The Diplomat
The President of Chile, Gabriel Boric, who will arrive in Madrid this afternoon, plans to hold a cultural event at Casa América on Saturday, to which he has invited former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, singer Joan Manuel Serrat and former judge Baltasar Garzón, among others, just a couple of months before the 50th anniversary of General Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état in the South American country.
Boric’s first trip to Europe is to Spain, where he will be received by His Majesty the King, who will offer him a lunch at the Zarzuela Palace, and by the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, who is immersed in the campaign for the general elections on the 23rd. In the afternoon, Boric will chair a Spanish-Chilean business meeting at the CEOE headquarters.
Before travelling to Brussels to attend the EU-CELAC Summit, the Chilean leader has called a cultural event, which will be held at Casa América and which, in a way, is part of the activities that Boric has programmed to condemn everything that represented the Pinochet coup perpetrated on 11 September 1972 in Chile, an event that is giving much to talk about in that country.
Boric has invited Pedro Sánchez to the event, but it is not foreseeable that he will attend, given his election campaign commitments. It is more likely that some of the other guests will attend, such as former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero; Spanish singer-songwriters Joan Manuel Serrat and Ismael Serrano; and former National Court judge Baltasar Garzón, who in October 1998 issued an arrest warrant for Pinochet, who was in London, for crimes of genocide, international terrorism, torture and the disappearance of people.
It is not unlikely that some prominent Podemos activists such as Pablo Iglesias and Irene Montero, with whom Boric has maintained close relations, will also attend the event.
Other Ibero-American personalities from the world of culture have also been invited, such as the Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli, who accepted Chilean nationality after being stripped of hers by Daniel Ortega’s regime.
