“Dear China, it's time to talk”, 20 July 2020

At the end of April, 263 civil society groups from around the world sent a letter to the heads of various Chinese institutions about financial aid to help coronavirus-affected projects connected to the Belt and Road Initiative… They asked for support not to be given to projects that had posed social, environmental, climatic or financial risks before the pandemic struck…

On 20 May, 73 Latin American organisations sent another letter to MOFCOM and the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC), which supervises China’s state-owned companies. They said certain companies had failed to comply with sanitary measures to avoid and handle cases of Covid-19, and had committed blatant violations of workers’ rights in Peru, Argentina and Ecuador…

They have not received a response from any of the 19 Chinese government entities, including MOCFOM and the SASAC, nor from the various Chinese embassies in the region to whom, after monumental work, the two letters were successfully sent. Detective work is often required to find contact information for authorities and public officials of different Chinese ministries, agencies and embassies…

We face similar challenges when we seek information from the China Development Bank, the China Export and Import Bank (Eximbank), the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) and the Bank of China, which finance loans and investments in Latin America. Even the China Development Bank, the largest Chinese lender to Latin America, does not publish its loan portfolio by region, country and sector, nor does it publicise its environmental assessment methods and requirements in its operations, or offer contact points for civil society groups to communicate with at the country level or in China…

Our organisations believe in the State Council when it states that “solidarity and cooperation are the most powerful weapons available to the international community in the war against the pandemic.” For this reason, we hope that the Chinese Foreign Ministry, today more than ever, recognises the benefits of dialogue with Latin American civil society organisations. The first step is to help the ministries, banks, embassies and other institutions we have mentioned by providing updated contact information and open channels of participation to discuss these issues…

[Also referred to Minera Chinalco Peru; Shougang Hierro Peru; MMG Las Bambas S.A.; China Andes Petroleum; Ecuacorrientes S.A. (a consortium of China Railway Construction Company and Tongling Nonferrous Metals Group Holding Company); China Gezhouba Corporate Group, Hidrocuyo S.A. and Electroingeniera S.A.]