Sea Control - Sea Control 526 - Maritime Security in Latin America Wilder Alejandro Sanchez (Part 2)

Episode Date: June 9, 2024

Links 1. CIMSEC author page of Wilder Alejandro Sanchez.2. Second Floor Strategies.3. “Hospital Ships: A Vital Asset for SOUTHCOM and South American Navies,” by Wilder Alejandro Sanchez, CIMSEC, January 24, 2023.4. “TIAR 21: Maritime Security, the TIAR, and IUU Fishing in the Western Hemisphere,” by Wilder Alejandro Sanchez, CIMSEC, October 16, 2020. 5. Twitter: @W_Alex_Sanchez.

Hey folks, it's Jared. This is part two of a two-part episode featuring Walker Mills' interview with longtime SimSec contributor Wilder Alejandro Sanchez. This episode was edited and produced by Andrew Frame. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. And now, Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security.

Welcome aboard the Sea Control podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security. I'm Walker Mills, and my guest today is Wilder Alejandro Sanchez, an analyst and researcher of Latin American security. He's been featured in a wide range of publications, including Jane's, Breaking Defense, and Shepard Media. He writes the SimSec column, Southern Tide, focused on maritime security in the Caribbean and Latin America.

And he's the president and founder of Second Floor Strategies and a non-resident senior associate at the Americas Program, the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And I'm curious, Alejandro, I mean, we've mentioned a couple of countries. Brazil has their ambitious submarine program

and tried to build at least one nuclear-powered boat. Yeah, I'm a little more familiar with Columbia and some of their future shipbuilding designs, but do you see other trends in terms of acquisitions in the region? You know, are navies expanding or kind of shifting to different types of vessels? In Mexico might be a case where the navy is a little bit, you could say, stagnant or not necessarily growing along with regional trends. Acquisitions are based on missions and priorities. And as I said before, there hasn't been an interstate conflict in the region in decades. There is cooperation, there is communication, but there's not much integration. Yes, Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro is a concern, but I do not foresee a war in Guyana.

Moreover, like I said before, countries' building mechanisms are working. One example is actually Brazil. Brazil is building a submarine, four submarines, and a micro-powered submarine. The Brazilian Air Force is also in the process of receiving a fleet of brand-new Saab Griffin warplanes. However, this ambitious acquisition by Brazilian armed forces has not resulted in an arms race. No South American country feels threatened by Brazil buying Griffin warplanes or building a nuclear power submarine, which is much more powerful than what any other South American Navy fleet has. So there is no arms in Latin America going on. I think that in the future, the fleets of South American navies will primarily domestically manufacture and more suitable for multi-role operations than solely your standard mission of protecting the country from an invader.

Again, I'm focusing very much on not just what regional navies are buying, but where they're buying them from. And they're primarily, like I said, from state-run shipyards. I mentioned Brazil, obviously. We can talk about Peru, which just signed a deal with HHI from South Korea to build multi-role ships and the first ever OPV that the SEAM is going to build. SEAM is also building a fleet of coastal patrol vessels. They've become an expert on that.

You have Chile's ASMAR shipyard. They're building a polar vessel for Chile's Antarctic operations. They also have the Escotillon 4 project, which Asmar is going to build a fleet of new transport multi-purpose vessels. The shipbuilding corporation Cotecmar is teaming up with Damon from the Netherlands to build a fleet of frigates. In Ecuador, you have the shipyard Astinavi, which is building the first ever multi-purpose vessel for the Ecuadorian Navy. Unfortunately, other countries are lagging behind. Uruguay has no shipbuilding capability starting off. Argentina, too.

For all that we've talked about the might of the Argentine military, there are two shipyards that are not off in Argentina, Rio Santiago and Tandanor. They've been trying to build two small training vessels for the Argentine Navy for around a decade. I'm not exaggerating. It's almost been a decade. They're still not done.

And we now hear the Argentinians saying we want to build a multi-purpose vessel or an amphibious landing vessel or even a submarine. They haven't been able to finish two training vessels. I don't think they have the capabilities to build something much larger. Yes, when it comes to Mexico, they haven't built or bought ships during the entire six-year presidency of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, which is something that I'm sure that the Mexican Navy and the Mexican shipyard estimator are upset about. And we'll have to see if the next president of Mexico will be more interested in modernizing the country's fleet.

Mexico is going to have elections this year, so it's just about waiting to see what happens in the elections. And the Central American nations have very small budgets. So buying fleets of any type of ship is out of the question. The United States Navy and South Comhabit program, which they have hired the Louisiana-based shipyard Metal Shark to build a fleet of, I believe, 12 or 13 near-coastal patrol vessels, NCPBs, for various U.S. partners across the greater Caribbean region. They have already transferred NCPBs to the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador. I believe that some will go to Jamaica and Guyana as well. One open question that I have is the future of submarine forces. It's more feasible for Ministry of Defense and NAVIS to justify buying multi-role vessels,

which can be used for combat operations, battles of HADR, humanitarian assistance, that sort of thing. A submarine, unfortunately, is not suitable for non-combat missions. You cannot really use a submarine to transport pets and medicine or doctors and to help a cost of population that just got hit by a tsunami, for example. So, while Brazil is building a fleet of submarines, they are deceptions to the rule. Argentina's fleet, for example, is non-existent, or I believe at least non-operational, because we only have one sub right now, or decades old. Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador have very old boats, which are over around 40 years old on average, so they will be decommissioned and have to be replaced eventually, because I don't think any of these names want to lose that capability. But buying new submarines for any of these countries is going to be a huge challenge when it comes to convincing civilian governments that they have to invest in it.

And finally, we haven't talked about maritime patrol aircraft, which are, again, critical for spotting a vessel that may be engaged in IUU fishing or potentially carrying narcotics or any other kind of illegal cargo. I know that Ecuador has received recently a Hercules that was, I believe, donated by the U.S. military from U.S. AFCOM that will help with surveillance operations. Argentina has also made the first payment for four P-3 Orion MPAs from Norway. They're used. There's a second hand.

Let's see if that acquisition moves forward too. While many South American navies are building via the local shipyards, ships, or submarines, the components still need to be bought from abroad. When it comes to missiles, cannons, radars, sonars, communication systems, some of these systems can be domestically manufactured, but not all of them. So even if we see a South American shipyard build a multipurpose ship or a frigate or submarine within the next decade, most of these components are going to have to come from abroad from external suppliers. Shifting gears a little bit, last year you wrote a really interesting piece for the Southern Tide column at CIMSEC about hospital ships and their kind of unique role in the region. Can you talk some about that? For sure. A couple of years ago, I interviewed Admiral Craig Fuller, who at the time was the commander of U.S. Sovereign Command, and he told me that he praised the U.S. Comfort, one of the U.S. Navy's hospital ships, and he said that he wished that he could send the Comfort twice a year to SAFCON's AOR for HADR and other humanitarian assistance operations.

Last year, in 2023, I had the pleasure to interview General Laura Richardson as well, who is the current commander of SAFCOM, and she said the same thing, praising the importance of comfort to support the command's missions. More recently, if you look at the SAFCOM's posture statement, which was released in March of 2024, it also praises and stresses how effective hospital ships like the Comfort to promote SAFCOM's mission. The Post Office noted that D.C. Wallachia, for 2023, for Operation Continuing Promise, Comfort was actually out of commission, it's been undergoing repairs, so the U.S. and its Burlington was embarked in a 52-day humanitarian assistance mission that went to Colombia, Grenada, Panama, Trinidad and Tobago. Hospital ships sent by SAFCOM are very important to win the hearts and minds of Latin American and Caribbean populations. We often think about if a carrier strike group goes to Colombia or to Peru as part of UNITAS, well, that's great for the government to feel happy and important.

The navies are going to train with the carrier strike group. That's great, but you're not really winning the hearts and minds of the population. Hospital ships do that because they can provide a service that citizens from Central America, from the Caribbean, and from South America will not have access to because of the socioeconomic situation. I have proposed in the past that as the U.S. Navy plans to procure a fleet of new hospital ships to replace Mercy and Comfort, that South Com should be assigned one because it's very helpful to its missions. Also, South American navies have hospital ships as well that can be used for HABTR missions. South America's coast is prone to several disasters, like earthquakes, tsunamis, torrential floods, and of course we have mentioned that hurricanes occur in the Caribbean. So when these natural disasters occur, natives deploy their hospital ships to assist local

populations. Chile's medical ship, Cirujano Videla, visits the Archiloe Archipelago with some regularity. The Chiloese Archipelago is part of Chile, and the medical ship provides medical services for free to local communities because they are way too far from the mainland and they don't have access to more complex hospitals or clinics in case they have some kind of emergency. And when it comes to countries like Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, these countries have vast territories which include the Amazon. So it's necessary for them to have reverie hospital ships that can provide assistance to isolate communities along the many, many rivers of these countries. I must say that

This is something that all three navies, ministers of defense, and gormes in general understand. That, for example, Peru's ship Marsima has built a fleet of medical and social service ships, locally known as Plataformas Itinerantes de Acción Social, which sail across all of Peru's rivers and one in Lake Titicaca to help local communities. This year, two more PIAs that are called Ucayali and Ucayali II, they will be commissioned and they will be sailing through the Ucayali River, located in Peru. Also, when it comes to Colombia, the building corporation Cotecmar is also building a hospital ship, which is going to provide medical services to populations of Cauca, Chocó, Nariño, and Valle del Cauca, which means the coastal departments of Peru, Colombia's Pacific coast. Brazil has quite a few hospital ships as well.

So I cannot stress the importance of hospital ships, and obviously they have a role during wartime, but they also provide critical services to communities when a natural disaster occurs. And they are also a vital lifeline to isolated communities who have the right to access NAGUS and other state services with some regularity. Really fascinating. And I think especially the point that you make for some of these countries, Peru and Colombia and Brazil, especially the Navy and then a subset of the Navy, these hospital ships or social action vessels are a key way of expanding governance in their own territory, right? Which for listeners from the U.S. and Western Europe, that's really a foreign thing that, you know, our Navy is not involved in regular governance at home, but in the Western Hemisphere and other places it is. Absolutely, yes. Alejandro, you know, I think kind of for the last question here, do you have recommendations for either the United States or regional countries in the Western Hemisphere for how they could perhaps best move forward or better manage some of the emerging trends in terms of maritime security in the region? So when it comes to the U.S., I'm going to talk about SAFCOM.

I have proposed in the past in several articles that SAFCOM requires permanently assigned ships, like a hospital ship, or ideally two littoral combat ships, or some other type of vessel, one that can operate out of the Pacific and one that can operate out of Florida to cover the Caribbean and the South Atlantic. SAFCOM does a lot with not much. The command does not receive the resources that other commands around the world receive. However, its missions include initiatives that are low-cost and high-reward, helping the American and Caribbean navies and militaries, or navies in particular, combat IUU fishing by sending locational surveillance aircraft to Peru or Ecuador to help them locate distant water fishing fleets, for example. Incidentally, last October, the U.S. Coast Guard cutters Alder and Terrelhorn and one Hercules C-130 went to the eastern Pacific off the coast of Peru as part of Operation Southern Shield.

And these assets helped the Peruvian Navy monitor for distant water-efficient vessels in its territorial waters and EEC. So I think that would be my first recommendation that South Korea requires and deserves more assets. a hospital ship, a couple of littoral combat ships, some ships that maybe the other commands don't need, but they will be very helpful for self-commissioning in the Western Hemisphere. Also, when it comes to other suggestions, one would be that there is communication, but there's not much integration when it comes to Latin American navies, and that needs to change. What I have proposed is that there should be some type of maritime task force to combat IUU fishing, for example, or to combat maritime

dark trafficking. Something similar to the multinational task force that are already operating off the Horn of Africa, which are fighting piracy and Houthi rebels in the Al-Yemen. The idea is that it is not without precedent, and there are some precedents within the Western Hemisphere. In the Caribbean, you have the shipwrecker

agreements. There's Operation Bahamas-Turk and Caicos-Opac, which is a decades-old trilateral country-codic cooperation between the U.S. government and the governments of the Bahamas and the Royal Turks and Caicos Islands. There's even another example when it goes to Argentina and Chile, they have teamed up to create a combined naval patrol that operates in Antarctic waters, looking for vessels that may require assistance or by visiting Antarctic bases as well, transferring supplies. So we need to see more integration. I understand that, of course, the national sovereignty is a very, very sensitive issue for Latin American militaries. I understand there's still border disputes, there's still some bad blood between some of these countries, but we need to think outside the box, come up with new, more integrated solutions to combat maritime crimes.

And one final issue I'm going to raise is that, and I have written about this for Sovereign Tide, for SimSec, that I have discussed the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, or TIAR, which was created in 1947. It was supposed to be a sort of NATO of the Western Hemisphere, Article III calls for collective security, for example. It has been invoked several times, not so much for collective security. In 2019, for example, the parties invoked the TR to put pressure on Medellín Maduro in Venezuela. So the TR has been used for non-military operations in the past. I think that it's time for the TR to be upgraded, to be modernized. I have proposed that there should be a TR-21 or TR-21. And the best idea to give this document new life is by expanding its reach or interpreting its articles in a different way

so that the TR can be invoked to combat IAU phishing. You can somehow maybe interpret some of the articles, like, for example, Article 5 says that the TR's Council can meet if there's a conflict or serious event that might endanger the peace of America. Well, running out of fish endangers the peace of America, so I think that would be a good reason to invoke it to combat distant water IUU fleets that are engaged in IUU fishing. Or the parties can simply add a new article to the TR that has to do with IUU fishing, for example. So I think that's some of the ideas I have that I think are a bit outside the box, but I believe that are necessary because air fishing is not going away, drug trafficking is not going away, maritime corridors is not going away, and cooperation exists, communication exists between regional navies, coast guards, air forces, but it's simply not in us. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, like we mentioned, a lot of the bigger issues or biggest issues facing the region are transnational threats. So more integration is naturally going to be one of the things that helps combat those. I'm sorry, but I think that's about all the time we have for today. So I'd like to thank my guest, Wilder Alejandro Sanchez, for discussing maritime security in Latin America with us. Alejandro, where, if anywhere, can our listeners find you online? And what are you working on next? Where can they find me? I am on LinkedIn.

I am on X or Twitter. Actually, I decided calling it X. I'm still going to call it Twitter. If you can just look up my name, Walter Alejandro Sanchez, I will definitely show up. And they can look up also on Google, my company, Second Floor Strategies,

and they can see what the services that my company can offer to any potential clients. What I'm working on right now is actually illegal phishing. I think that I want to discuss this more. My plan is to write an article for CSIS, for the Americas program, about the threat of IU fishing, and write down some of

the ideas that you and I have talked about today, about reforming the TR, more integration, looking to USVs or UAVs to improve surveillance capacities. I think that it would be good to just put all of these ideas on paper, or at least on the screen, to try to share them for a wider audience. Awesome. You'll have to reach back out once you get that written, and we'll bring you back on the show, because IU fishing is something we've had a couple episodes in the past about it. It's definitely an important topic that we like covering. Thanks again for joining us and to the listeners. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you next time. © BF-WATCH TV 2021

Thank you.