Chile’s Kast courts China day after US hits exports with forced labour tariff
Chilean president, who campaigned on aligning Chile with Trump, meets Beijing delegation as his party claims Washington cannot be trusted
Chilean President Jose Antonio Kast received China’s ambassador to Santiago, Niu Qingbao, at the La Moneda Palace on Friday morning, in an encounter that lasted more than an hour and marked the first meeting between the two men since the right-wing leader took office in March.
The USTR first proposed it on June 3, opening a window for the Chilean foreign ministry and the export associations to make their case.
Santiago said in a statement that it would keep talking to the Trump administration to improve access conditions, including the exclusion of products it considers essential to the country’s export basket.
Kast uses Trump’s strategy to gain power, flatter US
He also promised a closer alignment with Washington, and flew to Miami days before his inauguration to attend the launch of Trump’s Shield of the Americas initiative.
That alignment was already in trouble by the time he reached La Moneda, the seat of the president of Chile, in March.
Then Transport and Telecommunications Minister Juan Carlos Munoz signed the decree on January 27 and rescinded it two days later, citing typographical errors, after warnings from the American embassy.
The dispute wrecked the handover between the two governments. Kast said he had not been properly briefed, dissolved the transition coordination task force after a 22-minute meeting with Boric, and announced an audit of ministerial communications.
Niu defended the cable in public at the time, calling it a mutually beneficial idea and dismissing American claims about strategic risk as not grounded in fact.
US tariff threat raises concerns in Santiago
The tariff imposed by Washington has also unsettled parts of the governing coalition, with Agriculture Minister Jaime Campos and Defence Minister Fernando Barros both criticising the American decision in public.
US ambassador to Chile, Brandon Judd, responded by warning that statements of that kind make trade negotiations harder, and the government moved to lower the temperature, insisting that the talks were being handled exclusively by the foreign ministry.
Speaking to CNN Chile on Thursday night, Senator Arturo Squella, president of the Republican Party that Kast founded, said the tariff had shown how little Chile had got in return for courting Washington.
“At the end of the day you draw your conclusions and you say, look, there was no interest here in even recognising and respecting what has been signed with Chile,” he added, calling on the foreign ministry to argue the case as far as necessary “so that the word that is written down, when it comes to respect for free trade and everything that goes with it, counts for something again”.
His assessment of the two powers was blunt once that caveat was out of the way.
“If you ask me which one I would like to go deeper with, in terms of doctrine or of how a society should be run, obviously I see the United States as much closer,” Squella said.
“But I have no recollection of China creating difficulties or failing to respect the rules of the game.”
Squella said the episode had left him weighing what the relationship with Washington is worth in practice.
“It seems there is not much point in making so much effort to have a good relationship if in the end they arrive and out of nowhere impose tariffs on us that hit us at the waterline, in activities that are fundamental to us.”