The open war between the Instituto Cervantes (IC) and the Real Academia de la Lengua, which broke out a few days before the celebration of the Lengua Española Congress in Arequipa (Peru), celebrated last October, entered a new chapter after which the director of Cervantes, Luis García Montero, accused his RAE counterpart, Santiago Muñoz Machado, of wanting to “impose” Panama as the headquarters of the next CILE. Faced with these statements, RAE sources assured this newspaper that the proposal was not the initiative of Muñoz Machado, but that it was a unanimous agreement of all the Academies, something that was ratified a few hours later by the director of the Panamanian Academy, Jorge Eduardo Ritter, in statements to the local newspaper. La Prensa. Last year, Cervantes disputed in a statement that the procedure violates the norms of organizing congresses.
In its note, the institution headed by García Montero specifies that the election of Panama was “unilateral, without the prior knowledge of Cervantes”, the norm which dictates that “countries aspiring to become headquarters must formalize their candidacy through an official communication from their Spanish government to the organizing institutions (IC and RAE), which they will decide based on the circumstances of the moment”. In addition, he demands that the RAE “rectify its performance and return to the responsible path of mutual collaboration”, and regrets that it “uses Latin American academies causing damage to institutional and cultural relations with Panama”.
In the interview published in the Panamanian newspaper, Ritter considers that “Cervantes’ objection would be unfair if it were based on the perception of an individual imposition on the part of the RAE”. At the same time, it is clear that the Panamanian elections were a “collective and transparent” agreement adopted during the CILE in Arequipa.
In his ayer statements, García Montero made this unilaterality and assured that the Panamanian elections were included “because other academies were commenting on them”. In addition, he directly attacked Muñoz Machado: “Do not allow us to offend a state institution like the Cervantes Institute, to which the director of the Real Academia Española has accustomed us,” García Montero said.
Just a few weeks before the Arequipa meeting, García Montero launched the first public attack against Santiago Muñoz: “(The RAE) is in the hands of a professor of administrative law, expert in conducting business from his (law) order to multi-million dollar companies.” Ayer (from the following months) has not yet questioned the Cervantes manager about his confrontation with Muñoz Machado: “I continue to stand by what I say”, he expressed in an informative statement in different media, among which EL PAÍS, where he also recalls that “the Cervantes Institute offers the headquarters of the Congress of the Spanish Language, it has been like this for 37 years”.
Fuentes of the RAE assured EL PAÍS that the agreement to designate Panama as the seat of the next CILE “was not communicated at that time due to the decision of the Academies, among other reasons because it took three years for the next Congress and because the situation of tension and disagreement caused in Arequipa by the director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero, said that it was not the best time to announce it.” The director of the RAE did not communicate personally with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, until the very day of his return from Arequipa, a little later.
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