Queen Letizia is already in Colombia. It is her eighth cooperation trip when nine years are about to be completed since her passage from princess to queen and with it, the transfer of this type of visits that her predecessor, Queen Sofía, made for years. Dressed in the mandatory red vest, the uniform of the workers of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), Letizia landed last night (at dawn in Spain) at the Cartagena airport, the first leg of the three-day trip, which will will close on Wednesday in Cali. The Queen is traveling accompanied by Pilar Cancela, Secretary of State for International Cooperation.
The objective of the trip, according to sources from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (on which the AECID depends), is to see in situ the work that Spanish cooperation has been developing in Colombia for more than thirty years. The projects that have been included in the Queen’s trip revolve around support for women and young people and endorsement of the programs launched by the Colombian Government after the signing of the peace agreements with the guerrillas. Tomorrow, in Cali, Letizia will tour a coffee plantation where former guerrilla combatants of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have launched, with aid from the EU, a cooperative for the cultivation and trade of coffee.
The Queen’s program begins today in Cartagena, where she plans to tour the Villahermosa neighborhood, where 165,000 people live in a precarious situation, and where the AECID, through the Cooperation Fund for Water and Sanitation, has launched a project that has made it possible to improve access to drinking water and the installation of a sewage system. Also in Cartagena, the Queen, accompanied by the wife of President Gustavo Petro, Verónica Alcocer, visits the Escuela Taller, which was launched by Spanish cooperation in 1992 and which now depends on the Colombian Government, a center where young people at risk of exclusion receive training in traditional trades related to cultural heritage, such as restoration. In the afternoon, the Queen and the First Lady will tour the Santa Catalina bastion, located in the colonial zone, and whose restoration has involved young people trained at the Workshop School.
The Queen has arrived in a Colombia that is experiencing a moment of euphoria due to the discovery of the four brothers lost in the Amazon jungle and also due to the last peace agreement signed in Havana (Cuba) by President Petro and the guerrilla of the Army of National Liberation (ELN).
The one that begins today is the eighth cooperation trip of the Queen, who little by little has been catching the tone and giving them her stamp. The image of her from her first trip to Honduras and El Salvador is still remembered, where she attended a dinner at the presidential palace in a sequined dress. She is always attentive to correct errors, since then she has avoided, as far as possible, including protocol acts in the program, in order to maximize the time (which is always short) to visit the different projects.
The fund is to give visibility to the cooperation programs that Spain supports and, the way, to dress in the uniform of a cooperator. In Mozambique, he wore the red vest for the first time when visiting the projects and since that trip, which he made in 2019, he already wears it from morning to night; from the moment he goes down the stairs of the plane until he goes up, back to Madrid. The wardrobe: red vest, white shirt, canvas pants and combat shoes. In recent trips he has taken it to the letter, as happened two years ago in Asunción, when he appeared at the meal that the President of Paraguay offered him at his official residence with the same boots full of mud with which he had stepped on a landfill.
The Queen began on cooperation trips with the aforementioned to Honduras and El Salvador in 2015; she was followed by Senegal, in 2017, and the following year the Dominican Republic and Haiti; in 2019 she moved to Mozambique, and in 2020 she repeated in Honduras, which had just been hit by two hurricanes. In 2021 she traveled to Paraguay, while in 2022 the destination was Mauritania.
