AINEWS
Washington, Beijing and Moscow are courting Latin America for lithium, copper, soy and rare earths. Brazil, Mexico and the region's smaller economies are trying to set terms instead of taking them.
In Chile's Atacama salt flat, evaporation ponds stretch across a white crust that sits above roughly half the world's known lithium reserves, the soft, light metal that goes into the batteries that go into the cars, phones and grid-storage systems the rest of the world is now trying to electrify. Pumps run by SQM, the Chilean producer, pull mineral-rich brine to the surface. A few kilometers away, a Chinese-built port extension is taking shape. The ground underneath is, in the most literal sense, the front line of a contest for Latin America.
The framing of Latin America as "this century's commodity superpower," popularized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and echoed in The Economist's 2023 reporting from the same salt flat, assumes the region is a passive reservoir. The numbers say otherwise. Latin America holds close to 50% of known lithium reserves, large shares of copper, soy and renewable-energy potential, and 21 of the hemisphere's 33 countries have signed cooperation documents under China's Belt and Road Initiative, China's global infrastructure and trade program, according to a CSIS translation of Chinese state documentation. Four of them — Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Peru — also hold free-trade agreements with Beijing.
The wire coverage skips what the regional governments are doing with that leverage. In Brasília, the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has spent 2025-2026 branding Brazil's posture as "multi-alignment": a deliberate refusal to be filed under either Washington or Beijing. A November 2025 Belfer Center analysis describes Brazil as "a giant by nature" that treats its BRICS membership, the bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa that has since expanded, as optional rather than defining. A January 2026 Carnegie Endowment paper, "The Middle Power Moment," makes the same case more broadly: most BRICS members, including India and Brazil, want to expand their diplomatic options rather than narrow them. Brazil, in other words, is not leaving the U.S.-led order. It is collecting alternative chits.
Mexico, anchored to the United States by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), is doing a quieter version of the same thing. The 2026 USMCA review is the next inflection point. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's 2026 annual threat assessment testimony, delivered to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and posted by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, flagged the review as likely to "increase uncertainty in many Latin American countries, especially those that rely on Mexico as an export destination for intermediate goods." That is the kind of sentence a finance minister in Lima or Bogotá reads twice.
Underneath the courtship is a deeper contest the SIPRI Yearbook 2026, published in June 2026 by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, makes starker. The yearbook describes 2025 as shaped by escalating armed conflict, great-power competition, a fragmenting world order and climate-driven insecurity. Latin America is not the theater of that contest in the military sense. It is the theater in the resource sense: the lithium, copper, soy and rare-earth deposits the bloc economies all need to keep their energy transitions and food systems running. The China-Global South Project's August 2025 analysis noted that, after two years of declining BRI engagement, the 21 Latin American signatories received just 1.14% of regional construction engagement and 0.4% of investment in the first half of 2025. The courtship is loud. The cash is selective.
That gap is the opening for a regional framework some analysts describe as "Triple Circulation," combining domestic market expansion, deeper regional integration and global diversification, synthesized in a July 2026 Rio Times analysis of Peruvian and Brazilian strategic studies. The idea is to escape the old center-periphery dependency by trading more inside the region, building more at home, and pricing access to critical minerals against diversified demand rather than a single buyer. CELAC, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, the Pacific Alliance and the Mercosur-EU deal, still in legal limbo, are the existing rails.
The lithium and copper upside is concentrated near Indigenous and rural communities that bear the water and land impacts, while the political risk of single-bloc alignment sits with whichever government signs the next port or refinery deal. The DNI's 2026 testimony on Venezuela described a leadership shift toward U.S. cooperation after the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, a change that will reshape Caracas's external posture and the regional balance around it in ways the next six months of trade-architecture decisions will make permanent.
The next test is concrete. The 2026 USMCA review, the EU-Mercosur ratification fight and the Chinese-built port in northern Chile will, together, lock in the default rail for the region's exports for the next fifty years. The "new Cold War" frame treats Latin America as a board. The governments in Brasília, Mexico City and Santiago are treating it as a contract they intend to negotiate, not a position they intend to inherit.