The Diplomat
King Felipe VI and the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, received yesterday in Madrid the President of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, whose working visit to Spain coincided with the signing of a bilateral agreement to improve the migratory situation of Spanish aid workers and with the arrival of 80 of the more than 500 agricultural workers who will move to Spain this year within the framework of the agreement on migratory labor flows.
Castro was received by Don Felipe at the Zarzuela Palace. The meeting was also attended by the Spanish State Secretary for Ibero-America and the Caribbean and Spanish in the World, Juan Fernández Trigo, and the Spanish Ambassador to Honduras, Diego Nuño García, and by the Honduran Minister of Foreign Affairs of Honduras, Eduardo Enrique Reina, and the private secretary of the President of Honduras, Héctor Manuel Zelaya Castro.
Afterwards, the King offered a lunch in honor of the Honduran President. Felipe VI attended the inauguration of Xiomara Castro, the first woman to become head of state of her country, on January 27, 2022, and Queen Letizia also visited Honduras last year on a cooperation trip.
In addition, Castro was received by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, at the Moncloa Palace, where both leaders discussed the development of bilateral relations in areas such as health, education or climate emergency, and celebrated the agreement to improve the migratory situation of Spanish aid workers in Honduras.
This agreement, which was signed yesterday in Madrid by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Spain and Honduras, José Manuel Albares and Eduardo Enrique Reina, will help to “regulate the conditions of entry and stay of volunteers and scholarship holders of non Honduran nationality linked to the Spanish Cooperation”, according to the Honduran Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Likewise, according to Albares in his Twitter account, “it will allow to improve the conditions of our aid workers in the country” and to advance “in their protection”.
Likewise, Pedro Sánchez and Xiomara Castro pledged to continue working on the processing of the next Country Partnership Framework (MAP) 2024-2027 and both agreed on the success of the Agreement on the regulation and management of labor migration flows, which in 2022 (its first year of application) allowed the movement of 250 Honduran citizens to our country to work in agricultural campaigns. In 2023, according to Moncloa, this figure is expected to rise to 569 workers.
Precisely, Eduardo Enrique Reina and the ambassador of Honduras in Spain, Marlon Brevé, received this Tuesday at Madrid-Barajas airport the first 80 Hondurans who have moved to Spain this year to work in the agricultural sector in Andalusia thanks to the temporary work visas offered by Spain. “We are working with Spain so that this program can be extended, not only to trades in the agricultural area, but also to jobs in health issues; we are even analyzing the possibility that, at some point, employment quotas can be used so that Honduran scholarship holders who are studying in Spain can carry out their paid internships”, stated the Foreign Minister, quoted on the website of the Honduran Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The Hondurans will stay in Spanish territory for six months in application of the circular migration agreement signed in May 2021 by the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, and her then Honduran counterpart, Lisandro Rosales. The pilot program became operational in the first half of 2022, although the official entry into force of the Agreement on the Regulation and Management of Labor Migration Flows will take place precisely today.
The program provides a temporary work opportunity for Hondurans, for which it articulates a procedure for the selection of workers at origin and regulates the working conditions and social rights of the workers. According to data from the National Statistics Institute (INE) for 2020, there are currently more than 120,000 Hondurans living in Spain, mainly in Catalonia and Madrid.
Last June, the Spanish Government made a commitment at the Summit of the Americas – held in Los Angeles (California) and in which Spain participated as an observer country – to “double” the “labor channels” for Honduran migrants wishing to participate in “circular migration programs in Spain”. This announcement satisfied the political interests of US President Joe Biden, in view of the very high number of migrants and asylum seekers his Administration is facing at the southern border.
