This week on Sinica, we offer listeners a sneak preview of one of the new shows coming soon to the Sinica Network: Café & Seda, or Coffee and Silk. While this episode is in English, the podcast will be mostly in Spanish — our first non-English show. The host is Parsifal D'Sola, who is Executive Director of the ABF China Latin America Research Center and a nonresident senior fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub. Parsifal is a native of Venezuela, and his focus is on Sino-Latin American relations. Between 2019 and 2020, he acted as Chinese Foreign Policy Advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs under the Interim Government of Venezuela of Juan Guaido.

In this episode, Parsifal talks with Dr. Evan Ellis. Evan is a research professor of Latin American Studies at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College. His work focuses on the region’s relationships with China and other non-Western Hemisphere actors as well as transnational organized crime and populism in the region. He previously served on the Secretary of State’s policy planning staff with responsibility for Latin America and the Caribbean as well as international narcotics and law enforcement issues. Evan has also been awarded the Order of Military Merit José María Córdova by the Colombian government for his scholarship on security issues in the region.

Latin America has been the world’s most affected region due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Poverty levels have risen considerably, and economic contraction is several points higher than the global average. How will this affect Sino- Latin American relations? Furthermore, while the United States increasingly loses influence across the region, Chinese foreign policy has become more sophisticated and localized, filling many of the spaces traditionally filled by the United States and other Western actors. Evan helps us answer these questions and offers recommendations both for the United States in dealing with China’s growing role in the region, as well as advice for Latin American countries in managing the challenges that greater engagement with China will bring about.      

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at SupChina.com.

Recommendations:

China Engages Latin America: Distorting Development and Democracy? By Evan Ellis

Links of interest:

Articles from Evan Ellis at Global Americans

Andrés Bello Foundation - China Latin America Research Center

Twitter: @FABChinaLatam | @REvanEllis

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