Eduardo González
The Principality of Andorra will host this week the long-awaited XXVII Ibero-American Summit of Heads of State and Government, a meeting that will inevitably be marked by the major challenges facing the Ibero-American community to overcome the serious health, economic and social crisis of COVID-19.
The Summit, which was initially scheduled for the fall of 2020 but was postponed because of the pandemic, will be held in a hybrid face-to-face and telematic format. The only leaders present in Andorra will be that of the host country (Andorra’s head of government, Xavier Espot), those of Guatemala and the Dominican Republic (Presidents Alejandro Giammattei and Luis Abinader), hosts of the previous and next summit, and those of Spain (the King and President of Government Pedro Sánchez) and Portugal (President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa and Prime Minister António Costa), as well as the Secretary General of the Ibero-American General Secretariat (SEGIB), Rebeca Grynspan.
The rest of the leaders will participate by videoconference. According to diplomatic sources based on the indications of the Andorran organization, a much higher participation than in previous summits is expected and, in the absence of official confirmation, for the moment only the presidents of Brazil and Mexico, Jair Bolsonaro and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, have been ruled out. Venezuela will be represented by the president officially recognized by the UN, Nicolás Maduro.
The summit will take its first steps with the XIII Ibero-American Business Meeting, which will begin today with a meeting of Presidents of Business Organizations members of CEIB-OIE and will continue tomorrow with a discussion with the heads of state and government. The meeting will close with a closing ceremony in which the King and Xavier Espot will intervene and in which the pro tempore presidency of the Council of Ibero-American Businessmen-CEIB will be transferred to the president of the Dominican Republic Employers Confederation-COPARDOM, William Matías Ramírez.
The Summit itself will begin on Wednesday at four o’clock in the afternoon, with the intervention of all the heads of State and Government, in alphabetical order in Spanish and according to the name of the country (Maduro will be the last to speak for that reason). The King will speak on behalf of Spain. The day will conclude around 9 p.m. with a press conference given by the Andorran hosts and Rebeca Grynspan. A specific press conference by Pedro Sánchez is not ruled out, but has not yet been confirmed.
Access to vaccines, international financing and Ibero-American talent.
As for the topics to be addressed by Ibero-American leaders, the Andorran pro tempore general secretariat and SEGIB have been forced to abandon the initial theme of the meeting, dedicated to innovation and sustainable development, in order to introduce the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic as the main theme of the Summit, whose central theme will be Ibero-America facing the challenge of the coronavirus. Latin America is the region of the world most impacted by the pandemic. With 9% of the world’s total population, the region has accounted for almost 30% of the world’s deaths and is facing its greatest economic contraction since World War II as a result of this crisis.
For this reason, the Summit will focus on the major challenges that were addressed last Thursday at the telematic meeting of Ibero-American foreign ministers, in which the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, participated. At that meeting, the foreign ministers agreed on a Declaration to be signed at the end of the Summit and a Commitment on Innovation for Sustainable Development. They also analyzed 15 special communiqués that will also be discussed in Andorra and which propose concrete solutions for the region’s recovery from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in the health, social and economic spheres.
The Summit will focus on three main axes: the health crisis, the economic crisis and the search for practical solutions for recovery. Regarding the first axis, the main point of the discussions, which was addressed during the aforementioned meeting of foreign ministers and which will be included in the final Declaration, will be universal access to vaccines against COVID-19, a proposal that will have the firm support of the Spanish government, according to government sources. Likewise, during the debates on this first axis, the creation of an Ibero-American Epidemiological Observatory will be requested, which SEGIB is currently working on with the support of some countries, including Spain.
The central point of the second axis, dedicated to the economic crisis, will be the urgent reform of international financing instruments so that the countries most affected by the pandemic, including middle-income countries, receive faster and more flexible aid on favorable terms. The issue, which was also approved by the foreign ministers to be included in the final documents of the Summit, will be included in a joint communiqué proposed by Argentina and which has been very well received by the other countries.
As for the third axis dedicated to recovery, the main novelty will be the signing of a Framework Agreement to promote the circulation of talent in the Ibero-American space, which was proposed by Spain at the XXIV Ibero-American Summit, held in 2014 in Veracruz (Mexico), and which aims to create a legal framework to facilitate mobility and knowledge transfer. The Convention has already been ratified by five countries (Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Nicaragua and Colombia), which will sign it in Andorra, and is awaiting the completion of the ratification process in others, such as the Dominican Republic, which could arrive in time to sign it at the Summit.
