During a nine-day trip through Latin America in the fall, Chinese President Xi Jinping met with the leaders of Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina and inaugurated a $3-billion Chinese-funded port in Peru.

Over and over, Xi stressed his interest in strengthening economic ties with the region 10,000 miles from Beijing.

“True friends always feel close to each other,” he told China’s official news agency. “No matter the distance between them.”

Over the last two decades, China has begun to challenge longtime U.S. hegemony in Latin America. In at least six countries — Panama, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil and Bolivia — it has surged ahead of the United States as the biggest trading partners.

Now experts say China has been handed another opportunity in its quest to dominate the region: the presidency of Donald Trump.

In his first two weeks in office, Trump has strong-armed American allies, using the threat of tariffs to extract concessions from Colombia and then Mexico. At the same time, he has halted— and threatened to eliminate — many U.S. foreign assistance programs that have been a lifeline for developing nations.

Suddenly, China may seem like a more stable partner for many countries.

“The U.S. is now more unpredictable and bizarre than ever,” said Carol Wise, a political science professor at USC and expert on the relationship between China and Latin America. “The Trump administration has been very hostile to the region, and China has never shown that kind of hostility, ever.”

Of all the places where Trump’s foreign policy has created a newfound opening for China, none is more significant than Mexico.

North American free-trade agreements dating back three decades inextricably bind Mexico’s economy to the United States, and for a long time China was left largely out of the equation. But that began to change during Trump’s first presidency.

To skirt U.S. tariffs imposed on some of their goods, many Chinese companies moved parts of their supply chains to Mexico.

Chinese investment in the country surged to $570 million in 2022 from $5.5 million in 2013, according to Mexican government figures. Chinese firms now occupy twice as much industrial space in Mexico as they did three years ago, according to property analytics firm SiiLA.

They are building sprawling factories in industrial parks such as Hofusan, in the border state of Nuevo León, in order to send their products duty-free to Texas, 125 miles away.

“In one day, they can have your imports in the U.S.,” said Cesar Santos Cantú, a Mexican attorney who built the park on his family’s land with the help of two Chinese investors.

Mexican leaders have been courting more investment from China and other overseas companies in light of Trump’s push for more protectionist policies.

“Mexico will have to look for other paths,” then-Foreign Secretary Alicia Bárcena said last year, praising China as a “country that is constantly looking out for Mexico.”

Urging Mexico to diversify its trade relationships, Juan Carlos Moreno-Brid, an economics professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, likened the United States to “an abusive partner.”

“You can’t live four years with a gun to your head,” he said.

Mexico’s trade with the U.S. is still eight times that of its trade with China. But Washington is watching China’s encroachments south of the border closely.

“You have all these elements that from an economic standpoint push Mexico towards China,” said Evan Ellis, a research professor of Latin American studies at the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute. “But that complicates Mexico’s relationship with President Trump.”

China first ramped up trade with Latin America in the early 2000s to satisfy its voracious appetite for commodities during an economic boom.

It bought soybeans from Brazil, copper from Chile and lithium from Bolivia while flooding Latin American markets with Chinese products and telecommunications networks.

Trade between China and Latin America grew to $315 billion in 2020 from $12 billion in 2000, according to the World Economic Forum. In a decade, that number is expected to top $700 billion. For comparison, trade between the U.S. and Latin America in 2020 totaled $767 billion.

Ellis said that at first the United States was slow to react to rising Chinese influence in Latin America.

“As China was advancing in South America and to some degree in the Caribbean, I think there was a sort of a false sense of security in the United States,” Ellis said.

China’s inroads in the region are no an accident, but the result of strategic diplomacy.

More than 20 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are a part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, its effort to expand its global influence by funding major infrastructure projects. And in 2023, eight Latin American presidents made official to visits to China — the most ever in a year, according to the Boston University Global Development Policy Center.

That soft power helps pave the way for Chinese investment. It also builds support for one of China’s main geopolitical goals: getting more of the world to recognize its territorial claim to Taiwan.

At least five countries in Latin America have cut ties with Taiwan over the last eight years as a condition of establishing diplomatic relations with China. The latest was Honduras in 2023, a year after China surpassed the U.S. there as an investor, according to AidData, a research center at William & Mary that tracks Chinese financing.

Bryan Burgess, senior policy specialist there, predicted that China will move to fill the gaps left by reductions in U.S. aid to the region.

“The U.S. stepping back from its role in traditional development finance and aid projects is really opening a door for China to flood the zone,” Burgess said. “One of the advantages for Latin American countries now is the ability to play the U.S. and China off each other, do some bargain hunting and try to get more favorable terms.”

One perceived benefit for many Latin American countries is that, apart from the Taiwan issue, China isn’t meddlesome in politics. Its trade — and aid — is not conditioned on a country adhering to certain tenets of democracy, for example, as the U.S. once demanded, or on cooperating on issues such as immigration, which Trump requires.

Henry Huiyao Wang, founder of the nongovernmental Center for China and Globalization in Beijing, said China’s emphasis on economic cooperation — rather than political coercion — has bolstered its appeal for Latin American countries that have tired of U.S. meddling.

“Latin America still is influenced by the U.S.,” Wang said, “but China can provide them with economic benefit and also more political independence.”

But turning to China comes with its own risks. Debt defaults and failings in some China-backed projects — including a $2-billion hydroelectric dam in Ecuador that experienced thousands of cracks after its completion — have also raised doubts among Latin American countries about relying too heavily on China. And China’s current economic troubles could portend less trade and less generosity for faraway governments.

“I don’t think Latin America sees China as a reliable partner, but certainly a handy partner, especially for regimes that are populist and left-wing,” said Alicia Garcia-Herrero, chief economist for Asia Pacific at Natixis, a French investment bank.

With China and the United States announcing new tariffs against each other this week, it seems a new Cold War is brewing. Latin America will be one theater of the conflict.

“What we’re witnessing is a profound confrontation between the biggest economies of the world: China and the United States,” said Enrique Dussel Peters, director of the Center for Chinese-Mexican Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “This new triangular relationship is going on in all of Latin America.”

Linthicum reported from Albuquerque and Yang from Taipei, Taiwan.

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