Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping’s regime intends to persuade Guatemala to cut ties with Taiwan as part of a sustained effort to isolate the island democracy and enhance Beijing’s geopolitical clout in Central America.
“China’s going to be moving aggressively on Guatemala, that’s for sure,” Heritage Foundation visiting fellow Joseph Humire told the Washington Examiner. “I'm concerned that they're gonna flip.”
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Some of that uncertainty stems from Guatemalan President-elect Bernardo Arevalo's comments on the campaign trail, as the little-known aspirant told local media in June that he would “work on our trade relations and expand them, in the case of China.”
That rhetoric appears to have stoked hopes in Beijing, where Xi is keen to persuade the dwindling number of countries that still treat Taiwan as the legitimate Republic of China to align instead with the communist power that overthrew the nationalists and forced them to flee across the Taiwan Strait.
“We hope that the new government of Guatemala will make the right decision in the fundamental and long-term interests of its country and its people,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Monday. “We hope the new government of Guatemala will make the right call in line with the fundamental and long-term interests of its country and people.”
Wang’s rhetoric was tailored to dovetail with the incoming Guatemalan leader’s stated desire for more economic partners, despite his recent attempt to clarify his posture toward Taipei.
“We are already in conversations with the government of Taiwan ... and we have made it very clear that there is no interest in altering the diplomatic relations between our countries,” Arevalo told the Atlantic Council during a virtual event last month. “We don't see that being contradictory with the fact that there's already commercial ties established between Guatemala and the People's Republic of China and that we can begin to explore the expansion of those commercial ties.”
His rhetorical balancing act inspires less than full confidence in some American observers of China’s maneuvering.
“I would hope that he would say something like, you know, ‘For us, there's only one China and it's Taipei.’ Something like that, where ... it was rather airtight in terms of which side they were on,” Dr. Ryan Berg, who directs the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Washington Examiner. "The cautionary tale is if you try to have it both ways, that’s a recipe for dumping Taiwan later.”
Other analysts struck a more optimistic note, given that Arevalo’s rhetoric turned more favorable toward Taiwan as the campaign unfolded.
“I understood the first [comment to local media] as an innocent comment — that he probably got lots of education on,” the U.S. Army War College’s Evan Ellis, a research professor and former member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, told the Washington Examiner. “Count number one is, ‘We're not going to get more business with China unless we change relations. Changing relations has an enormous set of political and other consequences and choices linked to it. And so, you know, maybe we don't want to dive off that cliff.’ And then I think, the other piece is always, ‘Well, if we stay with Taiwan, then there actually are ways that Taiwan can help us that we should talk about.’”
Chinese officials paired their appeal to Arevalo with another diplomatic victory in Central America, as a six-country organization known as the Central American Parliament voted to deprive Taiwan of its status as a “permanent observer” of the organization and replace it with communist China’s National People’s Congress.
“This again shows that the one-China principle represents the unstoppable trend of the times and has the overwhelming support of the people,” Wang said. ‘China stands ready to develop friendly cooperation with the Central American Parliament on the basis of the one-China principle.”
The vote reflected a recent steep decline in Taiwanese fortunes. Nicaragua, which hosted the inter-parliamentary meeting on Monday, and four other countries — Panama, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Honduras —have severed diplomatic relations with Taiwan in favor of Beijing. The shuttering Taiwanese embassies have marked China’s diplomatic progress north from South America through the Central American states. Throughout Latin America, only Guatemala, its small neighbor Belize, and Paraguay still maintain formal ties with Taipei.
“Guatemala is the largest country, population-wise, that still recognizes Taiwan in the world,” Berg observed. “The rest of the countries are all far smaller than that. And if Guatemala were to flip to the PRC as its neighbor Honduras did earlier this year, it'd be a big deal. It'd be a huge deal for the region, especially given Guatemala's size and historic importance.”
Such a shift would enhance Chinese Communist influence in the Western Hemisphere while possibly lowering the potential diplomatic costs of military aggression against Taiwan.
“If Xi Jinping wants to act to eliminate Taiwanese autonomy before the end of his third term, there's no written guarantee that he's going to wait until Taiwan is down to zero international allies,” Ellis said. “And so, if you take away a big one, it's potentially destabilizing the terms of Chinese behavior in Asia, as much as it is for essentially, you know, China's position and U.S. cooperative relationships in our own near abroad.”
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The Biden administration provided valuable indirect assistance to Arevalo by playing an outspoken part in pressuring the Guatemalan authorities to restrain their penchant for disqualifying potential rivals from the election. But Washington still has its work cut out for it.
“It's not a foregone conclusion that Arevalo is going to abandon Taiwan,” Humire said. “But it definitely would follow a trend that's happening in Latin America.”