LatinNews Daily - 12 June 2023

* Honduras’s President Xiomara Castro has begun her first official visit to China since the two countries established diplomatic relations in March after Honduras severed ties with Taiwan. Heading up a high-level delegation which includes Foreign Minister Enrique Reina and Agriculture & Livestock Minister Laura Suazo, among others, Castro began her six-day visit on 9 June in Shanghai. There she held a meeting with Brazil’s former president Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016), who is currently the president of the Shanghai-headquartered New Development Bank (NDB), the institution set up by the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), in which Castro formally requested Honduras’s entry to the NDB. Castro also visited a research centre for China’s telecoms giant Huawei, before travelling to Beijing where she attended a high-level business summit hosted by the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT). CCPIT's deputy chairman Zhang Shaogang was cited by state newspaper China Global Daily as saying that “given the two countries’ diversity in resources and high economic complementarity, there is broad room for cooperation”. Zhang also noted that the summit was attended by “nearly 120 Chinese entrepreneurs from various fields such as foreign trade, engineering, finance, telecommunication and tourism”. Meanwhile Reina and his Chinese counterpart Qin Gang attended the inauguration of Honduras’s embassy in Beijing which comes less than a week after China opened an embassy in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa. Castro is due to meet China’s President Xi Jinping during her visit although a date for this has yet to be set.