On Friday, Feb. 21 the office of the spokesperson for Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a formal statement revoking the visas of three Chilean government officials, claiming they had “knowingly directed, authorized, funded, provided significant support to, and/or carried out activities that compromised critical telecommunications infrastructure and undermined regional security in our hemisphere.” For this crime, these officials and their immediate family members will be ineligible for entry into the United States. The three officials, who were unnamed in the statement, were elsewhere identified as Telecommunications and Transportation Minister Juan Carlos Muñoz, Telecommunications Undersecretary Claudio Araya and his chief of staff Guillermo Petersen..”
“Compromised critical telecommunications infrastructure?” Not described in Rubio’s statement is the fact that Chile, for some time now, has been discussing the Chile-China Express (CCE) project with the China Mobile company to build a submarine fiber optic cable between the West Coast port of Valparaiso and Hong Kong. Muñoz went so far as to sign a decree in late January granting China Mobile a 30-year concession for the project, only to rescind it two days later, and the project is now in “pause.” But this was enough for the thuggish U.S. Ambassador Brandon Judd, whose diplomatic credentials consist of his having served as a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent in Arizona, to proclaim that the U.S. is going to have to step in to protect Chilean “sovereignty” because of the foreign threat to Chile’s vital telecommunications infrastructure. This is the same argument the U.S. claims it must do in Peru to protect the country’s “sovereignty” from the Chinese-controlled Chancay megaport. This is a sick geopolitical joke. China, by the way, is Chile’s number-one trading partner and has been for years.
