Córdoba (Argentina), – Felipe VI called the Spanish-American fraternity at the inauguration of the Congress of the Spanish Language, in which the writer Mario Vargas Llosa recriminated the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, for his apology to the king for his the abuses committed in the conquest.
The Teatro del Libertador General San Martin of the Argentine city of Cordoba hosted on Wednesday the opening ceremony of the VIII Congress of the Language that was inaugurated by the kings of Spain and the president of Argentina, Mauricio Macri, accompanied by his wife, Juliana Awada.
“Long live our language! Long live our brotherhood”, were the words with which the King of Spain closed his speech at the opening of the congress, which highlighted the importance of the Spanish language as a link between peoples.
Don Felipe stressed that the appointment that brings together in Cordoba hundreds of experts to analyze the future of Spanish should be “a celebration of the Hispano-American fraternity.”
A few words spoken in the midst of the controversy generated by the letter sent by the Mexican president asking that Spain apologize for the conquest 500 years ago and to which the Nobel Prize for Literature Mario Vargas Llosa responded in his speech at this ceremony.
The president of Argentina, Mauricio Macri, emphasized in the ceremony that the language is the greatest asset of the Hispanic community and called to “keep it alive”, since that is “betting on the future”.
“All our diversity has the same words,” said the Argentine head of state on Wednesday, convinced that the Spanish language has done “much more” than allowing “easily” to communicate to more than 500 million people and marked for always their union “in an unbreakable way”.
But the most vehement speech was that of the writer Mario Vargas Llosa who, in addition to announcing that the next International Congress of the Spanish Language (CILE) will be held within three years in his hometown, the Peruvian city of Arequipa, referred to the controversy arising from the letter of López Obrador.
“I have the impression that the recipients were wrong, the letter had to be sent to himself and to answer the question of why Mexico, which joined the western world five centuries ago thanks to Spain, still has so many thousands of marginalized, poor Indians , ignorant, exploited, is a question that can be asked to almost all Latin American presidents, “said the writer.
The Mexican president “does not seem informed that the great massacres of Indians were not only in the colonial years, some countries such as Argentina, Chile or Peru itself committed frightful massacres of Indians during the Republic and that they have continued to be committed in the Amazon in the rubber era, “he said.
“But the problem is not there, in the past 500 years ago, it is alive today and it hits our conscience to Latin Americans” because of the inability to solve it, Vargas Llosa stressed.
The problem “is not that of today’s Spaniards, those who stayed in Spain, it affects mainly the Spaniards who came and stayed here, the grandparents, great grandparents and great-grandparents of López Obrador and mine and those of millions of Latin Americans who We are proud to have Spanish ancestry, “insisted the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero, also spoke at the opening ceremony, who assured that the congress will talk about America and the future of Spanish “to defend that technological experiments must be inseparable from ethics, education and human culture” .
The director of Cervantes said that thinking that from some territory “you can say who speaks badly and which is the best Spanish or Castilian is to understand very little the deep loyalty of the language with the maternal truth”.
For the director of the Royal Spanish Academy, Santiago Muñoz Machado, the main objective of the congress is to value Spanish as an American language: “everything in the congress is imbued with Panhispanism”. “We wanted to add” because Spanish is “open, mestizo, shared”.
Rebeca Grynspan, Ibero-American General Secretary, stressed the historical challenge facing the language as new technologies: “we can not be content to translate the future, we have to write it ourselves and write it in Spanish,” he said.
And the governor of the province of Córdoba, Juan Schiaretti, said: “Culture is one of the ways we have to love what we are, language represents us in almost everything and is the great tool to produce culture.”
The Spanish author Carme Riera also intervened in the act, who said that “rebellion and hope are articulated in the Spanish language in the caravan of immigrants that try to reach the United States” and those who can not ignore “those who speak their own language” . (EFE).
