March 14, 2025 (EIRNS)—The Shanghai-Chancay shipping route through the beautiful modern deepwater port which China’s COSCO Shipping built at the Chancay Port in Lima, became fully operational on Dec. 18, 2024. It is the most important Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project yet in the Western Hemisphere. Two voyages back-and-forth between Shanghai and Chancay now take place weekly, cutting the shipping time between South America’s Pacific coast nations and China from some 35 to 25 days, with shipping costs between Peru and China cut by over 20%. As of March, cargo heading to Asia from Peru’s neighbors, Ecuador, Colombia and Chile, is consolidated at Chancay, from where it is shipped at less time and cost to Shanghai, and from there, to other ports throughout Asia. The cut in shipping time is particularly significant for the increasing tonnage of perishable agricultural products from South America which China and other Asian nations are buying.
Chinese daily Global Times pointed yesterday to the biggest threat to this “win-win” increase in trade between South America and Asia: The United States crazed insistence that Chinese development projects are built in countries only through “economic coercion,” and are a threat U.S. economic and security interests. Global Times reports how the U.S. Southern Command has been busy denouncing the Chancay Port as a “military threat” to the United States. Global Times cited the warning by Zhu Feng, director of School of International Studies at Nanjing University, in February that the Chancay Port may be the next target of U.S. pressure in the Western Hemisphere, following on the heels of Trump administration’s brutal squeezing of Panama over the canal, which succeeded in getting Panama to pull out of the Belt and Road.
