FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Ibero-American Leaders at CIIE Find Xi Jinping Offers Crucial Strategic Orientation
Nov. 8, 2018 (EIRNS)—Many Ibero-American business and political leaders attending the Nov. 5-10 China International Import Expo (CIIE) in Shanghai have described President Xi Jinping’s keynote speech as strategically important, because, as Uruguay’s Foreign Minister Rodolfo Nin Novoa told Xinhua, it lays the groundwork for “a new international order.” Several also referenced the Belt and Road Initiative as a means to create that new order.
President Xi’s speech, Nin Novoa explained, “gave clear, precise and strategic orientation for the development of trade.” Uruguay shares Xi’s ideas,
“including more openness toward the rest of the world, free trade and transparency, that is, a new international order,” whose purpose is “to create a climate of international concordance among nations.”
In his Nov. 5 speech to the CIIE, Dominican President Danilo Medina effusively thanked Xi Jinping for inviting him to the CIIE, describing it as “a superb venue,” not only to learn about the import needs of the Chinese economy, but to also to learn “about the dozens of countries present here, from five continents.” China today, he said, has become the reference point for
“open trade, for that cooperation and connectivity among nations, which has as a visible example the process of reform and opening-up, and ... the important Belt and Road Initiative.”
Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela told the Spanish news agency EFE Nov. 7 that
“we want to send a clear message of support to what Xi Jinping expressed, that there are sufficient resources for everyone to live a dignified life.”
One of Panama’s two pavillions at the Expo was entitled “The Big Connection,” emphasizing, as Varela explained it, Panama’s role as “a bridge among the peoples of Asia, China and the Americas.”
At a meeting held on the sidelines of the CIIE, of the Seventh Mexico-China High-Level Business Group (GANE), Paulo Carreño, director of the government’s “ProMéxico” foreign trade agency, discussed how both nations had cooperated in such areas as infrastructure, manufacturing and finances, and assured his Chinese hosts that the Mexican government “will particpate actively in building the Belt and Road,” Xinhua reported.
