EL SAVADOR JUST CHANGED THE RARE EARTH GEOPOLITICAL GAME
If you've been watching the geopolitical rhetoric flying between incoming president-elect Trump, the outgoing Bai Den Jao regime, and its masters in Beijing, you might have come across the story about China suspending all trade in gallium and some other heavy metals to the USA amid Mr. Trump's "tough tariff talk". (I'd be tempted to coin yet another abbreviation to fill our vacant "communication" and say something like "hereinafter TTT shall stand for 'tough tariff talk'", but as most people know, I'm also AA, that is to say, "Against the Abbreviationism" that now passes for literate and informed communication in the United States.) Such rare earth minerals are crucial components in computer chips, and hence, drive much of the technology that makes the modern world work.
Well, K.M. spotted a statement on "X" by El Salvadoran President Bukele, and it may be the geopolitical-rare earth metals game changer of the decade, and perhaps of a few decades:
https://www.elsalvadornow.org/2024/12/06/nayib-bukele-el-salvador-has-various-metals-in-addition-to-gold-nayib-bukele-el-salvador-tiene-diversos-metales-ademas-de-oro/
Pay close attention to this one:
The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, revealed that they have found at least 18 types of elements, some metallic, in the ground in his country, which he intends to extract to generate wealth and develop infrastructure projects in the country.
According to Bukele, whose party Nuevas Ideas (NI) has enough votes to repeal the mining ban at any moment, the Salvadoran territory would have, in addition to gold deposits, metals from the fourth and fifth “industrial revolution.”
He said that in their studies, they have identified cobalt, lithium, nickel, and “rare earths used for advanced electronics,” in addition to platinum, iridium, tantalum, titanium, gallium, and germanium, among others.
“We need to make a responsible exploitation of our natural resources, as all countries in the world do,” added Bukele, who cited Qatar, Israel, Canada, and Switzerland as examples, pointing out that “there is no country that has done something as foolish” as banning mining.
Of course, it will take time to begin mining operations, but the point is, President Bukele intends to do so, and as the article also makes clear, his political party, Nuevas Ideas, has the votes in the Ecuadorian parliament to do so.
This is where it is going to become very interesting, for in making his announcement, Mr. Bukele - who has shown himself to be a shrewd politician and a strong leader in fighting his country's criminal gangs - surely knows that he has just placed his small country front and center on the world's powers' geopolitical radar, for virtually every major economic power from Tokyo to Jakarta to New Delhi will be watching the development, and courting Ecuador, not the least of which, of course, will be China, for the very simple reason that China has at least at present a virtual monopoly on the world's production of many of these vital rare earth minerals.
Little El Salvador just became a competitor to great big and powerful China, and in doing so, a major security interest to the other Indo-Pacific powers, the "usual suspects": Japan, Indonesia, Australia, India, Myanmar, Thailand &c.
And of course the United States of America, which, rightly or wrongly, has an old established precedent that enables it to meddle in South American affairs, a thing called the "Monroe doctrine." The doctrine, for overseas readers who may not know of it, was named for President James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States, but was in fact authored by John Quincy Adams who was the Secretary of State in the Monroe Administration. Basically the doctrine stated that, beyond any then-current colonial possessions in the western hemisphere, no European power may interfere in or topple the governments of any country in the western hemisphere, as the United States regarded all such countries as being within its sphere of influence, and that any such interference would thus be viewed by the United States as a hostile action.
The doctrine has been applied with mixed success, particularly during the American War Between the States, when the French Emperor Napoleon III installed the luckless Hapsburg Archduke Maximillian as Emperor of Mexico at the points of French bayonets, while the United States and Confederate States were busily engaged in a war with each other. But the doctrine said nothing prohibiting American influence, and no one was thinking of China at that time.
The long and short of it is, another major geopolitical and foreign policy issue has just surfaced for the incoming Trump Administration to deal with.
My speculation? Do not be a bit surprised if one of the first things Mr. Trump's administration will do is to negotiate some sort of trade and loan agreement with El Salvador to keep China out, and America in. Watch, perhaps, for a Trump "summit tour" in South America, with the big three, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil being on the bucket list. But now you can add El Salvador, and probably with it, Chile. And while we're at it, watch for some "initiatives" regarding Venezuela as well.
And mining and tunnel boring equipment? Funny... Germany makes a lot of that...
See you on the flip side...
(My apologies... when I originally blogged about this article I made the mistake of saying the country was Ecuador when in fact it was El Salvador! Thank you to our readers who caught the mistake!)
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Had to share as I just saw this on my newsfeed … #Abbreviations
I hate when I text ”Good Morning,” and I receive a text back “GM (GENERAL MOTORS) TO U 2‼️
Rare Earth Metals are everywhere. But even where they are richest it still takes very low wages or slavery to mine them and still turn a profit. Plus you got to be able to cut corners on the chemical disposal or recycling costs which requires low wages as well as poor environmental oversight. Is this one of the reasons the west is determined to lower wages and are even talking about instituting a new form of slavery? This is what it would take to compete with the low prices of these minerals from China and Africa. Without it the world will continue to be at the mercy of China for these minerals. Unless the mining is subsidized massively by the taxpayers or endless money printing.
The Americas have been hosts to a punder party for the last five hundred years, and the plunder continues.
I for one am quite weary of Bukele. The miracle of hunting down cartels who run the country for decades is suspicious. For several decades El-Salvador was a playing field of CIA. My assumption is that without Clowns In Action help that would be impossible. And there is that cryptic words of Trump himself during RNC convention when he wasn’t crazy about former cartel members clumped up in one place and ready to be deployed at the whim to the southern border for example.
And for this, they require a 1.6 billion loan and to give up bitcoin as transactional currency. Dots connecting? I see jackals waiting in the wings.
It wasn’t too long ago (1950’s late 1960’s) that drilling for oil in the Ecuadorian Amazon Basin forests became a major issue due to the contamination of pristine water supply regions and streams (still is among the indigenous folk). ‘Petroecuador,’ the state petroleum company of Ecuador, had to leave the region, at least, for a while.
Big oil, of the ole Texaco days of the 1950’s and later other Big oil companies, left cesspools behind that they almost got away with. It seemed that everywhere that seismologists went in, obtained encouraging subsurface results, and reported to corporate headquarters of their potentials found beneath the surface, indigenous tribes were uprooted.
It hit the fan soon after when drinking water became polluted water by oil drilling and sloppy cleanup by the companies. Oil floats on water and it rains a lot there. Covering spills with porous dirt didn’t work and the oil simply oozed up into stinky pools of contaminated water. In some instances, that foal water discolored the skin of the tribes using it. To say little about how ill they became ingesting it.
The trouble started with Texaco back in the 1950’s and has been festering for as long – the old battle between LDC’s & DC’s (Less Developed Countries & Developed Countries) as they were referred to then.
Hard rock mining and other types of mining techniques are just as, if not more, polluting as oil drilling was and is. The Party of the east by going west has little concern of how they foal the lands as they demonstrated across an ocean over there.
That business of the “Monroe Doctrine,” by way of Chevron (and others) remains a sore spot of exploitation that the Ecuadorians haven’t forgotten. The Party of the east by going west would, no doubt, like to add the Ecuadorians to their lengthy debt-trap list of current countries owing the Party membership. It depends on how Monroe will be supported one reckons.
It’d be better if technologies would change than obsess over what’s dreamed of now.
Get someone else to proofread your posts. Don’t do this yourself.
i didn’t see any mistakes that take away from the post. i’d rather have more volume than less errors. but i haven’t seen any like you are saying.
the news is about el salvador, but for some reason the good doctor swapped in ecuador throughout/in the title etc.
Ecuador -> El Salvador
Yeah they “all look alike”🤣
It’s Geronimo’s poetic justice, that the Russian nutcracker, Oreshnik, can – from Chukotka – reach anywhere, on the North American continent.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/jxcc5zjhzvakwls/geronimo.jpg
Perhaps Swampington’s rat king is moving south, attempting, to get out of reach, away from Tchaikovsky’s nutcrackers?
IVAN ORESHNIK
Ballistic is the courier of the Russian Tzar,
and hypersonic, like a falling star,
he travels high and deep
in a chimney sweep,
as nutcracker, with a samovar.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/scl/fi/4xayxcuvzu6l1lqzy580z/oreshnik.mp4?rlkey=ltehgyxohgdkdnooga152zfsc