China’s hunger for raw materials and the imbalance in the trade balance with Beijing are causing hives in Latin America.
The Mayaya gold mine, north of the Bolivian capital of La Paz, operates non-stop. Here near the kaka river, gold is extracted 24 hours a day, exploited by Bolivian cooperatives. But behind it are actually the Chinese owners, according to the local press. The environmental balance is catastrophic, there are reports that the rights of miners are being violated.
“The looting of Bolivian gold: Chinese companies hide behind mining cooperatives”, headlines the Bolivian newspaper El Deber. China’s craving for raw materials is increasingly being questioned in Bolivia: “The Chinese take everything and leave nothing for the people, but the government doesn’t say anything,” a man who did not want to reveal the identity of the man told the newspaper. the.
Mercury poisons Bolivian indigenous people
According to the Center for Indigenous Peoples of La Paz (CPILAP), the inhabitants of five indigenous peoples living in the Madidi National Park have toxic levels of mercury in their bodies. It is presumed that they are victims of contamination caused by the mercury used to extract gold. The indigenous people would be intoxicating through the consumption of fish.
“It’s a disaster,” Juan Pablo Cardenal, a writer, journalist and expert on Latin America and China, currently in Taiwan, tells Deutsche Welle (DW). “The Chinese don’t care about the environmental, social and labor damages of their projects, and host countries don’t review Chinese projects either,” he says.
While in China public opinion is unaware of the problem, In Latin America, criticism of Beijing’s hunger for raw materials and food production grows.
China, the great predator of the seas in Latin America
At the latest, since Ecuador detained the Chinese boat Fu Yuang Yu Leng 999 with 300 tons of fish, including 6,620 sharks, five years ago, in 2017, the concern that China is preying on the seas of Latin America.
Countries like Peru, and later Chile and Ecuador, decided to make their Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) data transparent, which comes from an automated satellite monitoring system for fishing vessels.
The environmental organization Global Fishing Watch then began monitoring the squid fleet in 2019. “Countries wanted more information about the movements and location of deep-sea fishing vessels that normally operate near their exclusive economic zones,” explains the organization to DW.
It is now known that squid fishing off the South American coasts is completely in the hands of China. 98.7 percent of the squid fleet that sailed in international waters off the coast of South America in 2021 was Chinese-flagged.
Local fishermen are powerless against the might of the Chinese fishing fleet. Its ships no longer call at ports in Central or South America and “transshipments on the high seas are practically impossible to control,” adds another environmental organization, Greenpeace.
Argentina seeks to equalize the trade balance with China
In Argentina, President Alberto Fernández and his Economy Minister, Sergio Massa, have asked Beijing to balance these “very unequal relations”, reports the Clarín newspaper.
Argentina’s trade deficit with China is around eight billion dollars a year. The accumulated total from 2013 to date reaches 57,000 million dollars. This, in turn, is equivalent to Argentina’s foreign debt. For this reason, Fernández and Massa are looking for a way to reorganize a commercial relationship “from which until now only China has benefited.”