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Madrid.— The Spanish government decided this week to reform its foreign service, believing it has grown enormously without any guidelines, in order to attain greater coordination, coherence and savings while projecting a better image of the country, its companies and products.

Deputy Premier Soraya Saenz de Santamaria and Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo announced that the Cabinet meeting held this week approved sending a draft bill to parliament outlining the reform.

The purpose is to know “what interests us, why we should take action and how we should take action”, the deputy prime minister said.
The idea of this law is “to put into practice a diplomacy of the 21st century, because what we have now is from the first years of the 20th century”, Garcia-Margallo said, referring to the proliferation of activities and establishments abroad by Spain's various autonomous communities.

In that regard, the minister said that when the current Popular Party administration took power a little more than a year ago, there were 166 offices of autonomous communities outside the country.

The proposed law will seek to put order in this “chaotic situation” inherited from the Socialist government, the minister said. “We have to coordinate and save,“ Garcia-Margallo said, inviting the autonomous communities to “work together” with the nation's central administration in their representations abroad.