The former Minister of Foreign Affairs Antonia Urrejola broke the silence after his removal in the cabinet change, carried out by the President gabriel boric On March 10. The former Secretary of State targeted an “interest group
Let us remember that Urrejola’s management was marked by different controversies. One of the last was when an audio was leaked from the Foreign Ministry in which the former minister and other portfolio officials insulted the Argentine ambassador in Chile, Rafael Bielsa.
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in conversation with The countryUrrejola maintained that “it was a dichotomy to go abroad and see the recognition of Chile and President Boric himself – not only in the region, but in Europe – and return to the country and receive so much gratuitous and unfounded criticism.”
“The resistance I suffered in Chile exceeded all limits. I understand the debate and political criticism, but that turned into personal criticism, harassment, inventions through the press. The icing on the cake was what happened in February during the forest fires,” he added.
Regarding the episode of the forest fires, the former chancellor explained that “I was on the front page of newspapers because I was the chancellor who was on vacation, when my job as Minister of Foreign Affairs was to call my peers to coordinate international aid, which It can be done from anywhere in the world. For the rest, I had made the decision to return before the scandal in the press”.
“This whole episode made me understand that an interest group that was determined to make my life impossible operated against me. That is the truth,” Urrejola said.
Group in which “the renewal bothered”
Regarding the controversies during her administration, the former minister said that “there were many inventions and reports of conflicts and crises, which in reality did not exist and were disseminated by some media whose motivation was to oppose the changes we were making.”
On the other hand, he indicated that “there is a group outside the Foreign Ministry of people linked to international issues who were bothered by the renovation and modernization that we proposed to carry out. They have managed foreign policy and have a relationship of many years between them, regardless of political color and their differences”.
“It is a nucleus that I discovered was much more closed than I imagined. And although I have known many of these people since my youth, I worked with many of these people, it was a group that saw me as outsider and that he resisted a new concept of foreign policy,” he added.
The country He also consulted the former chancellor about the criticism of the senator and former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jose Miguel Insulza (PS), against your management. Urrejola worked with Insulza at the Organization of American States (OAS).
“The content and tone of their criticisms surprised me, to be honest. The Foreign Ministry has a council of former foreign ministers with whom we met three or four times in 2022. They told me it was a space to lean on. But I don’t remember – and they I told them– that they have constantly sent messages to each other through the press as they did with me,” he said.
Misogyny
The lawyer also accused that there was misogyny against her. “In the world of foreign policy, call it foreign ministries or international organizations, misogyny still exists,” she commented.
“There was talk that I was a rookie, when I am 54 years old and with a curriculum that shows my career in international matters, although I am not part of that club that has been growing under the wing of the Chilean Foreign Ministry. I do not think that with a man with a resume like mine all this would have happened,” he added.
Regarding the audio leak -in which she is heard insulting Ambassador Bielsa-, Urrejola wondered: “If I had been a man and an unauthorized private conversation had been released by mistake, would Would the reaction have been the same, where the debate focused on the tone of the leaked conversation?”
