Huawei Threatens Latin America’s Independence
By U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL)
If a gangster offered to work in your household, would you accept? The logical answer is no. You wouldn’t think twice about turning him away, even if his services came at a bargain price. Well, governments in Latin America and the Caribbean courting Huawei should beware: the Chinese telecom giant is a criminal.
I’ve been making this case since 2018, when Huawei was using its budget-priced 5G technology to establish ties with the United States and many of its closest allies. Beijing wasn’t subsidizing Huawei to help rural communities in America. Instead, its goal was to make a Chinese company ruled by the Chinese state the dominant player in the global wireless market, and thereby to make every major country and company on Earth dependent on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for telecom.
This would have given Beijing incalculable leverage to exploit and coerce foreign policymakers and businesspeople. Add to this Huawei’s backdoor data-collection capabilities, and you get a Trojan horse tailor-made to spy, steal intellectual property, and rob nations of their very independence. I sounded the alarm, and President Donald Trump took action, effectively banning the company in the United States. The leaders of Australia, Canada, France, Japan, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom soon followed suit.
But in the years since, Huawei has lowered its profile, survived a near collapse, and set its sights on countries in our hemisphere. Unfortunately, it’s making significant inroads. Today, at least seven countries in our region — Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Ecuador — are using or planning to use Huawei technology in their national 5G networks. Huawei has also set up shop in Paraguay, despite President Santiago Peña’s commendable opposition to the CCP.
Latin American leaders are facing difficult choices, as the Chinese telecom giant offers a nominally good deal. Perhaps these leaders believe they can manage the risk of doing business with Huawei. But as I argued in 2020, “the strength of 5G is that the core and the periphery of a network are one and the same, meaning that giving Huawei any access poses a tremendous risk.” Open the door one inch, and this company will be able to manipulate your entire network — it’s just how the technology works. And take it from the United States, which worked with Huawei only briefly and exposed itself to high-level security threats and attacks on six domestic companies as a result, that it’s too dangerous to handle.
There’s an urgent need for other 5G suppliers — Sweden’s Ericsson, Finland’s Nokia, South Korea’s Samsung — to be made available in Latin America. Open Access Radio Network (ORAN) technology provides another alternative, one that is incompatible with Huawei, but offers more options at lower costs. In all of this, the deal the United States offered to the United Kingdom when it was considering a Huawei partnership should remain on the table for other U.S. allies and partners: reject this company, and we will help you improve your telecom network.
President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador took this deal just a few months ago. I hope more leaders in our hemisphere follow in his footsteps. It would benefit the United States by keeping our greatest geopolitical adversary from extending its reach in our region. But it would also benefit Latin America and the Caribbean by protecting their policymakers and businesspeople from Huawei’s state-sponsored coercion, espionage, and intellectual-property theft.
Remember, Huawei is no ordinary company. As a “national champion” beholden to the CCP, it knows no law but Beijing’s. Governments that give this entity access to their citizens’ data and technology are opening the doors to their people’s exploitation — and putting their national independence at risk.
