Eduardo González
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, yesterday entrusted the new undersecretary of the Ministry, Luis Cuesta, to “get down to work” and get the move to the new headquarters of the building in Plaza Marqués de Salamanca “as soon as possible”.
“The main asset of this house is the human team, the diplomats, the rest of the civil servants and all the contracted labor staff, at the headquarters and abroad, and helping to release the potential and capabilities of this team will be the most exciting challenge”, said Luis Cuesta during the ceremony of taking office, held at the Palace of Santa Cruz and attended by the Minister and the Secretaries of State.
For his part, Albares recalled during his speech that the members of the Foreign Service have been working for “months” in “very difficult conditions” because of the COVID-19 virus, the problems of access to vaccines and the need to attend to consular problems in a non-presential manner. “All this is an additional burden of stress and complexity of work, and everyone has done it with great professionalism”. said the minister, who paid tribute to the former undersecretary of the Ministry, Celsa Nuño, who “had to face the crudest moment of the pandemic”.
For all these reasons, Albares warned, “the first thing to do is to vaccinate 100% of our Foreign Service”. “We are already at it, anyone in the Foreign Service and their dependents can get vaccinated here in Madrid”, but “you have to do your best to encourage everyone to come here and get vaccinated, and for those who do not come here this summer, we have to find a feasible, viable and quick solution for everyone to get vaccinated, because there is no other way to fight the virus”, he warned.
Besides, he continued, “we have pending the transfer to the new headquarters” of the Marqués de Salamanca, and “we have to try to make it as fast as possible”. “I have been these days, and it has been practically the first thing I have done, visiting all the headquarters of our Ministry, and I am dividing my week between this headquarters, Santa Cruz, and Torres Ágora, where most of the directorates that make foreign policy are, and what I wish is that, as soon as possible, we move there, that we are all together again to improve efficiency, so that we can communicate, so that we can cross each other in the corridors”, he affirmed. “I commend you, Luis, to get down to work, as the previous undersecretary has been doing so far, and we can move as soon as possible,” he added.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs left the Marqués de Salamanca headquarters in 2004 because of naphthalene, a toxic and flammable substance, and the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ana Palacios, decided to move it to Torres Ágora, where the bulk of the Ministry has been located since then. In 2012 it was decided to refurbish and recover the Marqués de Salamanca building and in 2014 the works were awarded to the company Tragsa, under the direction of the Directorate General of State Heritage. The project was approved in 2016 and the works began in October 2017, but since then they have been delayed more than expected, for one reason or another. In December 2019 it was assured that the building would be ready a year later, but the COVID-19 pandemic further swelled the long list of previous delays. The Ministry hopes that the final move can become a reality by the end of this year.
In his speech yesterday, Albares also recalled the need to meet the needs of the Foreign Service, which “is very heterogeneous, because it is made up of different bodies, labor contractors, civil servants of different categories and diplomats.” “I am meeting with the unions, diplomatic associations, representatives of the Foreign Service” and it is necessary to be “very attentive to all of them,” he continued. “In the Foreign Service everyone has to have their needs met, and if we can’t, because we won’t be able to do everything, we have to give them an explanation as to why we can’t,” he warned.
