Jabonero during his speech, along with De Laiglesia and Celaá./ Photo: OEI
Eduardo González. 04/07/2018
The new secretary general of the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI in its Spanish acronym) for Education, Science and Culture, the Spanish Mariano Jabonero, declared yesterday in Madrid that the teaching and common Spanish and Portuguese languages must be the “central points” helping promote the “legitimate pride of being all Ibero-Americans”.
Mariano Jabonero was presented yesterday at Casa de América as new secretary general of the OEI, a position to which he was assigned in April and he will hold until 2022. This is the fifth Spaniard leading this institution, which is made up of 23 States and, with almost 70 years, the senior organization of the Ibero-American cooperation space.
“My main objective is to serve the Ibero-American community through education, science and culture, central points for integration and development”, Jabonero declared during the event, which was attended by the former Spanish and Colombian presidents José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Ernesto Samper, the director of Instituto Cervantes, Juan Manuel Bonet, and a large representation of Ibero-American ambassadors to Spain, among other personalities.
“The Spanish and Portuguese languages are the other central integrating points” in Ibero-America, the “world’s densest region in which these two twin languages” are “beyond identity and exclusive attitudes that threaten harmony and understanding nowadays”, he continued.
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Casa de América hosts the presentation of Mariano Jabonero as new secretary general of the OEI
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For his part, the secretary of State for International Cooperation and for Ibero-America and the Caribbean, Juan Pablo de Laiglesia, emphasized, at the same event, the importance of education in the Agenda 2030 for the Sustainable Development Goals, which “has come to change life and can only be taken one way, which is seriously”.
“This has been a clear objective of the Government from the beginning, which has materialized in specific facts, such as the creation of the Office of the High Commissioner for the Agenda 2030, directly dependent on the president of the Government; the drawing up of the Plan of Action for the Agenda 2030, agreed with all the actors; and the presentation of the report before the UN within barely ten days”, he pointed out before those present, being among them his immediate predecessor in the position, Fernando García Casas.
Furthermore, the Minister of Education and Vocational Training, Isabel Celaá, expressed the “predisposition of the Government to collaborate with the new secretary general and the OEI”, with which “we share basic institutional principles” in a context of “democratic global development in the Ibero-American region”.
