This Thursday, Nov. 14, the Presidents of Peru and China, Dina Boluarte and Xi Jinping, are set to jointly officially inaugurate the first phase of operations at the new, ultra-modern deepwater Pacific port at Chancay being built by China’s COSCO Shipping Co. and Peru’s Volcan Mining. Anyone half-human should join Peruvians and people throughout South America in celebrating the kick-off of this Belt and Road project, and the plans to next build transcontinental rail lines connecting to it, which will bring about a giant jump in the industrialization of Peru and the entire South American interior.
But official Washington is proclaiming that the Chancay port is a dastardly plot by the Chinese to take over the region and steal resources that rightfully belong to the United States, and that the U.S. should take measures to stop such bold steps towards regional economic development.
U.S. Army War College Latin American studies professor Evan Ellis, an Ayn Rand cultist and firm believer that the Anglo-Americans should run the world, is obsessed with figuring out how to do just that. In his latest attack on the Chancay Port, published two days after the U.S. election, Ellis portrays the Peruvian government as weak, vulnerable and probably corrupt for allowing COSCO to build and operate such a critical port complex—which, by the way, no U.S. company had offered or intended to build. He twice suggests that officials approving the contracts likely received “direct or indirect personal benefits,” an obvious call for “anti-corruption” investigations to be used to take the port’s operations out of the hands of COSCO.
