By Edelmiro Franco V. | 2025-06-10

BOGOTÁ -- Latin American nations must take a more assertive stance in regulating Chinese investments, especially on environmental, labor, security and human rights issues, region watchers warn.

That was the main takeaway from the virtual forum "China-CELAC: Challenges and Perspectives for Latin America and the Caribbean," hosted on May 29 by the BRICS Policy Center and Sustainable Latinoamérica (LAS). The event dissected the outcomes of the fourth ministerial meeting of the China-CELAC Forum, held on May 13 in Beijing.

BRICS is a trading bloc named for early members Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. CELAC is the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States.

Concerns have grown across the region over mounting allegations that Chinese investors have violated environmental and human rights, while benefiting from weak enforcement and regulatory blind spots.

Panelists María Helena Rodríguez of Brazil's BRICS Policy Center, Camilo Defelipe Villa of Colombia's Javeriana University and Maia Seeger, director of Chile's Sustentarse corporation, agreed on the urgent need for stronger national regulatory frameworks to protect regional interests in dealings with China.

'Act as a bloc'

"Latin America must seek greater integration and act as a bloc to negotiate key issues in today's shifting global landscape, particularly regarding critical minerals and infrastructure for extraction and transport," said Seeger during the forum.

She expressed concern over governments deliberately weakening regulations to attract foreign investment. "We're seeing officials roll back environmental protections under the guise of not scaring off investors," she said.

Resource extraction cannot serve only foreign interests while leaving Latin America saddled with social and environmental crises, she added. She criticized CELAC for its failure to present a unified agenda in dealings with Beijing.

"In the long term, how beneficial are these Chinese investments for our countries?" she asked.

Brazilian scholar Rodríguez underscored the urgency of a clearly defined regional strategy to avoid human rights violations by Chinese or any other foreign investors.

"China knows exactly what it wants from Latin America. But we haven't defined what we want from China, or if we have, our vision is too shortsighted," she said. "We need to build a future-focused development strategy."

For academic Defelipe, the China-CELAC summit lacked emphasis on regulatory safeguards and investor accountability, particularly in mining. "There was very little discussion around social and environmental responsibility," he noted.

China's clear strategy

China has a well-defined roadmap for its expansion in Latin America, focused on strategic sectors like energy, digital infrastructure and cross-border e-commerce, panelists said.

The China-CELAC Joint Action Plan (2025–2027), agreed upon during the recent Beijing summit, outlines expanded cooperation in growth, investment and productive transformation. Key areas for China include clean energy, artificial intelligence and the digital economy.

The action plan highlights Beijing's intention to increase imports of "quality products" from the region and to encourage more Chinese companies to invest in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Defelipe viewed this emphasis as a potential double-edged sword.

"Beijing's call to import high-quality products sounds good, but it may lead to barriers for countries that are still developing [economic] transformation policies, pursuing an energy transition or practicing responsible mining," he said.

Opacity and influence

Seeger presented her study "Investments, Transparency and Socio-Environmental Governance," published in April 2024. The report chronicles 50 years of Sino-Chilean relations and highlights the challenges posed by opacity in Chinese investments, especially concerning environmental protection and human rights.

Chile's engagement with China "has been marked by an overwhelming number of controversial lawsuits, business deals and lobbying activities, many of them beyond public scrutiny due to blurred lines between public and private sectors," Paulina Garzón, executive director of Sustainable Latinoamérica and author of the report's prologue, said.

"The operations of Chinese banks and investors are often shrouded in secrecy, with confidentiality clauses that block access to public information and prevent accountability," said Garzón.

The report criticizes Chinese investors for consistently disregarding socio-environmental impacts and proceeding with projects that arouse broad community opposition or threaten ecological systems.

"Secrecy appears to be embedded in Chinese business culture," the study says, adding that Chilean institutions share responsibility for enabling such practices. The corporate transparency of Chinese firms operating in Chile, the report notes, "lags far behind" global standards.

Chinese institutions based in Chile lack transparency, Seeger agreed. Her investigation points to the first major alarm in 2014, when Chilean media revealed losses in the millions suffered by the state-owned copper giant Codelco in a deal with China's Minmetals Non-Ferrous Metals Co. Ltd.

At the time, reports pointed to "irregularities, embezzlement and fraud," linking the losses to potentially fraudulent transfers of profits between related companies in futures markets. But public investigations went nowhere, and accountability remains elusive.