The open war between the Cervantes Institute (IC) and the Royal Academy of Language, which broke out days before the celebration of the Spanish Language Congress in Arequipa (Peru), held last October, has entered a new chapter after this Tuesday the director of the Cervantes, Luis García Montero, accused his counterpart in the RAE, Santiago Muñoz Machado, of wanting to “impose” Panama as the venue for the next CILE. Given these statements, sources from the RAE assured this newspaper that the proposal was not an initiative of Muñoz Machado, but rather it was a unanimous agreement of all the Academies, something that was ratified hours later by the director of the Panamanian Academy, Jorge Eduardo Ritter, in statements to the local newspaper. The Press. This Wednesday, Cervantes responded in a statement that the procedure violates the rules of organization of congresses.
In its note, the institution directed by García Montero details that the election of Panama in a “unilateral manner, without the prior knowledge of Cervantes”, skips the rule that dictates that “countries aspiring to become host countries must formalize their candidacy through an official communication from their government to that of Spain and to the organizing institutions (IC and the RAE), which will decide according to the circumstances of the moment.” Furthermore, it demands that the RAE “rectify its actions and return to the responsible path of mutual collaboration,” and regrets that it “uses the Latin American Academies causing damage to institutional and cultural relations with Panama.”
In the interview published in the Panamanian newspaper, Ritter considers that “Cervantes’ objection would be unfair if it is based on the perception of an individual imposition from the RAE.” At the same time, he emphasizes that the election of Panama was a “collective and transparent” agreement adopted during the CILE in Arequipa.
In his statements yesterday, García Montero disfigured this unilaterality and assured that he found out about Panama’s election “because other Academies commented on it.” Furthermore, he pointed directly against Muñoz Machado: “Do not allow offenses to a State institution like the Cervantes Institute, to which the director of the Royal Spanish Academy has accustomed us,” García Montero stated.
Just two weeks before the meeting in Arequipa, García Montero launched the first public dart against Santiago Muñoz: “(The RAE) is in the hands of a professor of Administrative Law who is an expert in conducting business from his (lawyer) office for multimillion-dollar companies.” Yesterday (two months later) it was not even necessary to ask the person in charge of Cervantes about his confrontation with Muñoz Machado: “I continue to maintain what I said,” he expressed in an informative breakfast before different media, including EL PAÍS, where he also recalled that “it is up to the Cervantes Institute to propose the headquarters of the Spanish Language Congress, this has been the case for 37 years.”
Sources from the RAE assured EL PAÍS that the agreement to designate Panama as the headquarters of the next CILE “was not communicated then by decision of the Academies, among other reasons because there are still three years until the next Congress and because the situation of tension and disagreement that the director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero, caused in Arequipa meant that it was not the best time for the announcement.” The director of the RAE did personally communicate this to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, the same day he returned from Arequipa, the same sources added.