American Thought Leaders - The New Sino-Iranian Alliance Taking Over Latin America: Joseph Humire

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

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, China and Iran are positioning themselves to take advantage of all that.”Joseph Humire 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 been looking closely at Latin America for 20 years.“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,” says Humire.In this episode, we dive into how the China–Iran–Russia coalition is influencing the region, from Venezuela to Bolivia. We also discuss how this is impacting America and the greater Western world.“If you think China is simply doing this for economic ambitions, you’re not reading the tea leaves on how China operates. They’re buying a country. They’re buying the sovereignty of this country,” says Humire. “Fundamentally, China is making Latin America a region more inhospitable to the United States.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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 Jan Jekielek. 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, you know, we talked right after the election. So right after the election, there was an effort by the opposition, Venezuela, Marie-Carina Machado and Mundo Gonzalez, to rally international support. And I think they did a good job. I think they basically got about two-thirds of Latin America to either recognize Mundo Gonzalez as the president-elect of Venezuela, which is 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 recognized him immediately after, Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, Bolivia. The big countries, Cuba, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, the ones we talked about, they haven't gone the full distance of recognizing Edmundo Gonzalez, but they haven't recognized Nicolas Maduro either. And I think that's somewhat of a diplomatic victory on Maria Corina.

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 Emundo 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 of some of the cabinet members

inside Venezuela and one of the individuals that's most notorious in the Maduro regime, his name is Diosdado Cabello, his name translates as God given, Diosdado, 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. And Mundo 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. And so the bottom line is this kind of repressive apparatus is, I guess, growing. 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, and 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, his regime, is sending a message. We care only about what we control, and we control what goes on inside Venezuela.

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 over all 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 interest, even beyond my academic interest, I go back to my time in the military and when I was in the Marine Corps. 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 port companies, 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 and 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, you know, 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 exercise called Snoopy missions, which basically you observe the traffic of the vessels that are transiting

through the canal. 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, right there, there just got my first glimpse of 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 deep water 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 of 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 40 deep water ports on national security of Canada, my home nation, the US, and North America in general? So to do that, let me actually go to 2004. Because this is what I didn't realize at the time when I was

down 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 and 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, which is 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, in other words, we removed the dragon and turned it into a 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 pushed back by a lot of their disinformation channels.

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 I was there as part of a military exercise, we have 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, you know, 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, the IDB, since 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 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 percent. 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 Bank that actually told me this story had called it an institutional kickback. Basically, they co-opted the largest multilateral land institution for Latin America. And what did they do with that? Well, they made conditions, and some of those conditions were

if they provided this, they called 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 and not understanding what China was doing led to. So I say malign intent because China misled Latin America to thinking this was just commercial when it was actually more military in nature. And I say U. intent 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. 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 this spaceport in Argentina. Okay, that's clearly military. But everything else, that looks commercial to me. Well, that's a great question.

So let's go to there. So 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 a, like the way they archetyped the station, it was done outside of the Argentine military's control. 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 was offering to Venezuela

to create a package. 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 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 you know basically destroyed their economy sixty percent of the GDP evaporated in six years unless you have other priorities.

Absolutely. And I argued this 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 we look at very strategically on the map of where they're located, we could point to at least three major port projects that, to me, are more militaristic than they are commercial. Some of them have a 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 the deep water port, and it's so profound underwater, like the deep water port is going so far into the ocean that you don't need that for commercial reasons. The only reason you would need that 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.

And 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 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 south, they're building to have the capabilities to receive submarines. 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 build 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 if they're able to eventually break the chain of island nations and get past Guam into the Blue Ocean, they need to have a destination. 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 the commerce and business and some of it was but also creating the dual use infrastructure so that when they need to send military ships to the region they can 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 with 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 and Wampoa, and they made us understand that Hutchinson and 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 in 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 Xi Jinping elevated that into one of the top priorities of the regime. So which basically means that you bet you better do it or you're going to get in trouble. This is something that was lost

in Latin America. Most Latin Americans, no idea that they had this this doctrine of military civil fusion. And I always emphasize when I would speak to them and say, you know, in the United States, we call the 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, who's a candy land for all kinds of minerals and agricultural products, basically is 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, like, what's the angle here? Like, why are we still talking? Why are we still looking to advance? And I think a big part of that is that they haven't been looking at the statistics inside China. 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 contract, both in terms of its demographics, housing, inflation, you guys know the rest, but their defense industry is growing. So the percentage that the defense industry is growing into 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-indust counterparts is, you're not feeding the Chinese people. You're feeding the military-industrial complex. You're feeding the 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 undeniably contracting at this point, I think even by their own admission. Yet the military was expanding at the same time. Yeah. 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 is, it 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, you know, the argument is that China doesn't have the money to be able to do what they did in the early part of the 21st century in Latin America. And that's true. 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, like, you know, 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. But that's actually 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 how I see it in Latin America. The first is because regardless of how we look at Russia, and there's a lot of things that I think Russia does that is very destabilizing around the world. Obviously Vladimir Putin is a kind of a kleptocrat, he's kind of a big thug and he's invading 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 and Eastern tradition, more from Sun Tzu, a different whole, different 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 is less of a problem, and in Latin America they're a huge problem, but the Iranian-China connection has been less focused on

and probably less point of 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 credits and loans to Venezuela, they created a huge economic line between Beijing and Caracas. Iran, at the same time, and I'm talking about circa 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 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. They pretty much had no investments. They did not have a lot of commerce or a lot of business, couldn't give any loans. But 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 as the UN began to impose restrictions on on the exports especially at the idea 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. A lot of 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, we saw, they call in Spanish orden de pago. 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, PDVSA, and PDVSA was using its oil agreements with China to shield the Iranian transfer of military technology into Venezuela. So we saw this very early on. So I remember the question that dawned on me, 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 think this is a economic. If you believe that this is just an economic partner, then you say, OK, why would this economic partner benefit them to have this military armament that could potentially cause conflicts? 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,

obviously a lot of trade agreements. They're probably the top trade partner of 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 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 more practical inside Latin America than probably more than most people do. 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, 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 the Indo-Pacific, less focused on China, because they have to deal with the near abroad. 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, you know, 30, 40 years, this idea that they were going to project power through growth, right,

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 has been in question more than it ever 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 is 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, conventionally they're not, right? 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. So how does Iran operate there? I mean, we started talking about this a bit. It operates much the way it does in many parts of the world with, you know, through intelligence apparatuses, through covert networks, through proxies, much the way they've operated 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 Brits. And so they used that as kind of a nationalist sentiment that they said, we're protecting our resources, and we had to create a civil society movement that lifted up that's the revolution and took power for the next decades to come. So when you explain it that way in Latin America, you open a lot more eyes and ears in the region because there's a tremendous

amount of natural resources. 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 mosques, 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-sponsored terrorist attack in Latin America, which was in 1994 in Argentina, the former prosecutor of that attack, Barton Eastman, he once called these Islamic cultural 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. 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 Hispan TV. It's a television network that has presence in

at least 16 if not more countries in Latin America with 24 hours, seven days a week programming in Spanish, full-time in Spanish. They have influencer networks of you know digital activists, YouTube, social media. This is where Russia comes in. They cooperate with Russia to amplify their messages. So the biggest disinformation network in Latin America is RT and Sputnik. RT and Español 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. Like, how does this all work together? Because originally it was Iran and Russia. Russia has a kind of much longer history of being interested, right, in the region as a Soviet Union. Right.

And then how does this nexus work today? So it's layered. And let me describe it at the core. At the core, so we talked talked about the little bit last time there's 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 is at its heyday was 13 countries

I think it's down to 9 or 10 now, which is primarily Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and 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. Or 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 15 years ago. People weren't talking about that nexus. They were talking about them as isolated actors. And people would sometimes debate. They say, well, 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, 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 these four countries,

or just developed? No, I think it's more of an understanding by these external actors of the changes that were happening in Latin America in real time and adapting to those changes. So both of those four countries, and you could say Ecuador for a 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, 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, and 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 a power, they have their vehicle to go in and they reinforce that 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 and all 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 Evo 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 a few years later, open embassies on both sides, a Bolivian embassy in Iran, an Iranian embassy in Bolivia. By 2012, they have counter-narcotics agreements. They have law enforcement cooperation. By 2015, they have military cooperation. And then just last year, they signed a defense agreement.

So they went from almost having zero to having defense cooperation at the highest level in a matter of about ten years. That's very fast in terms of international relations and geopolitics. 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, because I guess it matches their messaging, or they're just the ones that they can work with? 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, right? They talk about natural resources and social

movements, and they talk about it because they understand that that's what exists in Latin America, right? They're going to have to pick up the pieces of what 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 these three actors are fundamentally creating these conflicts throughout the world. Some of them have boiled up into full-out wars, like we've seen 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 like Venezuela, it's not Ukraine, but you certainly wouldn't think it's a peaceful country right now with the kind of conflict that is bubbling up. And so what I was saying- 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 the large amount of public spending so like 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 E Eben-Rolands 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 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 percent of GDP collapsed? Well, the ones that came to, quote unquote, save the day were Russia and Iran with food and fuel. Food and fuel shipments from Russia and Iran came to subsidize the Maduro regime and allow them to withstand the maximum pressure by the Trump administration. Now, we're already starting to see Russia come, Russia and Iran come into Bolivia.

Just in the last two months, there's been a handful of Russian cargo oil ships that 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 Bolivia made with Vladimir Putin about lithium. And so Russia is 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 of trade and control of maritime security, but fundamentally creating a region that's inhospitable to the United States. So migration and drugs and all that, that's just the beginning. And we're seeing that.

We're seeing it with the crisis on the U.S. southern border. We're seeing it 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-permiss 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. As a matter of fact, Mexico probably should be the number one source of nearshore manufacturing that companies that are coming out of China and want to relocate close to the United States,

Mexico should be open for business. But the Mexican government 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, China, Iran 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, just very truthful statement. And I've talked to a lot of people that have been working, diplomats that work 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% 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, 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. Right now, it's the last last and I think that needs to change to be able to fix this. As the final thought, you know, it just strikes me that not only does Javier

Millay in Argentina have his work cut out for him to reform the economy, but it would seem all these actors have a particular interest in seeing him fail. Absolutely. Javier Millay 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 Millet, 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. 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 and was always going to be able to be an area of influence that they would control.

And then comes Javier Millet. And Javier Millet, now he's 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 and 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. He can't just be Javier Millet in 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. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.