Foreign Affairs Minister Rubén Ramírez Lezcano has announced that Paraguay has decided to close five of its embassies, with reciprocity and cost given as the two main reasons.
The countries affected are Australia, Canada, Egypt, Portugal, and Switzerland.
“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 said that the countries where embassies will be closed do not have their own embassies in Asunción either. These countries are part of a larger number of nations whose diplomatic relations with Paraguay are handled by their Ambassadors to neighboring countries, primarily Argentina and Brazil.
The expectation is that diplomatic relations with the affected states will now be managed from a nearby country. As an example, Ramírez Lezcano expected that relations with Canada will now be managed from the Paraguayan Embassy in Washington DC (USA).
He was keen to stress that attempts have been made to encourage these countries to open their own embassies in Asuncion, but without success, and that this does not in any way change the status of diplomatic relations with the affected countries, just the location of where the relations are being conducted from.
“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.”
Of the 17 diplomatic representations vacant at the beginning of his term, the government has requested congressional approval to appoint ambassadors to Argentina, Belgium, Costa Rica, Germany, Lebanon, Qatar, Spain, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uruguay, as well as to the United Nations in New York. The ambassadorial positions for relations with Italy and South Korea currently remain vacant.
