Rosario not at the Fourth International Congress of the Spanish Language

The city of Rosario, Argentina, where the Third International Congress of the Spanish Language was held in 2004, will not have an official representation at the Fourth, which will start tomorrow (March 26) in Cartagena, Colombia. For unexplained reasons, no-one in Rosario was formally invited to participate in this, the most important event related to the Spanish language. Only last Friday a fax was received by the municipal authorities. This comes after more than a month of talks, and is a strictly protocol invitation, which does not provide for the logistics of sending a delegation to Cartagena. The organization in charge of making the guest lists was the Colombian Ministry of Education. Until Friday, according to local officials, the municipal government thought of sending one representative (not the mayor, who has a previous schedule), but this was cancelled because certain issues could not be resolved with so little time in advance, and it was also impossible to book a flight or to find accommodation in Cartagena, where hotels are going to be overwhelmed by the amount of participants to the Congress.

The Fourth International Congress of the Spanish Language will be attended by more than 1,200 people, among them politicians, researchers, educators, writers and students, and will include a ceremony to honour Gabriel García Márquez in his 80th birthday and the 25th anniversary of his Nobel Prize in  Literature.