The Biden administration pushes for more US-Latin America trade, seeking to lessen Chinese influence
President Joe Biden is trying to increase trade with Latin America
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden is trying to increase trade with Latin America, meeting on Thursday with the heads of the Dominican Republic and Chile as part of a broader effort to disrupt China’s dominance in global manufacturing.
The Democratic president on Friday will welcome national leaders from across the Western Hemisphere for the first Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity Leaders’ Summit. The event was announced last year at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles as Biden has made it a priority to expand U.S. alliances to counter competitors such as China and rivals such as Russia.
“The Dominican people are your friends. The Dominican people are your allies,” Dominican President Luis Abinader told Biden in the Oval Office.
Biden said the two countries are working together on economic growth and share values on stopping corruption.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen outlined the Biden administration's goals in a Thursday speech at the Inter-American Development Bank. The U.S. wants to diversify supply chains with «trusted partners and allies,» a strategy that she said had “tremendous potential benefits for fueling growth in Latin America and the Caribbean."
Yellen, who regularly talks about her friendshoring strategy for increasing supply chain resilience by working primarily with friendly nations as opposed to geopolitical rivals like China, laid out her vision of new U.S. investment in South America at the development bank on Thursday.
Latin American businesses “will increasingly have the chance to lead in new areas of clean energy, for example, helping create vertical supply chains by using locally extracted lithium in local battery
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