Colombian politicians are gravitating to China as relations sour with Washington under US President Donald Trump.
Beijing is on a charm offensive, inviting politicians on all-expense-paid trips ahead of the Andean nation’s presidential elections next year. There are exclusive factory tours, photo-ops in luxurious rooms overlooking the imposing sprawl of China’s infrastructure and guides with near-flawless Spanish showing off the latest shiny tech developments.
At least three Colombian presidential candidates, four senators and a minister have been on such tours this year, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation. Other current and former officials, entrepreneurs and media moguls have also been among the travelers, the people said.
Illustration: Mountain People
Colombians elect a new Congress in March next year and for vote for president in May, with incumbent leftist Gustavo Petro not allowed to run again.
Earlier this year, presidential hopeful Juan Manuel Galan was invited by the embassy to hear about opportunities to expand trade and learn how Colombia might benefit from China’s prowess in energy, technology and infrastructure.
“They’re incredibly well-prepared,” he said of his tour guides, many of whom were former diplomats. “It’s impressive how knowledgeable they are about Colombia’s history, its idiosyncrasy and its idioms.”
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has perfected this performance over years of trying to fortify the nation’s influence and trade ties around the world. Galan himself first visited China on such a trip 16 years ago and Beijing launched a similar effort during Colombia’s last major election in 2022.
However, this time, the hospitality comes as Colombia’s long-standing alliance with the US is unraveling.
Trump has gone directly after Petro, calling the Colombian leader a “thug” who is not doing enough to tamp down on his country’s record cocaine production, and imposing personal sanctions on him and members of his inner circle.
This year the US decertified Colombia as a partner in the war on drugs, and slashed aid. The US has since signaled that it is even considering a land attack within Colombia.
China’s growing influence in Colombia is “not because Petro and Trump hate each other,” said Veneta Andonova, a professor at Colombia’s University of the Andes. “It’s because the US isn’t willing to write checks, and China is.”
China’s envoy to the South American nation was asked about the trips by Colombian politicians at a news conference last week.
“We are working to further advance this mutually beneficial relationship between Colombia and China, regardless of who occupies the presidential palace” after the election, Chinese Ambassador to Colombia Zhu Jingyang (朱京陽) told reporters.
During the 2023 to 2024 congressional period, 28 members of Colombia’s lower house traveled to China compared with 24 who visited the US during the same time frame, according to research by professor David Castrillon for the site Diplomacia Abierta.
That was before Trump took office and began clashing with Petro.
The outreach is part of a plan Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) announced in May during a China-Latin America summit in Beijing. The communist government pledged to invite 300 politicians from the region to China annually over the next three years, as well as offer increased academic and training opportunities.
Henry Wang Huiyao (王輝耀), founder of the Center for China and Globalization research group in Beijing, described such visits as normal.
“It’s a way of helping people better understand what’s happening in China, and help us understand those countries who send their people here,” he said.
“This has nothing to do with the US,” but rather the strengthening of existing trade and cultural ties, Wang added.
Beijing has increasingly invested in Colombia and its Latin America neighbors over the past two decades. For years, it did so by offering massive sovereign loans, often for infrastructure and resource-backed projects. The strategy aims to secure crucial commodity supplies and extend its geopolitical reach.
Venezuela served as the prime example, receiving nearly half of all Chinese development bank financing to the region since 2005.
“That moment, in many ways, has passed,” said Margaret Myers, director of the Asia and Latin America program at the Inter-American Dialogue. “It’s been replaced by a much more intensive focus on smaller projects in very specific, often innovation-related sectors, many of which align with the objectives that have been set forth nationally, but also at local levels.”
Petro, sworn in as Colombia’s first leftist leader in 2022, has sought to bolster those ties. During a state visit in May, he met with Xi and signed on to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative in a bid to boost trade and Chinese investment in the Andean nation.
Bilateral trade between China and Colombia rose 13 percent last year from the previous year to US$20.8 billion, Chinese General Administration of Customs data showed. Colombia’s trade deficit with the Asian giant widened to US$12.4 billion last year, from US$6 billion five years earlier.
Colombia primarily imports from China are machinery and transport equipment, electronics and telecommunications goods, vehicles and parts, iron and steel products, and plastics, official data showed.
China, in turn, buys energy and mineral commodities from Colombia, including fuels and metals. China is Colombia’s largest trade partner after the US.
Chinese firms first gained a major foothold in Colombia’s infrastructure sector in October 2019, when the APCA Transmimetro consortium — led by state-owned China Harbour Engineering Company Ltd (CHEC) and Xi’an Metro Co — won the US$4.5 billion contract to build Bogota’s first metro line. It marked the largest Chinese infrastructure deal in Colombia to date. The project is expected to be completed in about 2028.
CHEC also has a majority stake in the Highway to the Seas 2, a roughly US$1.1 billion, 254km road concession connecting Medellin with the Uraba Gulf on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. Part of the government’s Fourth Generation Road Concession Program, the endeavor — originally awarded to a local consortium and taken over by CHEC in 2021 — became the first major Colombian road project under Chinese control.
Bogota also partnered with Sinovac Biotech Co, a Chinese biopharmaceutical lab, to create Bogota Bio, a company aimed at promoting research and creating vaccines against COVID-19, hepatitis A, polio and chickenpox. Sinovac said it expects to invest US$100 million in the project.
Now, Petro’s administration is in the process of awarding a contract for public cloud services to manage and store information from nearly 200 public agencies and entities. The auction is valued at 1.3 trillion pesos (US$338.8 million) and major cloud players such as Amazon.com Inc, Microsoft Corp, Google, IBM and Oracle Corp have expressed interest in participating.
However, there have been concerns over security and data protection from the US and within Colombia that Chinese providers such as Huawei Technologies Co and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd would also bid.
“It is in Colombia’s best interest to open the bidding process based on full competition and innovation,” Zhu said about the cloud service auction. “Some people are spreading a false narrative that Chinese companies represent a security risk and that American companies represent data security. That’s not the case.”
If recent history offers any indication, the Chinese firms could well stand a chance. When neighboring Brazil elected Jair Bolsonaro as president in 2019, the right-wing leader — mindful of aligning with Trump — portrayed China as a predatory economic power. That year Beijing welcomed several Brazilian congressional delegations, some of whose members returned to Brasilia optimistic about closer ties and largely unmoved by US cyber-security warnings.
Despite US pressure, Brazil included Huawei in its 5G network rollout.
While Huawei did not formally “win” the auction, its equipment has been widely deployed in Brazilian mobile networks. Then, when Brazil’s government was facing medical supply shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro’s ministers negotiated with China for vaccine inputs.
China and its companies have paired their growing investments in Latin America with diplomatic outreach. Since 2017, five countries have shifted their diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China, and many nations in the region have joined the Belt and Road Initiative.
Beijing’s strategy has been tested multiple times in Peru, where China retains significant influence. In Chile, lawmakers across the political spectrum have accepted Chinese-funded invitations to visit the Asian country in trips framed as efforts to deepen political, economic and cultural ties.
China sees Chile as an example of what its long-term relationship with Colombia could be, Zhu said.
In August, a group of five left-wing Ecuadorian lawmakers took the tour after receiving an invitation by China’s embassy.
The Colombian experience is tailored to each attendee’s interests, Galan said.
From the moment they land, participants are led on an intense, multicity tour — often including Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen — with activities scheduled back-to-back, he said.
While the core interest is showcasing China’s technological and economic evolution, the hosts seek to understand the visitors’ political and personal perspectives, Galan said.
Some recipients ignore the invitations or return with their views unchanged, but others, such as presidential candidate Roy Barreras, come back full of enthusiasm about the Asian giant.
“Is China a danger or an opportunity?” Barreras asked his supporters in a video on social media. “The danger would be to distance ourselves from it.”
With assistance from Samy dghirni, Stephan Kueffner, Marcelo Rochabrun, Valentina Fuentes, Yian Lee and Colum Murphy.
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