US defence chief woos Brazil as Chinese influence grows

US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis urged closer strategic ties with Brazil today in what appeared to be part of a concerted pushback against growing Chinese influence in Latin America.

Mattis, who is starting a tour of the region, told military officers at Rio de Janeiro's war college that Brazil and the United States had interests built on shared geography, democracy and battlefield history dating to World War II.

Mattis said the United States wants a "stronger relationship," with a focus on using the Brazil's Alcantara space center, whose location near the equator makes launches more effective.

China is developing its space infrastructure in Latin America, with a base in southern Argentina's Patagonia region. It has also pushed deep into the continent's economies as an investor and major client for agricultural, mineral and other commodities.

Mattis said that US interest in Alcantara was "not because it lies along the equator, a happy accident of geography, but because we want to work with Brazilians -- our hemispheric neighbours whose values we share politically, as well as your technological orientation." "Others cannot credibly say the same," he said in what appeared to be a pointed reference to China.

China's regional rise comes after long decades of deep, sometimes controversial US influence in Latin America. Mattis, due to visit Argentina, Chile and Colombia next, made clear that Washington is in no mood to give way.

"We see Latin America as our neighbour. Some people say we don't pay much attention to it. That is certainly not the case in the military," Mattis said in separate comments issued by the Pentagon's press office.

Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, a research organization, told AFP that Mattis is trying to make up for lost time.

"He's going to South America now simply to raise the United States' defense profile in a region that hasn't had a visit from a defense secretary since 2014," Isacson said.

"The Pentagon probably feels a need to raise the US profile amid concerns about increasing Russian and Chinese influence on the continent."
Mattis told officers in Rio that following an April discussion with Brazil's defence minister, Joaquim Silva e Luna, he ordered staff "to transform our defense relationship with Brazil, to reenergize it."
Mattis described the Venezuelan leadership as a "power-hungry, oppressive regime that forces refugees into Brazil and into Colombia, and elsewhere." The Brazilian defense minister said Monday after talks with Mattis that his US counterpart believed "the solution (in Venezuela) should be led by Brazil."