Asunción, Agencia IP.- The Foreign Affairs Minister, Rubén Ramírez Lezcano, announced that Paraguay has decided, following conversations and agreements of reciprocity, to close its embassies in Egypt, Canada, Portugal, Australia, and Switzerland, whose diplomatic representations will be handled by concurrent ambassadors.
«We have decided to close five embassies, based on a matter of reciprocity and founded on a budgetary issue. We are talking about the embassies in Egypt, Canada, Portugal, Australia, and Switzerland,» announced Ramírez Lezcano today, after a meeting of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate, where he presented the request for constitutional agreement for 11 ambassador candidates.
He indicated that these countries where Paraguay will close its embassies also do not have their headquarters in Asunción and that relations are handled by concurrences, either from their embassies in Brasilia or Buenos Aires.
He anticipated that in the case of Canada, Paraguay will establish attendance from its embassy in Washington. In the case of Switzerland there are the options of either the diplomatic representatives in Geneva or the Paraguayan embassy in Paris, France.
«We have made all the analyses to adopt these decisions. We have dialogued with the involved governments, and we have requested reciprocity. For the same reasons that these countries, for budgetary reasons, cannot reciprocate the effort of the Paraguayan taxpayer to maintain those representations, so we made the decision by mutual agreement,» said the Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Of the 17 diplomatic representations vacant at the beginning of his term, the Government has requested constitutional agreement to appoint ambassadors to Belgium, Argentina, Great Britain, Costa Rica, United Arab Emirates, Spain, United Nations in New York, Uruguay, Lebanon, Germany, and Qatar. The embassies of South Korea and Italy remain vacant, as indicated by Ramírez Lezcano.