On the morning of February 20, 2026, Chile's then-transport and telecommunications minister Juan Carlos Muñoz opened an email from the US State Department revoking his diplomatic visa. Two colleagues — telecommunications undersecretary Claudio Araya and Subtel chief of staff Guillermo Petersen — received the same notice. Their offence, per Secretary of State Marco Rubio's statement, was having "knowingly compromised critical telecommunications infrastructure and undermined regional security in our hemisphere." In plain terms: they had been assessing a roughly $500-million proposal from state-owned China Mobile to lay the 20,000-km "Chile-China Express" subsea cable from Valparaíso to Hong Kong.
A Rest of World investigation published June 18, 2026 traces what followed. Chile's telecom ministry, which had signed a concession decree on January 27, annulled it 48 hours later citing a "technical error" — after officials were summoned to the US Embassy in Santiago. The path was cleared for Google's 14,800-km Humboldt cable from Valparaíso to Sydney, a 50/50 joint venture with Chile's Desarrollo País due online in 2027. President José Antonio Kast's new government now says the Chinese project "continues to be assessed."
Why the landing point, not the cable, is the issue
It would be easy to dismiss this as raw great-power coercion. Before arguing that, it is worth stating the strongest case for Washington's concern — because it is not frivolous, and it runs directly through China's own statute book.
The destination mattered. A cable terminating in Hong Kong is not a cable terminating in a neutral jurisdiction. Under China's Cybersecurity Law (CSL), in force since June 1, 2017 and amended effective January 1, 2026, Article 37 requires critical information infrastructure operators to store personal information and "important data" generated in mainland China within the country, and to pass a state-led security assessment before any cross-border transfer. China Mobile is precisely such an operator. Layered on top are the Data Security Law, the Personal Information Protection Law, and the Cyberspace Administration of China's March 2024 Provisions on Promoting and Regulating Cross-Border Data Flows, which preserve mandatory security assessments by the CAC for important data and high-volume personal-information exports.
Hong Kong sits awkwardly inside this architecture. For data-transfer purposes, mainland law still treats Hong Kong as a separate jurisdiction — the 2023 Greater Bay Area standard contract exists precisely because moving data from Shenzhen to Hong Kong is a "cross-boundary" event requiring filings with both the Guangdong CAC and Hong Kong's privacy commissioner. But since the 2020 National Security Law, Hong Kong has also been folded into Beijing's security apparatus, giving PRC authorities legal avenues to compel data access that did not exist a decade ago. A subsea cable is a chokepoint: whoever controls the landing station controls the lawful-intercept surface. Washington's worry is that traffic between the entire Southern Cone and Asia would transit a node where Chinese state data-access law applies. That is a legitimate infrastructure-security question, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
The right concern, the wrong instrument
Granting all that, the method Washington chose is hard to defend on the very principles it invokes. Revoking the visas of three civil servants in an allied democracy — for the act of assessing a lawful commercial proposal — is not a proportionate response to a data-governance risk. Chile's foreign minister Alberto van Klaveren called the allegation "absolutely false" and the measure "unilateral," and he has a point about sovereignty: Chile is entitled to evaluate bids and weigh the trade-offs itself.
Three problems follow. First, coercion of this kind corrodes the open, interoperable internet the US claims to champion. The principle that should govern landing rights is transparent, technology-neutral security review — published criteria on encryption, landing-station control, lawful-access exposure, and operator ownership — not a phone call to the embassy and a cancelled visa. If the Hong Kong landing genuinely fails a security test, say so on the record and let Chile apply the standard to all bidders, Google included.
Second, punishing officials rather than regulating infrastructure sets a precedent that cuts both ways. If sanctioning regulators for assessing foreign vendors becomes normal, every country with a national champion will reach for the same tool, and the result is a more fragmented, more politicised cable map — the opposite of the resilient mesh that actually protects against single-point failure.
Third, it lets China set the narrative. Beijing's data-localisation regime is genuinely restrictive — the CSL and the 2024 Provisions impose real friction on anyone trying to move data out of the PRC. That is the substantive argument against routing critical traffic through Hong Kong, and it persuades on the merits. Washington had the better case and reached for the blunter weapon, handing Beijing a clean story about American bullying in its own hemisphere.
What proportionate looks like
The pro-innovation position is not indifference to who lands a cable in your country. Infrastructure security is real, and a landing point governed by expansive state-access law is a defensible thing to decline. But the open internet is best defended by rules, not by visa revocations: publish the security standard, apply it equally to Humboldt and to any Chinese bid, and let Chile choose with full information. Diversity of routes — including, eventually, more than one trans-Pacific path — serves resilience better than a US-preferred monopoly imposed by coercion. The Chinese cable may well fail an honest review. Washington should have let it fail one.