Rubio's Latin America Tour: The U.S. Pushes Back Against China's Economic Foothold

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is set to visit Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru in September 2026, meeting with newly elected presidents in all three countries, according to a Reuters report published September 4 (Reuters). The trip sends America's top diplomat into a region where Chinese economic influence has expanded steadily and, by several measures, now outpaces the U.S. commercial presence.

The gap is most visible in Peru. According to Peruvian government data through November 2025, China accounts for 33 percent of Peru's trade, compared with 14 percent for the United States (Reuters). That divide widened with the opening of the Chancay multipurpose port in 2025, a project initially projected by Peru's central bank to involve an investment of USD 1.3 billion (SMV Peru; BCRP). Chancay, located north of Lima, positions Peru as a Pacific gateway for South American exports to Asian markets, with Chinese state-linked entities central to its development.

Rubio's tour unfolds within a broader U.S.-China relationship that has cycled through tariff escalation, fragile truces, and tentative institutional structures. Trump and his allies have argued that tariffs — taxes imposed on imported goods, typically used as leverage in trade disputes — will force China to negotiate friendlier trade rules with the United States (New York Times). Tariffs imposed during Trump's first term ranged up to 25 percent on many Chinese goods, with additional levies layered on top (New York Times). Those duties have remained the principal economic tool in Washington's approach to Beijing.

On the diplomatic track, Rubio met China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi in July 2025 during a period of acute trade tension. Rubio described that sit-down not as a negotiation but as an effort to establish a "constructive baseline" to keep talks going (Reuters). A year later, in July 2026, Rubio and Wang Yi held a roughly 90-minute meeting at a regional gathering, this time amid a fragile truce between the two economies (Reuters). Analysts assessed that the July 2026 meeting was likely focused on preparations for a second Trump-Xi summit that year (Reuters).

Following that July 2026 meeting, Rubio said the United States and China are moving toward establishing boards for investment and trade between the two largest economies, with the aim of having them in place ahead of a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping (Bloomberg). The proposed boards would represent a shift away from the tariff-centric leverage model toward a more institutionalized bilateral economic channel, though their scope and authority remain undefined publicly.

Trump has appeared primarily focused on economic deals with China, showing less appetite for wading into human rights issues (New York Times). Some foreign policy analysts believe Trump would like to divide the world with China and Russia into spheres of influence — zones where each power holds primary sway (New York Times). That reading, if accurate, would place Latin America squarely within Washington's designated sphere and casts Rubio's September trip in a specific light: less about countering China's presence than about reasserting U.S. primacy in a region Beijing has treated as commercially open terrain.

The backdrop is sobering for Washington. Xi Jinping and then-President Joe Biden met in Peru in November 2024, in a country where China has steadily expanded its influence in what the United States has historically considered its own region (New York Times). That summit, held on the margins of APEC in Lima, took place as Chancay was nearing operational launch, and it symbolized a reality that the U.S. has struggled to reverse through either engagement or pressure.

The broader context here is a competition not primarily for military basing or political allegiance but for trade corridors, infrastructure, and the commercial dependence they create. Peru's trade data makes the asymmetry concrete: China's 33 percent share is not a projection but a recorded figure through late 2025. Colombia and Ecuador, the other stops on Rubio's itinerary, face their own versions of the same calculus, with Chinese investment flowing into extractive industries and infrastructure across the Andean corridor. Rubio's meetings with newly elected presidents in all three countries will test whether the administration can offer an economic proposition competitive with what Beijing has already delivered on the ground.

The structural question is whether Washington can deploy something beyond tariffs and rhetoric. The proposed investment and trade boards with China, if they materialize, would give the bilateral relationship a standing institutional mechanism. But for Latin American capitals weighing partnerships with both powers, the relevant calculation is transactional: who is building ports, financing infrastructure, and buying exports at scale. On those metrics, China's position in Peru and the wider region is established and growing. Rubio's tour is an early signal of whether the second Trump administration intends to contest that position directly or to manage it through the sphere-of-influence framework some analysts attribute to the president's worldview.