Two US representatives in a letter last week urged Honduran President Nasry Asfura to re-establish ties with Taiwan, which would reverse the “misguided decision” of the newly elected leader’s predecessor.
US representatives Tom Tiffany and Andy Ogles said in a letter dated Thursday last week congratulating Asfura for his election victory that the win represented the Honduran public’s rejection of policies of former Honduran president Xiomara Castro, including her decision to sever ties with Taiwan in favor of Beijing.
Tiffany and Ogles said that they “strongly support” Asfura’s expressed desire to resume diplomatic ties with Taipei and “look forward” to his formal announcement of the “important change.”
Photo: AFP
Asfura, who was sworn into office in January, had said on the campaign trail that his administration would seek to reverse Castro’s switch of diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China.
On Feb. 7, during a meeting with US President Donald Trump at the Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Asfura again said that he was considering switching diplomatic ties to Taiwan.
Tegucigalpa’s decision to switch diplomatic recognition and scrap a free-trade agreement with Taiwan was a huge blow for the Honduran shrimp industry, with data from Taiwanese officials showing that imports plunged from about 13,000 tonnes in 2022 to nearly 4,000 tonnes last year.
Shrimp exports have been a core industry for Honduras since the 1990s, and the slump led to the closure of 60 companies and the layoff of about 14,000 workers, reports said.
The Spanish-language La Tribuna last month reported that Honduran First Vice President Maria Antonieta Mejia said restoring diplomatic ties with Taipei would be a gradual process.
A team is reviewing the accords and agreements signed with China under the Castro administration and the results would help Asfura make a final decision on the matter, Mejia told the newspaper.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Feb. 11 said that it has an open-minded, practical stance and does not set prerequisites, adding that it would continue to foster bilateral relations based on the principles of equality and mutual benefit.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS