Panama City, Apr 13 (EFE).- The president of the Xunta de Galicia, Alfonso Rueda, honored this Thursday with a visit to the Panama Canal the around 12,000 Galicians who had “fundamental importance” in the construction of this engineering feat “that changed world shipping forever.”
“I wanted to start (…) by getting to know the Panama Canal, a famous engineering work that also changed world maritime transport forever, and to know that 12,000 Galicians, when this engineering work was built more than a century ago, had an important fundamental: they worked here, they played a very important part in making this a reality,” Rueda said during the visit.
The president of the Xunta de Galicia, who was accompanied by the Galician Secretary General of Emigration, Antonio Rodríguez Miranda, and the Spanish ambassador in Panama, Guzmán Palacios, attended the opening and closing process of the Miraflores locks.
Rueda’s visit coincided with the passage of a large ocean liner full of tourists, who watched the process of filling and emptying the locks from the top of the boat in order to navigate the different level sections of the Canal.
With the huge ocean liner behind him, Rueda insisted that with this visit he wanted to “value the work of those 12,000 Galicians who a century ago, surely in very difficult conditions, were a fundamental part.”
In a new tribute to those Galicians who worked on the construction of the Canal, which lasted for a decade until its inauguration in 1914 by the United States, the president of the Xunta will participate this afternoon in an act in which he will break ground for the future monument dedicated to these workers.
The monument will represent four Galician workers (for the four Galician provinces) taken directly from photographs of Galician countrymen in the works of the Canal, with their characteristic clothes and berets, in full labor of removing earth.
GALICIANS IN PANAMA: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
Rueda will also meet this Thursday, during his visit to the Central American country before continuing his Latin American route to Venezuela and Mexico, with the Panamanian president, Laurentino Cortizo, whose father immigrated to Panama as a young man from a Galician town in the province of Ourense.
“I will try to thank you on behalf of the people of Galicia for the recognition you give these workers and the relationships we maintain. There are Galician companies working in Panama and therefore, as president of the Xunta de Galicia, I am very interested in this continuing and, if possible, increasing it and continuing to maintain commercial and human relations”, he stressed.
As revealed by the president of the Xunta, today more than 4,000 Galicians live in Panama, so he wants to continue recognizing not only his countrymen who emigrated decades ago, but also “those who continue to leave today, magnificent Galician professionals also from engineering, very powerful Galician companies that are carrying out very large projects all over the world”.
Rueda recalled, for example, that in the recent expansion of the Panama Canal so that vessels with a greater draft can circulate, “the largest ships that exist that until then could not cross”, tugboats manufactured by a company based in Panama are used. Galicia and Asturias, in the northwest of Spain.
“Therefore I think that this is a good sign, that work is being done here, there are also Galician construction companies that are building powerful infrastructures in Panama, and then we must not forget that due to the geographical situation, Panama is a place where many Galician fleet boats that are fishing unload here to later send the product to Europe”, he pointed out.
Thus, he added, “from a logistical point of view, it is an important place. These are fundamental elements (…), we are very interested in being here and we are interested in having a presence. There are powerful Galician companies that are working here, but we would like them to be more”, stated the president of the Xunta.