PANAMA CITY: A planned trip by some Panamanian lawmakers to Taiwan has unleashed the latest diplomatic spat with China as the Central American country tries to navigate the turbulent waters between the Asian superpower and the United States.
On Wednesday, Panama’s Foreign Relations Ministry and the US ambassador to the country criticized China’s diplomats in Panama for asking the lawmakers to cancel their trip to Taiwan, with the ministry accusing the Chinese Embassy of “meddling” in internal Panamanian affairs.
This followed comments from Panama President José Raúl Mulino a week earlier saying that the planned Taiwan trip did not have the approval of his administration and reminding the lawmakers that the executive branch was responsible for Panama’s foreign policy.
China claims Taiwan, a self-governing island off its coast, as its territory and has staged threatening military drills in the surrounding waters in recent years. In Latin America, Chinese diplomats have worked to get governments to establish diplomatic relations with it and cut ties to Taiwan.
Panama established relations with China in 2017 after breaking them off with Taiwan.
The Trump administration has brought the weight of the US government to bear on the issue this year, starting with accusations that China could influence the operations of the strategically important Panama Canal because a Hong Kong-based conglomerate held the long-term concession to operate ports at either end of the canal. The canal’s administration and the Panamanian government have denied that China had any sway over canal operations.
On Wednesday, Panama’s Foreign Relations Ministry said in a statement that “as a sovereign country, it does not accept restrictions, nor pressure that tries to influence the legitimate decisions of its subordinates.” The statement did not name China, but came a day after one of the country’s largest newspapers, La Prensa, reported that 10 lawmakers were asked by the Chinese Embassy to immediately cancel the trip because it “seriously violates the principle of one China” and constitutes “an intervention in Chinese internal affairs.”
The Chinese Embassy referred a request from The Associated Press to the reporting from La Prensa.
Mulino has lamented that Panama has been drawn into the US-China tensions.
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Panama on his first trip as the US top diplomat in February, he made China’s influence a top issue. Mulino said then that Panama would not be renewing its agreement with China’s Belt and Road Initiative when it expires. The initiative promotes and funds infrastructure and development projects that critics say leave poor member countries heavily indebted to China.
In August, US Ambassador to Panama Kevin Marino Cabrera gave public backing to Panamanian lawmakers who joined the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, a group of hundreds of lawmakers from dozens of countries concerned about how democracies approach Beijing.
In September, the Trump administration said it was restricting visas “for Central American nationals who, while in Central American countries and intentionally acting on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), knowingly direct, authorize, fund, provide significant support to, or carry out activities that undermine the rule of law in Central America.”
Some of the lawmakers who planned to make the Taiwan trip later this week defended their decision. Some said the trip would expose them to models and experiences that could help Panama’s modernization, others cited opportunities for investment and cooperation.
On Wednesday, Cabrera addressed the controversy, saying that China’s Embassy “shouldn’t be involved in those issues.”
Panamanian lawmakers’ Taiwan trip sparks diplomatic row with China
https://arab.news/v3gfs
Panamanian lawmakers’ Taiwan trip sparks diplomatic row with China
- China’s diplomats in Panama have asked Panamanian lawmakers to cancel their planned trip to Taiwan
- “As a sovereign country, it (Panama) does not accept restrictions, nor pressure…,” Panama’s Foreign Relations Ministry responded
Isolated Kremlin critics lament lost future at Nemtsov memorial
- Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death
- Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street
MOSCOW: On a bridge next to the Kremlin on a drizzly Friday morning, a lone Russian police officer stood looking at the half-dozen bunches of flowers laying in memory of slain opposition figure Boris Nemtsov.
The symbolism was almost too much.
Four years into Moscow’s full-scale offensive on Ukraine, which has seen President Vladimir Putin eradicate all forms of dissent and usher in strict military censorship laws that have silenced his critics, few Russians dared, or wanted, to pay tribute.
Nemtsov, a longtime Putin opponent, was shot and killed on February 27 2015, meters from the Kremlin’s red walls. He was 55.
Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death, which came on Friday.
This year, there was barely a trickle. Those who turned up were visibly nervous.
“So few people, they’ve all forgotten,” lamented one elderly man, who refused to give his name.
“Everybody is afraid,” a woman standing nearby added.
Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street.
AFP reporters on Friday morning saw only around a dozen mourners alongside Western ambassadors laying red carnations.
“Keep moving, don’t gather in a crowd, don’t block the way for other citizens,” a police officer said through a megaphone.
Three days after Russia launched its offensive on Ukraine in 2022, protesters had staged an impromptu rally against the war at the memorial on the anniversary of Nemtsov’s death.
Nemtsov’s supporters have always accused Chechen leader and key Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov of ordering his killing.
Kadyrov has rejected the claims.
Five Chechens were convicted of a contract killing but investigators never said who it was ordered by.
- ‘Everything is persecuted’ -
For his followers, Nemtsov is a totemic figure in Russian political life — seen as a once-future leader who might have taken the country on a different path.
“I come here every year,” said 79-year-old scientist Sergei at the bridge on Friday.
“Russia should have had — though unfortunately it didn’t work out — a leader exactly like Nemtsov,” he told AFP, declining to give his surname.
“Right now everything here is suppressed, everything is persecuted, people are sitting in prisons.”
A physicist by education, Nemtsov rose to fame in the 1990s as a young, liberal provincial governor, and was widely tipped to take over from Boris Yeltsin.
He gave his hesitant backing to Putin when the ex-KGB spy was tapped to enter the Kremlin instead, but became an early — and fierce — opponent of what he cast as the Russian leader’s creeping authoritarianism.
He had largely lost popularity and was only a marginal figure in Russian politics when he was killed in 2015. Still, his murder shocked the country and the world.
“The hopes of the whole country were pinned on him — of all the people who wanted it to be free here,” said Olga Vinogradova, a 66-year-old volunteer who tends to the pop-up memorial to Nemtsov on the bridge.
“When this man was killed, naturally, all of us were, we were all just executed at that moment. Because our hopes were destroyed,” she said.
“With this memorial, we remind people that there was a different path for Russia. And that there was a real person who could have led us down this path.”
- ‘Forced out’ -
Nemtsov had strongly opposed Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and Moscow’s military backing for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
He was also a close and early ally of Alexei Navalny, who died in 2024 in an Arctic prison in what his supports say was a poisoning.
Open opposition to the Kremlin is unheard of inside Russia since the first days of the Ukraine offensive — when riot police cracked down hard on the thousands that took to the streets to protest.
All major critics of the Kremlin are in exile, prison or dead.
Those that remain have been silenced.
“Many have been forced out of the country, some have been killed,” said Gleb, a 23-year-old photographer.
A movement or person like Nemtsov was “impossible” to imagine right now, he said.
Still, he held on to a slither of hope.
“But everything can change at any moment.”
