Transfer of powers

ADRIAN DIAZ MARRO

CDMX

America is a continent in eternal transition. The colonial era was never surpassed, in any case replaced, and the custody of minors changed hands by virtue of an emancipation that has not yet materialized. We stop looking east and start looking north; the new promised land. The so-called American backyard has undergone permanent instability that seems useful in global geopolitical balances. It is difficult to understand the world as a chessboard where we are all sacrificial pieces, finding below the Rio Grande an infinity of pawns that were never allowed to crown queen. And after the disaffection caused by eternal poverty, an inconsistent American dream that, in any case, was produced by emigrating, leaving behind belongings, also affective, America (the continent) turns its hopes to the west, its west, which also has it although on our maps the world ends in the Pacific and there is nothing to its left.

Democracy is turning countries towards left-wing policies, or rather towards left-wing politicians (the policies have been very similar for a long time). People do not vote “delighted by”, but “disenchanted with” and today a new hope appears on the horizon. China has been very quietly positioning itself as the main trading partner of a good number of countries; it has signed more free trade agreements than anyone else in that region and has already rescued quite a few in trouble. There is no specific vocation to negotiate with certain countries, filtering ideologically… They negotiate with everyone. They trade with those most open to trade, with those most closed to ideology they “ideologize”. “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”, taken to maximum pragmatism to explain why they are capable of negotiating with their friend and with the enemy of their friend. A balance that, for the moment, works for China. After all, nobody understands China, and in any case, the goal was never to understand Mister Marshall, but to get the most out of him.

There remain today fourteen countries that officially recognize Taiwan and therefore do not have official relations with China. Nine islands/tax havens (I include the Vatican here) and five countries with faces and eyes, all of them on the American continent (Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, Haiti and Paraguay) that do not stop trading with China.

The Asian giant is advancing, and the New Silk Road now includes a continent that the wagons full of silk on the original route never reached. The US backyard is rebelling and looking for a new major trading partner. And Latin America is wondering how it can copy the Chinese model, a scheme that brought it out of poverty through hard work in conditions that are incontestably worse than those it has today, from which Latin America is fleeing today. The answer is cruel, but, as Serrat said: “the truth is never sad, what it has is no remedy”: China got out of poverty with its own efforts, while most of the world’s poor countries aspire to get out of poverty with the efforts of others. The equation only stands with a total lack of knowledge about China, which is now seen as a float of increasingly self-destructive policies. It is not credit that is needed by one of the most hyper-indebted regions on the planet, which rightly refuses to pay the debt already contracted; The solution must come from somewhere else, other than getting closer to the hegemon in power in search of new patronage.

China is an opportunity for fair trade, without military blackmail, with which to exchange goods and prosper as they did, as did each and every one of the countries that have emerged from poverty in the last 200 years. What is not Chinese? Or What should not be China? A new lender that allows us to continue with the current mess; there is nothing worse than a bearable illness and the feeling is that we see in China the umpteenth owner to whom we sell a little piece of our home, our decision-making capacity and our future, in order to continue being little more than tenants of a space that we believe is ours, but for which we can barely afford the monthly expenses to have a dignified life.

Let's not fool ourselves, China comes to the same as the others: to benefit. There is no charity, no solidarity, no donations. The same as previously Spanish, Portuguese, English or American. They come looking to obtain their own benefit from this relationship. It is true that they do not do it with violence, they do not seek a toxic or invasive relationship, they do not judge our internal activities, our religion or our political tendencies. They seek pure trade. They present an offer and it is up to us to accept it or renegotiate. The hope is that in each of our territories a political class will be able to emerge that knows how to seize the opportunity of the moment and make the appropriate decisions to escape from a blind alley from which objectively all the others have already emerged.

We are living in a critical moment in a good number of countries around the world. A new world hegemon is knocking on our doors and it is up to us and our former landlord, of course, to see how we do this transfer of power.

Adrian Diaz Marro is a business development consultant in Asia.