EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) continue to grapple with some of the highest rates of violence and corruption in the world, particularly due to the corrosive presence of transnational criminal organizations (TCOs). Notorious regional TCOs continue to sell drugs worldwide, kill with impunity, bribe local officials, terrorize communities, and build deadly international partnerships with Italian, Russian, and Albanian criminals. But one group has quietly increased its influence throughout this region, even though its customers are half a world away: Chinese criminal networks. Over the past decade, Chinese criminal groups operating in LAC have specialized in four illegal [ … ]

Introduction As Mexico looks to national elections in June 2024, the expanding engagement that the country is backing into with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will have profound implications for the country’s future, as well as the United States and the rest of the region. Background Mexico’s relationship with China has always been complicated. Although Chinese migrants formed an important part in Mexico’s national story, the perceived “otherness” of the Chinese community and competition for work led to occasional violence against ethnic Chinese. With the contemporary expansion of the PRC economy, the position of both countries as manufacturing exporters [ … ]

Introduction In his March 2023 annual posture statement to the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, head of U.S. Northern Command General Glen VanHerck referred to the substantial commercial and other presence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the Bahamas as “efforts to gain a foothold only 50 miles from the U.S. East Coast.” Relatively little has been written in either the U.S. or Latin American and Caribbean media regarding PRC engagement in the Bahamas. Those activities, in both commercial and other domains, have been substantial and growing for more than two decades. Moreover, they are part of broader [ … ]

This article was originally published on The Diplomat on July 17, 2023. The enormous expansion of global engagement by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its companies over the past two decades has generated a corresponding need to protect Chinese operations and personnel in the dangerous environments where they sometimes operate. Awareness of such needs for protection among the Chinese public was most expressed in the “Wolf Warrior” movies, in which Chinese citizens working abroad are threatened by foreign mercenaries and must be rescued. The need to evacuate Chinese citizens from Libya in 2011 and Yemen in 2015 due [ … ]