The Diplomat
The Queen visited the city of Cali yesterday on the second and last day of her cooperation trip to Colombia. In the capital of the department of Valle del Cauca, where she arrived 29 years ago for a meeting of journalism students, Doña Letizia visited a coffee cooperative run by former FARC guerrillas, a workshop school for indigenous women and a microfinance project.
The Queen traveled to Cali, southwest of Bogotá, in 1994 to participate in the III Latin American Meeting of Social Communication Faculties, held in October of that year at the Universidad Autónoma de Occidente. Letizia, who was 22 years old at the time and studying journalism at the Complutense University of Madrid, was forced to work for a year in a pizzeria in Madrid to pay for that trip.
Yesterday began with a visit to the facilities of Economías Sociales del Común – ECOMUN, a cooperative for the cultivation and sale of coffee located in the Cali municipality of Yotoco and which employs former rebel fighters of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The initiative, which is part of the demobilization process through the “strengthening of the solidarity economy in Colombia” (according to the cooperative’s website), is supported by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), the European Union, the National Agency for Reincorporation and the National Coffee Board Association.
Afterwards, the Queen visited a Gardening Workshop School where indigenous women work and moved to the Santa Elena neighborhood to visit the Bancamía S.A. project, one of Colombia’s leading microfinance institutions, created in 2008 from the merger between Corporación Mundial de la Mujer Colombia and Corporación Mundial de la Mujer-Medellín. After this visit, Doña Letizia went to the Cali airport to return to Spain.
Colombia has been a priority country for Spanish Cooperation for thirty years. Spain accompanies Colombia’s efforts to implement the peace agreements, focusing on strengthening the social rule of law, sustainable economic development, social cohesion, gender equality and the fight against violence against women.
This is the eighth cooperation trip made by the Queen, who has recovered a custom started by Queen Sofia in 1997. Previously, Doña Letizia traveled to Honduras and El Salvador (2015), Senegal (2017), Dominican Republic and Haiti (2018), Mozambique (2019), again Honduras (2020), Paraguay (late 2021) and Mauritania (May 2022). The objective of these visits is to support Spanish Cooperation, to learn first-hand about the work carried out by AECID or Spanish NGOs and to verify the effectiveness of the projects financed by Spain and their direct impact on the beneficiaries.
On the first day of the trip, in which the Queen was accompanied by the Secretary of State for International Cooperation, Pilar Cancela, and the Spanish Ambassador to Colombia, Joaquín de Arístegui, Doña Letizia and the First Lady, Verónica Alcocer, visited in Cartagena de Indias the Spanish Cooperation Training Center and two projects financed by Spain, the drinking water supply and household sanitation program in the Villahermosa neighborhood and the Workshop School on cultural heritage and restoration for young people at risk of exclusion.
