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The US suggests Latin American countries to “donate” Russian equipment to Ukraine

The US suggests Latin American countries to “donate” Russian equipment to Ukraine

China and Russia are Washington’s great rivals in Latin America, the head of the US Southern Command said Thursday, suggesting to Latin American countries that “donate“Russian equipment to Ukraine for”replace it” for American material.

This region matters and matters a lot for our national security”, assured General Laura Richardson during a conversation with the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington, aware of the criticism from Latin American countries that feel abandoned.

In the 2022 Homeland Security strategy, the Joe Biden administration prioritized China and identified Russia as a significant but localized challenge.

The United States’ number two adversary in the region is Russia, said Richardson, the second woman to reach the rank of general in the US military.

A total of nine countries”they have Russian equipment and we are working to replace that Russian equipment with US equipment if those countries want to donate it to Ukraine or the ongoing cause”, he said, referring to the war that was waged after the Russian invasion of Ukrainian territory almost a year ago.

The general did not specify which are the six countries with Russian military equipment, beyond Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

Evan Ellis, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Studies of the US Army War College, told AFP that Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Mexico and Bolivia have Russian military equipment, “mostly transport helicopters”.

In his opinion Richardson’s idea “it has merit from a technical point of view but it is unlikely that the nations of the region will carry it out”.

Technically it is very difficult for countries with Russian helicopters to maintain them, he explains, due to international measures imposed on Moscow and Russia prioritizing the war in Ukraine. “That will not change in the short term, which means that the Russian team is a burden in the long term.

The shift to the left “in many parts of Latin America, very low defense budgets and a reluctance to buy new military equipment from anyone, let alone donate scarce existing equipment to Ukraine, means that this good idea will be very difficult to carry out in practice,” explains Ellis.

chinese tentacles

For the general the other “malign state actor” is China, with which “we are in a strategic competition in the Western Hemisphere”. “Seeing the invasion and the tentacles of the People’s Republic of China in the countries of the Western Hemisphere so close to the United States worries me a lot.”.

Twenty-one of the 31 countries in the region have signed up to the Belt and Road Initiative, also known as the New Silk Road, a global infrastructure development strategy launched by Beijing.

The Asian colossus invests in critical infrastructure, Richardson warned, such as deep-water ports, space or telecommunications, with 5G networks and the multinational Huawei.

For what reason? Question. “If I had to guess, they are probably offered a discount.”, in a context of economic difficulties aggravated by the pandemic that hit the region hard, where at least 170 million people live in poverty.

The general argues that American equipment is of better quality but countries are now paying close attention to the financing that goes along with it, to “who gives the best financial deal” because they can’t pay as much up front.

Close to home

So “we must pause and look at this very, very clearly” because it happens very close, “in our neighborhood”, asked Richardson, for whom being a good neighbor goes through “take care of each other”.

The United States has a third adversary: ​​transnational criminal organizations that inject “insecurity and instability”, which is precisely what, according to her, China and Russia take advantage of to “settle in and prosper”.

These networks are nourished by human trafficking, drug smuggling, unregulated logging, illegal mining, because it is a region rich in resources and rare earths, with the so-called Lithium Triangle (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile) , a much-needed metal for technology.

It also overflows with oil resources, copper, gold. That without counting the Amazon, the lungs of the world, and 31% of the Earth’s fresh water.

A zone “out of series”, she sums up, with a trade “amazing”, from which China benefits to a large extent, since it has become the main trading partner of some Latin American countries, relegating the United States to second place.

The value of trade between the Asian colossus and Latin America and the Caribbean has gone from 18,000 million in 2002 to approximately 450,000 today, and is on the way to 750,000 “in the near futurepredicts Richardson. “The stakes are high”.

Source: Gestion

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