Closer but Not Steadier? Logistics Performance and Latin America's Share of US Import Reallocation after the Section 301 Tariffs

The US tariffs imposed on Chinese goods under Section 301 in 2018–2019 triggered a large reallocation of US imports away from China, and nearshoring narratives predicted that Latin America, closer to the US market, would be a principal beneficiary. This article tests that prediction with product-level US import data for 74 major suppliers, 4,772 HS6 products and the years 2015–2025, combined with the original tariff lists published in the Federal Register and the World Bank Logistics Performance Index. Using Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood with exporter-product, product-year and exporter-year fixed effects, the estimates show that a full 25-point tariff increase reduced China's imports by about half relative to other suppliers, with flat pre-trends. Latin American exporters did not capture a disproportionate share of this diversion: in tariffed products their imports fell by about 27% relative to other non-Chinese suppliers, a result that holds for Mexico, Central America and South America separately and survives alternative windows, samples and treatment definitions. Pre-shock logistics performance does not explain which Latin American countries fared better; the moderation estimate is fragile and its randomization-inference p-value is 0.44. Proximity and logistics capacity were not sufficient conditions for capturing tariff-driven reallocation. This record contains the manuscript (Research Article) and its replication package: download scripts with SHA-256 manifests, the product-level tariff-exposure measure and the Python code that reproduces all tables and figures. Data sources: US Census Bureau International Trade API; Federal Register notices 83 FR 28710, 83 FR 40823, 83 FR 47974 and 84 FR 43304; World Bank Logistics Performance Index.