United States | Director, Asia & Latin America Program, Inter-American Dialogue
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Margaret Myers is the director of the Asia & Latin America Program at the Inter-American Dialogue. She established the Dialogue’s China and Latin America Working Group in 2011 to examine China’s growing presence in Latin America and the Caribbean. Myers also developed the China-Latin America Finance Database, the only publicly available source of empirical data on Chinese state lending in Latin America, in cooperation with Global China Initiative at Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center.
In addition to maintaining the Dialogue’s China and Latin America and 美洲对话 blogs, Myers has published numerous articles on Chinese leadership dynamics, international capital flows, Chinese agricultural policy, and Asia-Latin America relations, among other topics. The Political Economy of China-Latin America Relations and The Changing Currents of Trans-Pacific Integration: China, the TPP, and Beyond, her co-edited volumes with Dr. Carol Wise and Dr. Adrian Hearn, respectively, were published in 2016. Myers has testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the US-China Security and Economic Commission on the China-Latin America relationship. She is also regularly featured in major domestic and international media, including the Economist, Financial Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, El Comercio, Folha de São Paulo, CNN en Español, CCTV, and Voice of America. In 2018, she was identified by Global Americans as part of the “new generation of public intellectuals.”
Before arriving at the Dialogue, Myers worked as a Latin America analyst and China analyst for the US Department of Defense, during which time she was deployed with the US Navy in support of Partnership of the Americas. Myers also worked as a senior China analyst for Science Applications International Corporation; a consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank; a faculty member at Georgetown University, the George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins SAIS; and for Fauquier County Schools, where she developed the county’s first Mandarin language program. Myers received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and conducted her graduate work at The George Washington University, Zhejiang University of Technology, and the Johns Hopkins University/Nanjing University Center for Chinese-American Studies. Myers was a Council on Foreign Relations term member. She was also the recipient of a Freeman fellowship for China studies, a Fulbright Specialist grant to research China-Colombia relations in Bogotá, and a Woodrow Wilson Center fellowship to write a forthcoming book on China-Latin America relations.
In September 2022, Ecuador and China reached an agreement this week to restructure $4.4 billion of Ecuador’s debt with Chinese banks, which is estimated to provide $1.4 billion worth of debt relief to Ecuador through 2025.
A Latin America Advisor Q&A featuring viewpoints on how protests in Peru will affect mining investment from countries like China.
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Testimony by Program Director Margaret Myers on China’s Role in Latin America and the Caribbean to Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Sharp-edged messaging from Chinese diplomats featured prominently in China’s global communications in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Beyond humanitarian motives, China’s pandemic aid has aimed to achieve multiple other objectives.
China’s system of strategic partnerships is an important, if poorly understood, element of China’s broader diplomatic outreach.
There are efforts to try to increase and incentivize US investment in Latin America and the Caribbean now. The problem is that a lot of these initiatives are private-sector-led, and in a moment in time when the investment environments aren’t necessarily improving in Latin America, it’s very difficult to generate that interest.
[Chinese military basing in Latin America is still] rather hypothetical, but there’s a sense that based on the sorts of investments that we see in areas of strategic interest to the US and some of the investments that we see in ports with potential dual-use capacity that things are headed in that direction.
