The Diplomat
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, yesterday took advantage of his meeting in Madrid with the Argentine President, Alberto Fernández, to announce that on June 8 and 9 he will make an official visit to Buenos Aires accompanied by a “large” delegation of businessmen and the Government.
The Argentine President, who arrived in Spain as part of a European tour, was received in audience by King Philip VI at the Zarzuela Palace, accompanied by the Argentine Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Felipe Solá, and of Economy, Martín Guzmán. On the Spanish side, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and for Latin America and the Caribbean, Cristina Gallach, and the Spanish Ambassador to Argentina, Francisco Javier Sandomingo, attended the meeting.
Afterwards, Fernández met with Sánchez at La Moncloa Palace, with whom he offered a joint statement to the press in which the President of the Government announced that next June 8 and 9 he will officially visit Argentina together with “a large delegation of the Government and businessmen and businesswomen”. “The expectations for the visit are very high,” said Alberto Fernández. “I hope to receive you as you deserve in Argentina”, he added.
Sánchez also affirmed that the collaboration between both countries extends “to many areas that have to do with the economy” and announced that the plan for the internationalization of the Spanish economy approved yesterday by the Council of Ministers places “Argentina as one of the priority countries for Spanish presence and investment”.
Likewise, the head of the Executive recalled that, “during these months of pandemic”, Spain and Argentina have worked “jointly” to review the mechanism of surcharges that the IMF has and that is greatly damaging Argentina’s economic and financial possibilities”. “Spain, together with Argentina and other Latin American countries, have worked to open international financing channels through instruments of the international financial organizations for middle-income countries, which is essential to relaunch the economy and recover the levels prior to the pandemic”, he added. In this sense, Fernández thanked Spain “for the support it has given us, time and again, when we had to make our approaches to international credit organizations in the face of the huge debt that Argentina inherited in 2019”.
“Argentina and Spain have to be absolutely united and work in consensus” because “we have many views in common”, said Alberto Fernández, who highlighted, in this regard, the coincidence between both countries on the need to declare the vaccine against COVID-19 as a global good. “It is a moral and ethical imperative that the vaccine reaches all the inhabitants of the world, and that is the effort we have to make as the global community that we are,” he warned. In this sense, Pedro Sánchez declared that vaccine patents should be “liberalized” and called for “the transfer of knowledge and technology, increasing production capacities so that it can be universal, and promoting and speeding up distribution to all parts of the planet”.
On the other hand, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, held yesterday a working breakfast with her Argentine counterpart, Felipe Solá, at the Palacio de Viana, during which, among other matters, the process of ratification of the European Union-Mercosur Association Agreement was analyzed. According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the head of diplomacy exchanged impressions with her Argentine counterpart on her recent trip to Brazil and Paraguay, during which she was able to confirm “Mercosur’s political will to carry forward the process for its definitive entry into force”.
