With Nicaragua and Venezuela on the agenda, Felipe Solá will meet with Joe Biden’s Secretary of State tomorrow

The summit of G20 foreign ministers has already started on Italian soil. A hot climate exceeding 30 degrees received the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Development of the participating countries in Bari, in the south of the peninsula. This is the first time that a meeting of this type has been held in person since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. The Argentine delegation arrived there, led by Foreign Minister Felipe Solá and Sherpa Jorge Argüello, who is also our country’s ambassador to the United States.

Luigi Di Maio, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Italy, served as the host and after the formal greetings and photographs, Solá and Argüello participated in the first exchange with their peers where they spoke on how the global economic recovery will face after the COVID-19 pandemic and the production and distribution of vaccines to combat the virus were discussed. Later, Solá met his Indonesian counterpart, Retno Marsudi, and the European Commission’s Commissioner for International Associations, Finland’s Jutta Urpilainen.

Argüello, in his social networks, described the position displayed on this first day. “We are promoting greater international cooperation to achieve early global immunization and a strong recovery in developing countries,” he published. And then he added: “Otherwise, the cost of the crisis will be even more intense and will not distinguish between developed and developing countries. He also quoted Pope Francis’ sentence at the end: “No one can save himself alone”.

This Tuesday, the summit will move to the city of Matera, also in southern Italy. There will be two very important meetings for Solá and Argüello. The premiere at Palazzo Lanfranchi with the Secretary of State of the United States of America, Antony Blinken. Later, he will do the same with his German counterpart, Heiko Maas. Also during the day he will have a series of bilateral meetings with his colleagues from Turkey, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu; and from Singapore, Vivian Balakrishnan; in addition to the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy of the European Union, Josep Borrell Fontelles.

With Blinken, with whom Solá has already spoken three times since he is an official in the government of Alberto Fernández but always by telephone or videoconference, the Argentinian delegation will present its position on the situation in two sessions around noon (at 7 a.m. morning.special concern for the United States: Nicaragua and Venezuela. The American, who for 20 years was close to Democrat Joseph Biden, knows the region and its problems deeply. Although the government of Alberto Fernández maintains coincidences with the United States, Solá will also propose the subtle differences of opinion compared to the current political situation of these nations.

The pink house recently refrained from condemning the human rights violations committed by the Sandinista regime when processing a draft resolution at the Organization of American States (OAS). One of the differences Solá will explain to Biden’s Secretary of State is the role of the head of that body, Luis Almagro, who has been questioned since his decisions on Bolivia, when Evo Morales was removed from that country’s government.

Also on Venezuela there are different looks. They were evident when Argentina decided to withdraw from the Lima Group, made up of 13 countries, at the end of March 2021 with the argument that the actions that were promoted from there to “isolate the government of Venezuela and its representatives did not lead to anything. And that the Venezuelan opposition led by Juan Guaidó was involved. Whenever it could, our country has avoided condemnation or reproach against the way of exercising power of dictator Nicolás Maduro.

On the agenda, there will be other topics to discuss such as the support that will be requested from Secretary of State Biden for the renegotiation of the debt with the IMF and the Paris Club. They will also discuss the provision of vaccines and Solá will reiterate the invitation to Blinken and the Democratic President to visit our country. Another topic, in which there are coincidences, concerns climate change, since Alberto Fernández participated in the Summit that was held this year for Earth Day, in April, with the intervention of 40 other leaders global.

On Wednesday 30, in the city of Brindisi, the Argentinian Minister of Foreign Affairs will be received by his Italian counterpart, Luigi Di Maio, within the framework of an official lunch offered to the heads of delegation. There he plans to meet his Indian counterpart, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. He will also participate in the Ministerial Summit on Humanitarian Aid, which will be held at the UNHRD / UN base at the Brindisi military airport.

After the summit, Solá will cross the Mediterranean Sea and set foot on African territory. In Tunisia, awaits his counterpart Othman Jerandi, with whom they have already spoken in March by teleconference. They will discuss with him for the commercial promotion of Argentina with all our ambassadors from the Maghreb.

The last activity before starting the return scheduled for July 6, will be in Vienna, the Austrian capital, where he will be with Rafael Grossi, the Argentinian career diplomat, who since December 2019 is the director general of the International Agency for the atomic energy (IAEA), the main atomic energy agency of the UN and with Argentine ambassadors from Central Europe.

Grossi, who is 60 years old and previously Argentina’s Ambassador to Austria, is one of the world’s foremost experts in nuclear energy and specializes in its use for peaceful purposes. In 2017, and on his own initiative, he engaged in the search for the submarine ARA San Juan and contacted the international monitoring network of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, to monitor the area with its seismological and hydroacoustic stations. This is how the experts were able to identify the “abnormal event corresponding to an explosion“In the sea that allowed us to find the location of the submersible.

Minister Solá arrived in Rome on Saturday, June 26, where he held a midday audience at the Vatican with Secretary for State Relations Monsignor Richard Gallagher and later a meeting with Argentine Ambassador María Fernanda Silva, and the accredited personal diplomat there.

Last week, the head of the Palacio San Martín delivered his speech to the UN Decolonization Committee at its headquarters in New York, where he again claimed Argentine sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, accompanied by Secretary Daniel Filmus and of the Argentine representative before this organ María del Carmen Squeff.