that if you're paying attention to Bolivia, you know who this individual is.
If you're not paying attention to Bolivia, you don't hear about him until 2006 when he becomes the president of Bolivia.
And so there's this impetus, I think, where China, Russia, Iran were looking at these networks from a very ground level and understood.
This guy has potential.
Or this network has a movement.
So we're going to invest into that.
We're going to help nurture it.
And they're going to help it grow.
And then once it becomes the power, they have their vehicle to go in.
And they reinforce that power.
And so I used to stick with Bolivia because I think it's a very interesting case study.
You know, we talk a lot about Venezuela.
But the most successful Iranian project in all of Latin America to me is Bolivia.
By far.
And why is it more successful than Venezuela?
Not in terms of quantity.
There's still more Iranian activities in Venezuela, and there's more Iranian armament in Venezuela.
But the difference is, in Venezuela, Iran's always had a role since the founding of OPEC.
Both Iran and Venezuela were both co-founders of OPEC.
And Iran's had an embassy in Caracas since before the revolution, since the 1960s, I believe.
In fact, on contrary, in Bolivia, Iran had nothing before Edward Morales.
They did not have an embassy.
They did not have diplomatic relations.
They did not even have, I think, any kind of personnel inside the country.
After Morales becomes elected, he becomes elected in 2005, he comes to power in 2006.
By 2007, Iran and Bolivia signed their first strategic agreement, an all-encompassing strategic agreement.
And, you know, a few years later, open embassies on both sides, a Bolivian embassy in Iran.
And the bottom line, though, from what I'm hearing is these are Marxist networks you're talking about, right?
Ultimately.
And that's so interesting because it's not immediately obvious that this is the networks that Iran would go to or these are the ones that A little bit of both.
And that's why I made that point earlier that when Iran comes to Latin America, they message in a different way.
They talk about natural resources and social movements, and they talk about it because they understand that that's what exists in Latin America.
They're going to have to pick up the pieces of what the Soviet Union left over after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Absolutely fascinating.
Today, how exactly do these three powers operate together?
And how does that impact, again, North America?
What I would say is, I'll say two things.
I call these external actors, these are agents of chaos.
They're looking for tremendous change in the world order, the way trade works, the way monetary system works, the way defense agreements work, where maritime security works.
So in order to create that change, they need to catalyze that change through chaos and conflicts.
We talked a little bit last time about how you can weave both Ukraine, the war in Ukraine, the war in Israel, Gaza, and potential wars that can erupt in Latin America through the idea of creating new maritime trade security, right?
And so in that, I think that the Some of them have boiled up into full-out wars, like we see in Ukraine and Gaza, but some of them are just bubbling under the surface.
And in Latin America, we haven't seen a full-out war yet, but a place like Venezuela is not Ukraine, but you certainly wouldn't think it's a peaceful country right now with the kind of conflict that is bubbling up.
We talked a little bit about Guyana.
And there's an impetus to potentially, eventually, maybe attack Guyana, and that could happen.
We don't know, especially as Maduro feels more isolated.
And he could take that maneuver because it would change the goalposts.
It would change the nature of the conversation.
But I'm actually going to focus a little bit on Bolivia because that's a good example.
Then I'll answer the question about how this affects the United States.
2025, I believe that Bolivia will probably be the number one humanitarian crisis in Latin America because the numbers don't add up.
It's the same story as Venezuela in terms of the same kind of external support, the same kind of socialist movement, with one difference.
They didn't nationalize their industries the way Hugo Chavez did in Venezuela, which led to the economic calamity that they became.
In the case of Bolivia, they were able to somewhat have some stable macroeconomic indicators, but they were camouflaged with a large amount of public spending.
So people didn't realize that Evo Morales was spending pretty much the future of Bolivia by depleting his foreign reserves.
And so now we go into Evo Morales Lee's office, they have interim government, and they come back with this new socialist president named Luis Arce.
Who's actually the former economic minister, and they don't have nowhere near the foreign reserves.
And so when you don't have foreign reserves, you have a hard time getting credits, and you have a hard time getting loans from the international community.
And because of this, you're seeing a scarcity of dollars, you're seeing a scarcity of imports, they're not able to pay for the imports, and then the fundamental catalyst for a crisis is the lack of fuel.
That's exactly what happened in Venezuela.
Once they had lack of fuel, once they had no ability to move transportation, the country paralyzed.
You had water shortages, food shortages, and the humanitarian crisis began, which sparked mass migration.
That's going to happen in Bolivia next year, I believe.
And so how do I know that this is going to happen this year?
So what happened in Venezuela when the economy collapsed, 60% of GDP collapsed, well, the ones that came to so quote Food and fuel shipments from Russian Iran came to subsidize the Maduro regime and allow them to withstand the maximum pressure by the Trump administration.
We're already starting to see Russia and Iran come into Bolivia.
Just in the last two months, there's been a handful of Russian cargo oil ships that are carrying diesel that have been shipped into Bolivia.
And this is the caveat.
They're being shipped in Bolivia because of a deal that the President of Bolivia made with Vladimir Putin about lithium.
And so Russia's going to get payments for this diesel that it's shipping over to Bolivia.
To avoid a fuel crisis by giving up one of its most precious natural resources with its lithium deposits.
Bolivia is one of the three main countries for lithium deposits in the world, alongside Argentina and Chile.
And Russia's company, Uranium One, is starting to get concessions onto that lithium.
So we're seeing the same playbook play out.
And this is all in a way to kind of give you this understanding of how Russia, China, and Iran are creating these crises or capitalizing on these crises to catalyze for change in terms of control of resources and control.
trade and control of maritime security, but fundamentally creating a region that's inhospitable to the United States.
We're seeing that.
We're seeing it with the crisis on the U.S. southern border.
We're seeing with the fentanyl crisis, cocaine crisis that's happening inside the United States.
But over time, as I think this strategy is intended to do, as it weakens the social fabric of the United States, they want Latin America to become an area of non-permissiveness for the United States to operate in.
So it's not enough that the United States government, But American investors, American companies, American entrepreneurs won't be able to operate in Latin America as well.
And if we're able to capitalize on this momentum of nearshoring and the momentum of being able to decouple from China, we're going to need Latin America.
Matter of fact, Mexico probably should be the number one source of nearshor manufacturing.
Companies are coming out of China and want to relocate close to the United States.
Mexico should be open for business.
What the Mexican government has, you know.
Might do some of that, but they've also been very cozy up with our adversaries, and not to mention that they just did some reforms in their country that make them look more like a judicial dictatorship.
So we have this issue in Latin America where the region is going towards a much more autocratic direction.
Democracy is kind of dying in the darkness, and Russia and China are positioning themselves to take advantage of all that.
This sounds hugely problematic.
I've been looking at Latin America for 20 years, both in the military and as an academic, and I've never seen it this bad.
And this is a bottom-line, you know, just very truthful statement.
And I've talked to a lot of people that have been working, diplomats that have been working in Latin America for decades, and I think most of them will agree they have never seen it this bad.
It's a region that's not only, you know, the world's leader in food insecurity, you know, 44 percent of food inflation, top homicide rates, some of the capitals of Latin America are top homicide rates in the world.
So not just looking at all that stuff, the region geopolitically.
is falling outside of the grip of the United States, falling outside of the hands of the United States.
And I think that that's something that's going to pay consequences to the United States for many years to come, which is why I think that Latin America, I think second to the Indo-Pacific, because obviously I think China's the big actors, the big challenge, and we have a lot of key allies in the Indo-Pacific, namely not just Taiwan, but also India and Japan and South Korea.
But outside of the Indo-Pacific, I think to complete that Indo-Pacific strategy, you have to go to the other side of the Pacific, and that's Latin America.
And I think Latin America should be the second priority for U.S. foreign policy.
Absolutely.
Javier Malay was a shock to many people, especially to these actors, to Russia, to China, to Iran.
I mean, they used to call Argentina Argent-China because of the level of influence that China had due to the Kirchner government that was able to embed China into all the different institutions inside the country.
In fact, Alberto Fernandez, the previous president before Javier Malay, the last year in office, he actually said he wanted to make Russia, he wanted to make Argentina the gateway.
for Russia into Latin America.
This is a public statement that he made in one of his remarks.
We mentioned Iran.
Iran bombed Argentina twice in its history in 1992 and 1994, and Hezbollah's operating all around.
So these actors believe that Argentina was always going to be within their geopolitical orbit.
It was always going to be able to be an area of influence that they would control.
And then comes Javier Malay.
And Javier Malay not only is an economist that's fixing the economic situation, but he's a strategist.
And he sees the geopolitical alignment that he wants to take Argentina.
He knows that to lead to liberty, prosperity, and security inside Argentina, he has to separate from Russia, China, and Iran.
It's not easy to do, and he's not going to do it overnight.
But I think that's the direction he's taking the country.
But in order to be successful, he's going to need partners.
He's going to need partners.
It can't just be Javier Malay and Argentina by himself, which is why I think in the United States it's very important that we realign ourselves with Argentina.
I think it's important that other countries, Latin America, do so as well, and in the world.
I mean, he's done trips to Europe.
He's done trips to other parts of the world because he's trying to broaden Argentine's foreign relations and their apparatus to show the world that Argentina is going to make a comeback.
And I believe he will if he gets his help.
Well, Joseph Humeyer, it's such a pleasure to have you on again.
Always a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
Thank you all for joining Joseph Humeyer and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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