The Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jose Manuel Albaresurged this Thursday the leader of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, to “immediately disavow” the “slander” of the Vice-Secretary of Institutions of the PP, Esteban Gonzalez Ponsto the Spanish government for its role in the departure from Venezuela of opposition leader Edmundo González Urrutía.
“I demand that Mr Feijóo disavows the MEP who slandered Spain and accused it of absurd but extremely insulting things for our country,” Albares told reporters after attending a meeting in Brussels to try to advance a deal on Gibraltar after Brexit. González Pons said Thursday that the Spanish government was involved “as a necessary cooperator” in the “the coup that took place in Venezuela” and named former President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero as the “great conspirator” of the “operation.”
The head of Spanish diplomacy He “blatantly” rejected these accusations. and, in response to Feijóo’s request for resignation made today from Rome, he demanded that he publicly disavow the vice-president of the European Parliament. “Listen, what Mr Feijóo should do is disavow the MEP who publicly slanders and insults Spain, who publicly slanders and insults the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is beyond reproach and beyond reproach,” Albares stressed. And he added that he asks the PP “to respect the decision taken by Edmundo González (to leave Venezuela) and to understand the difficult circumstances in which he had to take it.”
González Pons expressed this Thursday on esRadio the “disgust”, “shame” and “indignation” provoked by the video in which the former presidential candidate, exiled since September 8 in Spain, complaint he signed under “coercion” at the residence of the Spanish ambassador in Caracas a document recognizing the victory of Nicolas Maduro.
Albares stressed, on the one hand, that González Urrutia, whom he recently met in Madrid, thanked him “for the work of the Spanish government, unlike Mr. Feijóo and his MEPs, who are trying to tarnish the image of Spain,” of the Spanish Foreign Service and diplomats.
And he further insisted that “Spain has absolutely nothing to do with any type of negotiation, with any type of document that may have existed between Edmundo González and the government of Venezuela.” “The Spanish ambassador had received precise instructions not to hinder Edmundo González’s freedom to to be able to talk, manage, have meetings with whoever he wants“, so the decision he made “was what he really wanted and that’s why I spoke to him personally,” Albares said.
