(Guatemala) The President of Guatemala, Alejandro Giammatei, left Saturday for Taiwan for an official visit intended to support the island, which his country is one of the last to recognize diplomatically.
“We are leaving for Taiwan to send a very clear message internationally that countries have the right to govern themselves and have their own territories. […] without other countries invading or threatening them,” Giammatei said on Twitter.
Mr. Giammattei, who takes a commercial flight with a stopover in the United States, will stay from Monday to Thursday in Taiwan. There he will meet President Tsai Ing-wen, who had visited Guatemala and Belize three weeks earlier.
“The friendship between Guatemala and Taiwan is unwavering,” said the president of Guatemala during this visit, affirming that the island was “an independent nation and the only true China”.
On the way back from Central America, Mr.me Tsai had met in Los Angeles with Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy. This meeting angered Beijing, which retaliated with three days of major military maneuvers around Taiwan.
Guatemala is one of the last 13 countries in the world to diplomatically recognize Taiwan.
China regards Taiwan as a province that it has not yet managed to reunify with the rest of its territory since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. It aims for this reunification, by force if necessary, and does not allow no country to maintain diplomatic relations both with it and with Taiwan.
On March 26, Honduras was the latest country to break with Taipei in favor of Beijing.