The socialist government of Argentina joined several other impoverished nations in condemning Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Sunday for visiting Taiwan and loudly proclaiming its allegiance to communist China.
The vocal support for Beijing comes about half a year after socialist President Alberto Fernández visited Beijing and laid a wreath to honor communist mass murderer Mao Zedong in China’s capital city. Fernández joined China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), China’s infrastructure colonialism program, shortly thereafter.
The Chinese Communist party falsely claims Taiwan, a sovereign nation with a functional democratic government, as a “province” of China, despite the Communist regime having never ruled over the island nation. The “One China principle,” as Beijing calls it, requires countries to deny Taiwan’s existence as a country to secure diplomatic ties with China. The United States, to maintain ties to China, does not recognize Taiwan as a country, and Pelosi repeatedly stated that she did not recognize Taiwan’s sovereignty during her visit last week.
On Sunday – nearly a week after Pelosi left Taiwan – Argentine Ambassador to China Sabino Vaca Narvaja described the visit as a “problem for all the international community” and expressed support for the “one-China principle,” the formal term for incorrectly identifying Taiwan as a province of China. Vaca Narvaja’s statement places Argentina in the same category as Sri Lanka, Cuba, and North Korea in poor countries condemning Pelosi despite playing no meaningful role in China-U.S. or China-Taiwan relations.
Vaca Narvaja gave an interview to the state-run China Global Television Network (CGTN) on Sunday.
“We are sure that this visit has been a provocation for China, and a problem for the entire international community,” the ambassador claimed. “That is why we want to condemn this visit and join the voices of Latin America but also the voices of the United Nations.”
In the same interview, the Argentine ambassador also denounced the “double standards” of “countries that fight for the principle of territorial integrity in Ukraine” but do not support China’s one-China principle with regards to Taiwan while using Argentina’s claim to the British Falkland Islands — which China supports — as another example.
News website Infobae reported on Sunday that Ambassador Vaca Narvaja asserted to the Argentina state-run Telam news agency, ”as our Foreign Ministry has expressed in all multilateral forums and organizations, Argentina supports the principle of one China and the concept of territorial integrity. It is the same principle by which China also supports our claim to sovereignty over our Falkland Islands.”
The Falkland Islands is a South American archipelago that is part of British territory, which Argentina claims as its own under the Spanish name Islas Malvinas. In 1982, the Argentine dictatorship of General Leopoldo Galtieri invaded and occupied the islands before the British government under Margaret Thatcher sent and expeditionary force, spanning a 74-day war that culminated with Argentina surrendering to the United Kingdom. In 2013, more than 90 percent of the island’s population chose to remain part of British territory.
Vaca Narvaja, who has family ties with former president and current Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kircher, was appointed as Argentina’s ambassador to China in 2020. He has been heavily criticized in the past for maintaining an excessively pro-Communist China stance.
In June, Vaca Narvaja openly denied China’s genocide of the Uyghur people, claiming that there is “harmony in Xinjiang.” In reality, the China has ilegally detained 1-3 million Uyghurs and other minority groups in the Xinjiang region since 2017 in concentration camps, forcing the detainees into inhumane conditions that include physical and sexual abuse, torture, slave labor, and force sterilization. China has also engaged in mass sterilization campaigns to limit the number of non-Han ethnic people born in the region.
Anti-socialist demonstrations took place across Argentina this weekend against the administration of socialist President Alberto Fernández, whose management has led to a severe economic crisis. https://t.co/JEkPU95YBh
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) November 10, 2020
The Argentine ambassador’s recent words of appeasement to China drew the criticism of Andrés Cisneros, former vice chancellor of Argentina, who cataloged the Ambassador’s words as an “Irresponsible statement.”
“What happens is that many ambassadors become so inseparable from the country in which they are serving that they end up being reverse ambassadors: their ambassadors to us and not ours to them. I am afraid that this is the case of Vaca Narvaja,” Cisneros stated in an interview given to Argentina’s Radio Mitre on Monday.
Argentina, which currently holds a $44 billion debt with the IMF, officially joined China’s predatory Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) this year. China has also agreed to provide $8 billion to the South American nation to finance its $12 billion nuclear plant project.
Argentina now joins the ranks of other South American nations that have sided with China and condemned Taiwan over Speaker Pelosi’s visit such as Venezuela – which did so both through the ruling Socialist Party and more officially, through the People’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs – Nicaragua (who cut ties with Taiwan in December 2021 and seized the Taiwanese embassy, handing it over to China), and Cuba.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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