The Executive Power, in an unprecedented decision that surprised Paraguayan diplomats, left 9 diplomatic representations without ambassadors, just at the time of a serious health crisis and political instability that requires having high-level spokespersons abroad to explain the situation of the country, but mainly, to help make the contacts that allow access to some of the anticovid vaccines.
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At the request of the National Chancellery, the President of the Republic ordered by means of decrees dated between 3 and 5 of the current month to terminate the missions of the ambassadors to France, Canada; Korea, Russia, Morocco, Israel, Argentina, Portugal and the Dominican Republic.
This provision was adopted on the basis that these ambassadors, 5 of whom are career and 4 were in office by political appointment, had already exceeded the maximum time of permanence in the foreign service, which Law 1335/99 of the Diplomatic Service and Consular establishes that it is 6 years. However, normally the Foreign Ministry makes the changes in a spaced, gradual way and as it has candidates of the same rank for the relays.
According to diplomatic sources, these massive movements must be placed in the context of political crisis in which serious health problems derived due to the lack of planning to face the current wave of infections by Covid, the lack of medicines that just began to be addressed after various complaints and after the citizen mobilization that began on Friday the 5th and continued on the following days. But mainly, due to the public anguish of confirming that all other countries have already begun to vaccinate their inhabitants against SARS-CoV-2, while in Paraguay the Government did not specify the arrival of the necessary doses to start vaccination.
Leaving the country’s embassy in front of Russia, Korea or Israel without ambassadors is nonsense at this time, according to the criteria of some diplomats who contacted ÚH, it is going against what is being asked of the foreign service, which is to contact the laboratories that develop and manufacture some of the vaccines against Covid or with governments willing to donate the vaccines, as Chile did, which donated 20,000 doses of Sinovac biological to Paraguay and Ecuador. They explained that it is not the same to have a Chargé d’Affaires at the head of our embassies, than with an ambassador, just when they need to explain the situation in Paraguay and seek to accelerate efforts to obtain more doses of immunizers against Covid and cooperations that strengthen the health area.
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