Belt and Road Initiative and its Impacts on Latin America's Regional Integration

Latin America was invited in 2018 to be a "natural extension" to a set of new infrastructure projects with aims to improve regional integration and economic development with the label of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). If successful, the new regional integration scheme proposed by the BRI may reshape global politics and have implications for Latin America's regional institutions and economic blocs. In this article, we argue that many Latin American institutions can play a relevant in the dynamics of the BRI in Latin America. We conclude that the future of the BRI in Latin America is linked to (1) China's capacity of mobilizing Latin American regional institutions to expand the initiative; (2) to Latin American countries' ability to design a joint strategy towards China's increasing influence in the region.