Argentina’s vice president, the first high-ranking official of Milei’s government to travel to Spain since the crisis

Luis Ayllón The vice president of Argentina, Victoria Villarruel, plans to travel to Spain next week, which will make her the first high-ranking official of Javier Milei's government to do so since the bilateral crisis between the two countries broke out at the end of May, The Diplomat learned from diplomatic sources. Milei himself returned to Spain on June 21, just a few weeks after Pedro Sánchez's government decided to withdraw the Spanish ambassador in Buenos Aires, María Jesús Alonso, in response to statements made by the Argentine president during his stay in Madrid, at a Vox event on May 19, in which he accused the wife of the head of the Spanish Executive, Begoña Gómez, of being "corrupt." However, Milei did not maintain any contact with members of the Government during either of his two stays. Nor is it scheduled for now, according to sources consulted by The Diplomat, that Victoria Villarruel will do so, who intends to travel to our country to attend the international conference on Victims of terrorism sponsored by the United Nations and which will be held on October 8 and 9 in Vitoria. More likely is that Villarruel, who is also the president of the Argentine Senate due to her position, will hold a meeting with her Spanish counterpart, Pedro Rollán, of the PP. The Argentine vice president was part of the coalition 'La libertad avanza', with which Milei managed to come to power. Her presence at the Vitoria Conference is related to the fact that Villarruel is the founder of the civil association called Centro de Estudios Legales sobre el Terrorismo y sus Víctimas (CELTYV), which she has chaired since its beginnings, and from which she has shown herself to be very combative for the victims of the terrorist groups that acted in the seventies in Argentina. Political relations between Spain and Argentina remain frozen, despite the fact that on August 20 there was a telephone contact between the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, and the Argentine chancellor, Diana Mondino, and that both have coincided last week in one of the meetings held by the ministers of the branch on the margins of the UN General Assembly, in New York. On the 16th, Diana Mondino told the Efe agency in Vienna that, despite the tensions between the Argentine president, Javier Milei, and members of the Spanish government, bilateral relations between Argentina and Spain are not suffering from any crisis or being formally affected. Mondino assured that the links between both countries remain strong, highlighting the importance of not confusing certain personal disagreements with relations between nations, and stressed that the disagreement is between Milei and Sánchez, "it is not between countries or between societies." Villarruel may coincide in Vitoria with the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, and with the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, who already participated in the 1st Global Congress of Victims of Terrorism held in September 2022 at the United Nations headquarters in New York. The event, a continuation of that meeting, is being organised by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Interior together with the UN Office against Terrorism (UNOCT) and the City Council of the Basque capital, which is home to the Memorial Centre for Victims of Terrorism.

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