The presidents of Chile and Spain, Gabriel Boric and Pedro Sánchez, participated this Wednesday in a ceremony to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Salvador Allende’s speech to the UN, where the European leader accused “an offensive by reactionary movements.”
The president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, and the president of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, participated this Wednesday in New York in a tribute for the 50th anniversary of the historic speech before the UN by former president Salvador Allende, a year before he died following the coup of Condition.
The tribute took place at the Cervantes Institute in the Big Apple, with the presence of Peruvian President Pedro Castillo and actor Pedro Pascal, who came to listen to Allende’s third daughter and today a senator, Isabel Allende, as well as her granddaughter Marcia Tambutti, president of the Board of Directors of the foundation with the name of the honoree.
The act It began with a retransmission of fragments of that historic speech in which he denounced the “forces that operate in the shadows, without a flag, with powerful weapons, stationed in the most varied places of influence”, and where he pronounced some of his emblematic phrases such as that “imperialism exists because underdevelopment exists, and underdevelopment exists because imperialism exists.”
behind the pictures, The Argentine-Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman, who was Allende’s cultural adviser between 1970 and 1973, took the floor. year in which he went into exile due to the coup d’état to settle definitively in the United States.
#50YearsSpeechAllende | president @gabrielboric led the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the speech given by President Salvador Allende before the @ONU_estogether with the President of the Government of Spain, @sanchezcastejonminister @UrrejolaRREE and the senator @iallendebussi. pic.twitter.com/dxuwFdzc22
– Presidency of Chile (@Presidencia_cl) September 22, 2022
Dorfman was succeeded by Isabel Allende Bussi, who thanked the act on behalf of the family, and following her a youthful string quartet from the humble Santiago neighborhood of La Pintana took the stage, performing two songs.
The young musicians – who “come to make the name of Chile shine”, said the president, and who “fill him with pride”, were succeeded by the president of the Spanish government
Pedro Sánchez, who is immersed in an intense week of political and diplomatic activities in New York on the occasion of the UN General Assembly, gave a speech at the Cervantes in which he even alluded to the ship Winnipeg, chartered by Pablo Neruda to save hundreds of Spanish refugees in 1939 and take them to Valparaíso.
Sánchez winked at Boric, evoking a parallelism between the time of Allende and the current one, where he detects “an offensive of reactionary movements on a world scale that live by feeding fear and uncertainty among our societies.”
According to Sánchez, there are still, as then, “global organizations beyond all control (which) continue to condition debates and mark the future of markets that function inefficiently”, and this is “corrosive to democracy: suspecting that citizens choose each four years to those who govern, but not to those who really command”.
The event ended with the delivery of a copy of Allende’s speech to Boric, Sánchez and Isabel herself, a gift from the Chilean Foreign Ministry and which was delivered by Chilean Foreign Minister Antonia Urrejola.
