Queen Letícia is already in Colombia. It is her eighth trip of cooperation when they are about to complete nine years since her transition from princess to queen and, with this, the transfer of this type of visits that her predecessor, Queen Sofia, made for years. Dressed in the obligatory red vest, uniform of the workers of the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation for Development (AECID), Letícia landed last night (early in the morning in Spain) at the Cartagena airport, the first stage of the journey of three days, which will end on Wednesday in Cali. The Queen is traveling accompanied by Pilar Cancela, Secretary of State for International Cooperation.
The purpose of the trip, according to sources from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (to which AECID depends), is to get to know in situ the work that Spanish cooperation has been carrying out 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 the endorsement of the programs started by the Colombian Government after the signing of the peace agreements with the guerrillas. Tomorrow, in Cali, Letícia will visit a coffee shop where ex-guerrilla fighters of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have launched, with EU aid, a cooperative for the cultivation and trade of coffee.
The Queen’s program begins today in Cartagena, where she plans to tour the neighborhood of Villahermosa, where 165,000 people live in a precarious situation and where AECID, through the Cooperation Fund for Water and Sanitation, has launched a project that has improved access to drinking water and the installation of a sewer system. Also in Cartagena, the Queen, accompanied by the wife of President Gustavo Petro, Verónica Alcocer, will visit the Escola Taller, which launched 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 catering. In the afternoon, the Queen and the first lady will tour the bastion of Santa Catalina, located in the colonial area, restored with the intervention of young people trained at the Escola Taller.
The Queen has arrived in a Colombia that is experiencing a moment of euphoria due to the finding of the four brothers lost in the Amazon jungle and also due to the latest peace agreement signed in Havana (Cuba) by President Petro and the guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (EAN).
What begins today is the Queen’s eighth trip of cooperation, which little by little has taken the tone and given them her stamp. She still remembers the image of her first trip to Honduras and El Salvador, when she went to a dinner at the presidential palace in a sequined dress. Always waiting to correct errors, since then he has avoided, whenever possible, including protocol events in the program, in order to maximize the time (which is always short) when visiting the different projects.
The purpose is to give visibility to the cooperation programs that Spain supports and, in the form, to dress in the uniform of a cooperative. In Mozambique, he used the red vest for the first time when he visited the projects and, since this trip, which he made in 2019, he wears it from morning to night; from the moment he descends the stairs of the plane until he ascends them, back to Madrid. The costume: red vest, white shirt, canvas pants and battle shoes. During the last trips he has taken it to the letter, as happened two years ago in Asuncion, where he appeared at the lunch that the president of Paraguay offered him at his official residence wearing the same boots full of mud with that he had stepped on a dump.
The Queen started cooperation trips with the aforementioned to Honduras and El Salvador, which took place in 2015; then he went to Senegal, in 2017 and, the following year, to the Dominican Republic and Haiti; in 2019 he traveled to Mozambique, and in 2020 he repeated in Honduras, a country that had just been hit by two hurricanes. In 2021 he traveled to Paraguay, while in 2022 the destination was Mauritania.
