Eduardo González
Panama’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Erika Mouynes, will make an official visit to Spain this week as part of a tour in Europe to present Mission Panama, a diplomatic strategy to promote a new international image of a country “extremely committed to the highest standards of transparency”.
Mouynes will be received this coming Thursday at the Palacio de Viana by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, with whom she will address the state of relations between the two countries, sign a Memorandum of Understanding on bilateral consultations and offer a joint press conference, according to Ministry sources.
In addition, the Panamanian minister will take advantage of her stay in Madrid to participate in the Tribuna EFE – Casa de América. This is the first visit by a Panamanian foreign minister since 2019, following the two trips made that same year by the then minister, Isabel De Saint Malo. Former Spanish ministers José Manuel García-Margallo and Josep Borrell visited Panama in 2014 and 2019, accompanying former President Mariano Rajoy and the King, respectively.
Besides, for Mouynes this will be his first international tour since he took office, last December 2, 2020, although she already coincided last June 10 in Costa Rica with González Laya herself on the occasion of the Spain-SICA Summit (Central American Integration System), in which the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, also participated. At that meeting, the Panamanian foreign minister joined her signature to that of her counterparts from Spain, Costa Rica, Belize, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic to demand the “immediate release” of the Nicaraguan opposition leaders recently detained by the regime of Daniel Ortega.
After her stay in Madrid, Erika Mouynes will travel to Brussels, where she will meet with the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, to discuss Panama’s participation in the Copernicus Program of the European Space Agency (ESA) and to present Mission Panama, a program of the Panamanian diplomacy which aims to do away with the image of the country as a tax haven for fraudulent companies and show, instead, a new image of a country “extremely committed to the highest standards of financial transparency”, as she herself recently declared to the Efe agency.
