The Argentine Presidency juggled this Friday to justify why it defended as official the trip to Madrid that its Embassy in Madrid had communicated as private. “It is absolutely correct that the embassy has defined it as a private visit because there are no official audiences but rather a meeting with businessmen, academics or relevant cultural people,” said the presidential spokesman, Manuel Adorni, when responding to the letter sent by the office. Argentine diplomat to the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs on April 30 in which she reported on the “private visit” of Javier Milei. “It is also absolutely correct that I or anyone from the Government said that the visit was not private,” Adorni continued in reference to the letter published by EL PAÍS.
According to the spokesperson, both versions are not contradictory but compatible since the Foreign Ministry uses different terminology than the Presidency. The Argentine Foreign Ministry only considers an official trip to be that which includes at least one meeting with a Spanish authority, while it considers it to be a private trip when it does not. “We do not use the same terminology that the Foreign Ministry uses because otherwise we would not understand each other, because if I say private visit you understand that it is of a strictly personal nature and that it should be addressed with the president’s assets,” Adorni explained at a press conference.
The spokesperson’s statement corrects the first official response received by this newspaper. As soon as the letter became known, sources close to Milei described the fact that it reported a “private visit” by Milei and not an official one, as the Government maintains to avoid the controversy over the high expenses for presidential trips abroad in the midst of a severe cut in public spending.
The president tried another justification. “You can make a head of state visit and not necessarily see another head of state. What I try to do is fit in activities, to save resources,” he explained in an interview with the LN+ channel. “When I have an activity, of course, originally it had a format, but later we made an agenda to solve problems in Argentina. And Spain is one of the countries with the most investments in Argentina, so I went and sat down to talk with Spanish businessmen. Part of my international agenda has to do with finding the best scenario to encourage investment in the country,” he said. Thus, he showed that his trip was scheduled to participate in the launch of Vox’s European election campaign.
The president made it clear that there is no truce in his confrontation with the Spanish Government. Once again, Milei defined Sánchez as “an incompetent, a liar, a coward who sent his ministers to attack me, he did not even have the courage to do so.” He also said that he “interfered in Argentine politics by playing a role in the electoral campaign,” in reference to the Spaniard’s support for Sergio Massa, the Peronist candidate defeated in last year’s elections. And he accused the socialist leader of being “the laughing stock of Europe in diplomatic matters.”
The official explanations have not been enough for the opposition, which has sued the Argentine president in court. “We present a complaint against President Milei and Francisco Sanchez (Secretary of Worship) so that they can be investigated for embezzlement and defrauding the State,” reported this Friday the radical deputy Fernando Carbajal, signatory of the accusation along with his peers Pedro Galimberti and Manuel Aguirre. . “The president traveled to Spain for strictly personal reasons. He attended a partisan activity and went to present a book of his apparent authorship. The private nature of the trip results from the nature of both events, neither of which has any relationship with the management of national interests. But it has also been legally endorsed by the Argentine State itself, which, through its ambassador, officially informed the Kingdom of Spain, as it was recently made public through publications in the newspaper El País de España,” the lawsuit says.
Milei came to power with the promise of reducing political expenses and eliminating caste privileges, but the media questions whether he is beginning to resemble those he criticized during the election campaign. “No, we are not Kirchnerists,” Adorni responded days ago when a journalist compared her way of acting with those of the previous Government.
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