The timing was either a coincidence or a message. On Friday morning, one day after Washington escalated its tariff fight with Santiago, Chile’s President Jose Antonio Kast received China’s ambassador to Chile, Niu Qingbao, at the presidential palace. The meeting ran more than an hour.
The agenda was billed as routine: the bilateral relationship, a planned visit by Foreign Minister Francisco Perez-Mackenna to China, and preparations for the APEC leaders’ summit in Shenzhen in November, which Kast is expected to attend. The palace was quick to note that the meeting had been scheduled before the US tariff announcement. But in diplomacy, optics are facts. The president who campaigned on aligning Chile with Trump spent his Friday with Beijing’s man.
The dispute behind the optics is real. On July 23, the US Trade Representative, acting on Trump’s direction, imposed tariffs on 60 economies under Section 301 of US trade law for failing to ban imports made with forced labor. Chile landed in the 12.5 percent tier; countries that had made commitments to adopt such bans face 10 percent. The measure is strange in Chile’s case. Washington does not claim Chile exports goods made with forced labor, and it did not identify a single Chilean product linked to the practice. The tariff is punishment for the shape of Chile’s regulations, not for its behavior. Copper, Chile’s dominant export, was exempted. Almost everything else that crosses the border now carries the surcharge.
Santiago did not take it quietly. Agriculture Minister Jaime Campos called the measure arbitrary. Defense Minister Fernando Barros called it very unjust. The US ambassador to Chile, Brandon Judd, pushed back, saying such criticism complicates the negotiation. Perez-Mackenna has tried to lower the noise, insisting that tariff talks belong to his ministry and that Chile is in contact with the US embassy. On radio, he said the important thing was to remember that Chile had to sit back down at the table to reach an agreement that would be positive for its exporters.
The political shift is what makes the week notable. Kast came to office as the most pro-American president Chile has had in years, promising a foreign policy aligned with Washington. His party now says Washington cannot be trusted. Chilean officials spent recent weeks in Washington presenting their labor record to the USTR, arguing that a free trade agreement in force since 2004 and the complementary nature of Chilean exports, from salmon to fruit, should count for something. It did not move the decision.
China matters to Chile more than almost any other market. Beijing buys most of Chile’s copper, and the relationship has deepened for two decades while the United States talked about values. Washington’s tariff opened a door, and Beijing walked through it. The APEC summit in Shenzhen in November will give Kast a stage in China at exactly the moment the US relationship is at its coldest in years.
Tariffs are supposed to change trading behavior. This one may change more than that. By punishing a friendly government for the shape of its labor laws, Washington has given Santiago a reason to look elsewhere, and Santiago, it turns out, was already looking. The meeting with the Chinese ambassador lasted an hour. The relationship it signaled may last much longer.