Panama City, Apr 13 (EFE).- The president of the Xunta de Galicia, Alfonso Rueda, concluded his official visit to Panama on Thursday, recalling that it is “unfair” to ignore the “heroic deed” of thousands of Galicians For more than a century they contributed fundamentally to the construction of the Panama Canal.
“There is a very important episode that unites Panama and Galicia, Panama and Spain, which is more than 100 years old and which I believe is unfairly not sufficiently known: that thousands of Galicians abandoned everything 116 years ago in a world that it was not easy (…) to embark on an engineering work that forever changed communications in the world”, he stressed.
The president of the Xunta de Galicia spoke these words during the act in which he gave the first shovelful for what will be a monument in honor of the Galicians, and by extension the rest of the Spaniards, who participated in the construction of the Canal.
The monument, located on the Amador Causeway, a promenade in the Pacific Ocean on the banks of the Canal, will represent four Galician workers (for the four provinces of Galicia). Their figures were taken from photographs of Galician countrymen in the works of the Canal, with their characteristic clothes and berets.
“I think it was unfair that this heroic deed was not recognized, that it was not known (…),” remarked Rueda, who highlighted the work of the Nosa Terra Foundation, made up of Panamanians of Galician origin, in bringing to light this key episode of Galician history.
Thus, the president of the Xunta promised to promote the knowledge in Galicia of this work of some 12,000 Galicians in the Panama Canal, and asked that the same be done in the Central American country where with this engineering work “two oceans were united , which is as much as saying that it united two worlds”.
“It is a source of pride, it is an honor and in a year we will see each other here to inaugurate the monument,” said Rueda, who will continue his Latin American tour tomorrow with a visit to Venezuela, to later move to Mexico.
RECOVER THE “HISTORICAL MEMORY”
The Spanish ambassador, Guzmán Palacios, also recognized that “this feat of thousands of Spaniards, Galicians, who came here, unfortunately is not very well known, neither in Galicia nor in the rest of Spain, perhaps not much in Panama either.”
Faced with this situation, Palacios stressed that acts such as today to begin construction work on the monument are key to “recovering that historical memory.”
“Sometimes we are not very aware of the difficulties they had to go through, we have no record of what happened to them after their stay here, we know that at least thousands of them came to work, but their trace remains here,” lament.
The ambassador, like Rueda, called for “a recognition of all those Spaniards, Galicians, who 100 years ago made the courageous decision to come to an unknown country to contribute to the construction of what is now the Panama Canal.” .