President Alberto Fernández announced this Wednesday the creation of a “roving correspondentfrom the public news agency telam in Argentine Antarctica with the aim of giving visibility to the information linked to the white continent.
“We are going to create an itinerant Antarctic correspondent from the Télam agency because Argentina cares about knowing the news from our Antarctica”stressed Fernández in his speech from the scientific and permanent Marambio base, which he toured this Wednesday, when Antarctica Day was celebrated.
To start up the correspondent, Télam entered into a cooperation agreement with the National Directorate of the Antarctic (DNA) and the Joint Antarctic Command (CoCoAntar) that will allow “There is at least one journalistic team from Télam south of the 60th parallel” in each summer Antarctic campaign, as long as the “logistical, budgetary and meteorological” possibilities allow it, according to the agreement.
As part of the agreement, Télam will offer free access to its news service in all Argentine bases installed in Antarctica and will also deliver to the National Antarctic Directorate “a plaque commemorating the 50th anniversary of the installation of the correspondent station at Brown Base in 1972 to be placed there next summer”, again in the event that weather conditions make it possible.
The Brown base is the summer station for research in Antarctica of the Argentine State, it was founded by the Navy in 1951 and is located at the Proa point of Bahía Paraíso: oceanographic, chemical, physical and biological data are collected there.
The tripartite agreement signed by Télam, the DNA, which is part of the Foreign Ministry, and the Joint Antarctic Command, an organization with an organic and operational dependency on the Joint Staff of the Armed Forces, was signed by the National Director of the Antarctic, Patricia Ortuzar; brigadier general Edgar Calandín (owner of CoCoAntar) and the president of Télam, Bernarda Llorente.
According to the terms of the agreement, the object of the collaboration between the three signatory institutions is “to deepen the journalistic dissemination of Argentine activities in the Argentine Antarctic sector” and will have a duration of three yearswhich may be renewed “for periods of equal duration, unless one of the parties expressly decides not to do so.”
Llorente, who is part of the official delegation that accompanied the President on his trip to Antarctica, linked the creation of an Antarctic correspondent with the reconstruction and consolidation process from the agency “from journalistic quality, the right to information and the defense of sovereignty”.
“We rebuilt Télam and we are consolidating it from journalistic quality, the right to information and the defense of sovereignty. We work to make it the national and federal agency that Argentines deserve“, he valued.
The President traveled this Wednesday morning to the southern continent from the Tierra del Fuego city of Ushuaia and thus became the fourth head of state to visit that national territory; the first was Arturo Frondizi, in 1961.
“The south also exists and that south is Argentine,” remarked the President, who called on society to “think of Antarctica as a source of wealth that exists and is still unexplored.”
