China’s shifting LatAm focus: From sovereign loans to local networks, surveillance tech deployment

China is building a grassroots presence in Latin America, with public surveillance and safety solutions among target segments, BNamericas was told.

While the bulk of Chinese investments in Latin America is still geared to securing food and raw materials for its economy, China is engaging with different levels of governments in the region to develop markets for an increasingly wide range of high-value-added products.

Chinese firms, benefiting from subsidized production, are offering national and sub-national authorities in Latin America cut-price solutions chiefly in the technology and energy infrastructure spaces.

Chinese businesses seeking a foothold in Latin America traditionally had a role in large sovereign lending arrangements.

“That’s not really a feature of the relationship anymore,” said Margaret Myers, director of the Asia & Latin America Program at US think tank the Inter-American Dialogue. “Instead, we see Chinese companies, which have now established significant presence across the region, engaging on their own terms through networks that they’ve established over the course of many years on the ground and increasingly doing so not just at the national level but also at the local, through networks of contacts.

“A lot of dealmaking is happening through the companies, often with behind-the-scenes support from Chinese financial institutions but not through these sorts of commodity-backed loans or sovereign lending arrangements that were a major feature of the relationship in the past.”

In the Chinese surveillance and public safety technology space, among other deployments, Venezuela has launched QR code-based ID card Carnet de la Patria, while Ecuador has implemented integrated emergency response platform ECU 911 and Uruguayan capital Montevideo facial recognition camera systems in public spaces.

While most technology applications – such as Uruguay’s – are “pretty innocuous” some are aimed much more explicitly at social control, said Myers.

“That’s the case with the Carnet de la Patria system that was implemented in Venezuela, which resembles in many ways what China has at home,” Myers said, adding that data is leveraged to “ensure a degree of social control” and that, in some cases, data on Latin American citizens is used by Chinese technology firms to further develop AI capabilities. 

Top Chinese technology players in Latin America include Huawei, ZTE and Dahua.