President of Taiwan Visits on Sunday Symbolizes Our Close Ties

Taiwanese President, Tsai Ing-wen is scheduled to arrive in Belize on Sunday. This will be her second visit to Belize since she was first elected in 2016. This visit signals the strong ties that Belize shares with Taiwan since establishing diplomatic relations back in 1989. Earlier today, News Five spoke with Foreign Minister Eamon Courtenay about the pending visit of the Taiwanese head of government.

Eamon Courtenay,

Senator Eamon Courtenay, Minister of Foreign Affairs

“It is to renew and reaffirm our relationship to underscore the friendship and strong ties that we have. And as I said, it is just a sign of showing the Belizean people that she values and her country values the support that they get from Belize. We cooperate with them in a wide range of issues. For example, diplomatically, we provide support. They support us in agriculture. They support us not only in direct finance contributions, but in a lot of other areas, some of which I don’t want to go into publicly. Sufficed to say that we have no particular requests, we are not begging the president. This is a sign of solidarity of two countries that have very close relations, and we want to send a signal to the world just like who she’s visiting, Guatemala, send a signal to the world that our relationship remains strong. I think the Prime Minister will be having a private meeting with the president. I will be meeting with my counterpart, Minister Joseph Wu, and in those meetings we will just be going over the bilateral programs that we have and to ensure that they remain on track. And so we just renew our relations. We respect the relationship that they have with Guatemala. In fact, we have our own diplomatic relations with Guatemala, so we certainly don’t judge them or criticize them for that. What we have done is to try to approach them to keep them briefed on different concerns that we may have from time to time with Guatemala or any other country we have considered them to be very supportive of some of the asks that we have in terms of supporting the O.A.S. and the Adjacency Zone, and other things along the border – other things that we have had to finance, other things that we have had to ask for diplomatic support, and they have always been forthcoming. So their relationship with Guatemala, we respect, we have no concerns, no criticisms of it. We have relations with Guatemala and that’s the way the world operates, diplomatically.”