Juan Carlos Muñoz, the Minister of Transport and Telecommunications of the Government of Gabriel Boric, approved on January 27 the concession so that the China Mobile company could install, operate and exploit an underwater fiber optic cable that would interconnect Hong Kong and the Chilean coastal city of Concón, in the Valparaíso Region, as reported this Tuesday by El Mercurio. Two days after signing the decree, it was annulled, citing technical or typing errors, in a precedent that until now the left-wing Administration, in its official spokespersons, had not told, as it has insisted that the project is in the «evaluation» stage. Muñoz is one of the three officials of the Boric Administration – along with the undersecretary of Telecommunications, Claudio Araya, who has had a key role, and his chief of staff, Guillermo Petersen -, to whom the Donald Trump’s government revoked their visas after accusing them, last Friday, of «undermining regional security» as a result of the cable project promoted by two Chinese companies, which Washington challenges. The immediate response of the Chilean Foreign Ministry was to classify the accusation as “absolutely false” and the sanctioning measure as “unilateral in nature” and that “violates the independence and sovereignty” of the South American country. Also, the authorities were surprised by the decision, something that the United States ambassador to Chile, Brandon Judd, described this Monday as “laughable,” because he said he had warned several Boric ministers about the threat that, according to Washington, the project poses. Since the US State Department, led by Marco Rubio, accused officials of compromising critical telecommunications infrastructure and “undermining regional security” in a public statement on Friday, new details have become known about the run-up to the project. This Monday, hours before the publication of El Mercurio, Muñoz told TVN, public television, that at the end of January they received a document from the United States with information that indicated that the cable posed a threat to security and mentioned cyber attacks on telecommunications companies. “I decided to reverse [la aprobación de la concesión] and seek a lot more information,» said the head of the Transportation and Telecommunications portfolio. Also, the minister said that as a Government they took the alerts from the US Embassy «very seriously», which implied that they gathered additional information. He explained that progress was made in the project and that the decree that allowed the proposal to be carried out was even «ready to be sent to the Comptroller’s Office» – the body that must check all the administrative acts of the State so that they can be officially materialized. but that they considered that, after the background provided by the United States, “it was worth going back and beginning to do a much more in-depth analysis of some dimensions of the project that were beyond” the functions of their ministry. During the day, another background was added, after La Tercera revealed that Muñoz informed Boric that he approved the concession of the Chinese cable, in a response sent by the Transport and Telecommunications portfolio of the leftist Administration. “As in all sensitive issues, the minister told him. communicated to the president the alert that was received from the United States Embassy, which led us to review in detail the impact of this new information.» The publication adds that the president «agreed not to move forward in the processing of the project permit until he had absolute clarity about the scope of the alerts.»
The first stage of 13
Álvaro Elizalde, Minister of the Interior, also delved deeper this Monday morning, on radio Duna, into background information that had not been mentioned: «There was no formal administrative act and therefore, there was no decision on the part of the State, an explicit approval to start the process. How is that done? Through a decree that is sent to the Comptroller’s Office and which is taken into account by the Comptroller’s Office. That had not happened.» And he added that a project of the magnitude of the submarine cable requires 13 stages, and that the first of them is the concession, which was ultimately not concluded. The document that Muñoz signed in January – and later annulled – detailed that the concession will have a validity period of 30 years to «install, operate and exploit» the transmission network, which the cable would cover 19,873 kilometers. And if the Boric Government has insisted that the Chinese cable is in the «evaluation» stage, Muñoz added this morning that it is «paused.» “When the project arrived to us, like any telecommunications project, we were analyzing it and, according to the information provided to us by the United States Embassy, we have paused the project, and we are looking at it with the competent organizations,” he told La Tercera. The progress of the project is waiting for the security alerts raised by Washington to be verified through a report by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, through the Ministry of Defense of the Boric Government, headed by Adriana, which ends on March 11, when the Republican José Antonio Kast assumes the presidency. This morning, Kast has spoken, briefly and for the first time, about the project, which will fall to his Administration, and has said that they are «seeing accordingly» the international issues with the authorities that they are going to assume. “This exceeds the possibilities of a single person making decisions and I believe that there are many situations that must be clarified and have been clarified over time,” he noted. The future chancellor, Francisco Pérez Mackenna, an influential businessman who will debut in politics when he arrives in the Republican Cabinet, is the one who must lead the project on a particularly sensitive issue, since it includes China, the South American country’s main trading partner, and the United States, its main foreign investor. In the escalation of tension between the Chilean authorities and the US ambassador in Chile, he threatened with Chile’s continuation in the visa exemption program to enter the United States. «The Visa Waiver is a security program, that’s what it is. If Chile wants to participate, it must secure all telecommunications. We must have confidence that the information we pass to the Chilean government will be protected so that Chile remains in the program,» the diplomat noted, adding that it depends «strictly on what the actions of this country are. Certainly everything is on the table.»
