President Joe Biden’s administration will unveil a plan for distributing 80 million vaccines within two weeks, Secretary of State Antony Blinken assured Latin American leaders during a trip to Costa Rica.
“We will distribute vaccines without political requirements of those receiving them,” Blinken told reporters on Wednesday. “Within the next two weeks or so, I expect we’ll be able to make clear exactly how we’re going to do that.”
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Chinese officials have taken a different tactic, which involves accusing the United States of “hoarding” democracies while distributing hundreds of millions of jabs around the world — making them vaccines that come with a political and financial price tag. That jockeying has added public health urgency to a more fundamental struggle about whether the region will be organized around the democratic rule of law and transparent governance or led by politicians comfortable working with the Chinese Communist regime on Beijing’s terms.
“It is a different cold war, but it is nonetheless cold,” said Evan Ellis, a U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute professor who worked on the State Department policy planning team for former President Donald Trump’s administration. “The Chinese want a world in which most of the money flows from the rest of the world to them, and they have enough political cover so that the world’s governments and institutions go along with it.”
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi countered Blinken’s message with a broadside that blamed the U.S. and European countries for the pandemic crisis in developing countries.
“The coronavirus pandemic has seen cases growing in the global south and declining in the north — the hoarding of vaccines and control of exports from some developed countries is not unrelated to this,” Yi said Wednesday. “China has provided more than 350 million doses of vaccines to the international community. This is in sharp contrast with developed countries that have adopted a ‘domestic first’ approach.”
According to public estimates, Latin American countries have signed agreements for 225 million Chinese-made vaccines, often to the advantage of Chinese political or security interests. For example, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro allowed Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei to bid to build Brazil’s next-generation 5G wireless technology, despite previously acknowledged espionage fears. His government paired the gesture with a request for vaccines, a plea the health minister made at Huawei’s offices in Beijing.
Likewise, Chinese officials have offered vaccines to Paraguay and Honduras to convince the two countries to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan, the island democracy the mainland communist regime wants to bring under Beijing’s control. Costa Rica switched diplomatic relations from Taiwan to mainland China in 2007, but Costa Rican President Carlos Alvarado, standing alongside Blinken, signaled he is not one of the presidents inclined to trade favors with the communist power.
“We implement a principle of global cooperation, particularly for the ones that receive cooperation, which is dignity and no strings attached in that sense,” Alvarado said. “I mean, here we’re talking about saving lives […] but that doesn’t mean we, in receiving a donation, will compromise our dignity as a nation in order to receive those.”
Alvarado hosted Blinken in conjunction with a convocation of Central American foreign ministers, who gathered in San Jose under the auspices of the Central American Integration System.
“Good governance is crucial for confronting the challenges and seizing the opportunities of this moment,” Blinken said during the press conference. “And yet, we meet at a moment when democracy and human rights are being undermined in many parts of the region.”
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The arriving American vaccines could fortify transparent political institutions and honest political actors.
“It’s showing that we care, and it’s trying to stabilize the situation without asking for quid pro quos,” Ellis said. “It’s democracy, transparency, and good governance at the end of the day. If you don’t have transparency, you get these dirty deals between the Chinese company leaders and the locals.”
