US vs China: America Bans Officials Over China's Secret Pacific Cable & Port Deals
WASHINGTON / SANTIAGO / LIMA, March 7, 2026 — The United States is no longer just issuing warnings about China's creeping footprint in Latin America. It has started punishing people for it.
In two separate but connected moves, the Trump administration has revoked the visas of three Chilean government officials over a proposed Chinese undersea cable project, while simultaneously warning Peru that it risks surrendering its national sovereignty to a Chinese-controlled mega port on the Pacific coast. [web:121] Both moves are part of a broader, increasingly aggressive U.S. strategy to push China out of the Western Hemisphere — by targeting the officials and deals that let it in.
Chile's Cable That Triggered a Diplomatic Rupture
The cable at the center of the Chile dispute sounds technical. The implications aren't.
Two Chinese private companies proposed laying a submarine fiber optic cable connecting Chile to Hong Kong. The project is still in early planning stages — no final decision has been made. [web:127] None of that mattered to Washington.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced visa restrictions on Chile's Transport and Telecommunications Minister Juan Carlos Muñoz and two other unnamed government officials, accusing them of "knowingly compromising critical telecommunications infrastructure and undermining regional security in our hemisphere." [web:122] Their U.S. visas have been cancelled. Their immediate family members are also barred from entering the country. [web:122]
It is an extraordinary measure — revoking a cabinet minister's visa over a project that hasn't been approved, let alone built.
Chile's Foreign Minister Alberto van Klaveren summoned the U.S. ambassador for an explanation and pushed back hard. "The US government believes that cable could in some way pose a threat to its security," he said dryly, making clear that Chile considered the American position both overreaching and premature. [web:127] The project, he emphasized, was still at the proposal stage — two private companies making a request, not a government decision.
Washington's position is that it doesn't matter. The cable would connect South American telecommunications infrastructure directly to Hong Kong — which, post-2020, the U.S. treats as effectively Chinese-controlled territory. An undersea cable carrying South American internet traffic through a Chinese-controlled hub is, in Washington's view, a surveillance and intelligence vulnerability that it will not tolerate in the hemisphere — regardless of which stage the project is at. [web:123]
The timing added another layer of significance. The visa bans came less than a month before the inauguration of Chile's incoming President José Antonio Kast — a right-wing figure described as a close Trump ally. [web:127] Reading between the lines: Washington was sending a message to the outgoing administration while signaling expectations to the incoming one.
Peru's Port Problem — $1.3 Billion and No Oversight
Two thousand kilometers north, the other half of America's Latin America-China offensive is playing out at a deepwater port called Chancay.
Built at a cost of $1.3 billion by China's state-owned Cosco Shipping Ports and launched in 2024, Chancay sits about 80 kilometers north of Lima and has quickly become one of the most strategically significant new port facilities on the entire Pacific coast. [web:128] It is designed as the primary hub connecting South American exports — copper, lithium, soybeans — directly to Asian markets, cutting out the Panama Canal route entirely. For Chinese supply chains and Latin American trade flows, it is a genuinely transformative piece of infrastructure. [web:131]
For Washington, it is a Chinese military and intelligence asset disguised as a shipping terminal.
The crisis escalated in January when a Peruvian lower court issued a ruling instructing Peruvian authorities — including the port regulator Ositran, which oversees every other major port in the country — to stop exercising "regulatory, supervisory, oversight, and sanctioning powers" over Chancay. [web:128] In other words: a court told Peru's own government it couldn't regulate a Chinese-controlled port on its own territory.
The U.S. State Department's Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs did not hold back. In a statement on X, it declared it was "troubled" by the ruling, warned that Peru risked losing sovereign control of critical infrastructure to "predatory Chinese owners," and attached a blunt message for the rest of the region: "This is a warning to the region and the world: inexpensive Chinese financing undermines sovereignty." [web:125]
Cosco pushed back, saying multiple Peruvian authorities — police, environmental regulators, customs officials — are actively operating at the port and that the court ruling has been mischaracterized. [web:128] Ositran, for its part, said it would appeal the ruling. [web:128]
The legal battle is ongoing. But the geopolitical signal has already been sent — and received.
The Bigger Pattern: Latin America as a Battleground
The Chile cable ban and the Peru port warning didn't happen in a vacuum. They are two moves in a systematic campaign.
Trump's pressure on Panama forced the Panamanian government to strip a Hong Kong-based firm of its operating contracts at ports on both ends of the Panama Canal. [web:121] China's investments in Venezuela were suddenly exposed when the U.S. captured then-President Nicolás Maduro in January, leaving Beijing's oil-sector assets without political protection overnight. [web:121]
Latin America — long treated by Washington as a sphere of influence that China was quietly colonizing through infrastructure financing, port deals, cable contracts, and technology supply chains — is being actively contested again. The tools are travel bans, public warnings, diplomatic pressure, and the implicit threat of financial consequences for governments that don't comply.
What Washington is telling Santiago and Lima is simple: every Chinese infrastructure deal in this hemisphere comes with a price tag that isn't printed on the contract.
Beijing has responded to both the Chancay and cable situations by accusing the U.S. of "economic bullying" and interference in sovereign decisions. [web:131] That framing resonates with some Latin American leaders who feel they are being told by Washington to reject development financing that their countries genuinely need.
The question for Chile's incoming government and Peru's current one is the same: how much pressure from Washington will they accept, and at what cost to their relationships with the country building the infrastructure their economies depend on?
The cable still hasn't been approved. The port is still operating. But the battle lines are drawn.
