Since the creation of the Congreso Internacional de la Lengua Española (CILE), “it has been up to the Cervantes Institute (IC) to propose the location of the meeting”, says today its director, Luis García Montero, “as has been the case for 37 years”. This morning, he accused his counterpart Santiago Muñoz Machado, head of the Real Academia Española (RAE), of wanting to “impose” Panama as the seat of the next Congress. In the meantime, I do not need to question the person in charge of Cervantes about the open war between the two institutions – which broke out a week before the previous CILE held in Arequipa (Peru): “I continue to maintain what I say, namely that the Academy should have as its director a high-quality philologist, and not a business lawyer.”
The Instituto Cervantes now has “two situations,” says García Montero: “The first, which entered (from the imposition) because other academies comment that the director of the RAE has decided on his behalf that Panama is,” he said. “We must now avoid offending the country, because international relations interest us.” The second: “Do not allow offenses against a state institution like the Cervantes Institute, to which the director of the Royal Spanish Academy has accustomed us,” García Montero declared at Cervantes headquarters in front of different media, including EL PAÍS.
The meeting took place before the meeting of the Patronage of the Cervantes Institute, chaired by the Reyes at the Aranjuez Palace, to present the “notable results” that “the institution has obtained” during the 2024-2025 course, according to García Montero. 170,102 registrations will be recorded, which represents an increase of 6.67% compared to the previous course. “When Cervantes started managing, he sold his buildings to be able to meet his own needs, due to a reduction in his budget,” the director underlined. “The fact that now we can buy buildings instead of selling them, we have a good situation where we are,” he added. The CI budget remains at 143 million euros, of which 43.5% comes from self-financing and the rest is made up of transfers from the State.
However, García Montero remarked that he thought that the Presupuestos Generales del Estado “constitute a serious problem” and approved the launch of a reflection against those who “do internal politics” with this theme: “It is very unpatriotic to go to the rest of Europe and say bad things about Spain and try not to Salganize the Presupuestos.” The three-year freeze “hinders” Cervantes’ expansion and the “creation of new centers.” The IC’s presence in the world is structured across 103 cities in 52 countries.
The director underlined the “need to be present in Toronto (Canada) and to carry out extensions in the USA, possibly in Miami”. And he mentioned that “the actions of the United States presidency and its very aggressive statements towards the European Union complicate things”. Furthermore, García Montero assured that the RAE “is very accustomed to this type of difficulties in the use of culture as a sphere of fraternity when there is a radical confrontation between political institutions.”
In the United States there are more than 60 million citizens of Spanish origin and more than 40 million have Spanish as their native language. “Therefore, Donald Trump’s injuries affect a very significant part of his own population,” García Montero emphasized. The Observatorio Global del Español – which depends on Cervantes – denounces “how these attitudes fuel policies that legitimize fraud against students or workers who use Spanish in their daily lives,” he stressed. This leads many Spanish families to “want their children to abandon their language.” Faced with this, the Instituto Cervantes strives “to analyze Spanish as a language of heritage and to see how it can be maintained and valued in families involved in the vertigo of improving their language,” said García Montero.
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