The Diplomat in Spain

The Diplomat

The President of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, will arrive tomorrow in Spain as part of a tour of several European countries starring the negotiations for the modernization of the Agreement with the EU and the Chilean government’s desire to seek European support for its policies against climate change.

The tour was initially scheduled for last June, but was postponed due to the worsening of the coronavirus pandemic in Chile. The ten-day tour includes Italy, Vatican City, France, Spain and the United Kingdom, as well as meetings with the leaders of these countries, such as French President Emmanuel Macron, Pope Francis, Italian Prime Minister Sergio Mattarella and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Sebastián Piñera will visit Spain tomorrow, where he will be received in audience by the King, will be entertained with a lunch with the King and Queen of Spain and will hold a meeting with the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez. Sánchez previously met with Piñera in August 2018, during his first trip outside the EU. Apart from that, King Emeritus Juan Carlos I attended the president’s inauguration in March 2018. and Piñera made his last official visit to Spain in October 2018, as part of his first international tour of Europe since his inauguration.

As reported by the press office of La Moneda, the president will be accompanied on all these trips by his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Andrés Allamand, who held a meeting this past Thursday in Madrid with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, to address, among other matters, Piñera’s trip and various issues on the bilateral agenda.

According to the Chilean Foreign Ministry, during this meeting the progress in the negotiations for the modernization of the Association Agreement with the European Union (in force since 2003) was also discussed. In fact, according to the Chilean press, it is foreseeable that Piñera will take advantage of the tour to obtain the support of his European interlocutors for the closing of the negotiations, which began in 2017 under the presidency of Michelle Bachelet. Since then, a dozen rounds of negotiations have been held, but an agreement has not yet been closed despite the fact that the parties hoped to achieve it in the first half of 2021. Spain has repeatedly called for the formalization of this agreement and the other two that the European Union has pending with Latin America: the modernization agreement with Mexico and the Mercosur agreement with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. The European Union is currently Chile’s third largest trading partner and the leading foreign investor (FDI) in the country.

Official sources also stated that the Chilean president has traveled to Europe with two other objectives: to promote the creation of marine protected areas and reforestation in Chile to tackle climate change and to attract European investment for the development of renewable energies.

Sebastián Piñera will finish his current term in March 2022. Among the most important changes made during his term in office is the process of drafting a new Constitution that will put an end to the current one, in force since the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), a process that Spain has supported from the beginning and for which it has even offered its accompaniment.  The constitutional reform was the Government’s response to the social outbreak experienced by Chile since October 2019. The riots forced Chile to suspend the celebration in Santiago of the UN Climate Summit, which was hosted by Spain in December 2019.

Precisely, Amnesty International sent a letter last week to the leaders of the European countries included in Piñera’s tour to express its concern about the lack of progress in the investigations into human rights violations committed during the protests, the largest in 31 years of democracy and which resulted in some thirty deaths, thousands of injured, numerous episodes of extreme violence and accusations against the security forces.