The Foreign Minister of Argentina, Santiago Cafiero, after cutting the opening ribbon of the embassy in Dhaka (Bangladesh).@CancilleriaARG (RR.SS.)
Business are business.
Argentina has reopened this Monday its embassy in Dhaka, Bangladesh, closed 45 years ago by the military dictatorship (1976-1983).
The Government of Alberto Fernández saw an opportunity in the fanaticism that the Bangladeshis showed for the Argentine soccer team during the World Cup in Qatar.
At the end of each game, tens of thousands of people took to the streets to celebrate the goals of Lionel Messi and his teammates and went into a collective ecstasy when the albiceleste finally lifted the Cup. Football will now be the gasoline of a strategy that aspires to increase food exports to what is the eighth most populous country in the world.
“There is a lot of love for Argentina from the people of Bangladesh;
It's very exciting," Argentine Foreign Minister Santiago Cafiero, the first South American foreign minister visiting the Asian country, said from Dhaka.
Argentina sold 876 million dollars in oil and soybean meal to Bangladesh in 2021, in addition to corn and wheat, with a surplus in the trade balance of 862 million dollars.
The reopening of the embassy began to take shape last August, within the framework of a United Nations conference.
Cafiero met in New York with his Bangladeshi counterpart, Abul Kalam Abdul Momen, to explore "the commercial potential" of the bilateral relationship, as they said at the time.
Six months after that meeting, the Argentine embassy reopened its doors.
The foreign ministers of Argentina and Bangladesh, Santiago Cafiero and AK Abdul Momen, during a meeting in Dhaka, on February 27, 2023. MONIRUL ALAM (EFE)
“Our country was one of the first to recognize the independence of Bangladesh, declared in March 1971. President Juan Domingo Perón enabled the first diplomatic representation on October 30, 1973. The embassy was opened in the city of Dhaka in January 1974 and it was closed four years later by decision of the last civic-military dictatorship," the Foreign Ministry explained in a statement.
Beyond these historical ties, attention was paid to the fervor that the albiceleste arouses in the population.
The ceremony in Dhaka was a sample of them.
Hundreds of people came to the headquarters of the new embassy wearing the shirt of the Argentine team, while inside the building they sang "Boys, now we are excited again...", anthem of the champion fans in the stands of Qatar.
The albiceleste is the selection of Bangladesh by adoption.
The relationship began more than 30 years ago and has historical roots.
On June 22, 1986, the match between Argentina and England was played in Mexico.
Maradona scored a goal with his hand and it was then that "cosmic kite" that scored what is still considered the best in the history of the World Cups.
Those goals were also shouted in the Hindustan peninsula, where India and Pakistan (whose eastern part, Bangladesh, claimed its own sovereignty in 1971) had won their independence from the British crown in 1957. Almost 15 years earlier, Bengal, the most colony, saw almost three million people die in a famine decreed from London.
Winston Churchill and the British Army suffered against Japan and,
fearing that the Japanese army would invade his colonies, he burned the planted land.
The Bangladesh soccer team, which was founded in 1972, a year after independence, never qualified for a World Cup, and its people adopted that of Maradona as their own.
The devotion to the albiceleste was renewed with Lionel Messi.
Bangladeshi attendees at the opening of the Argentine embassy in Dhaka.@CancilleriaARG (RR.SS.)
The ball will serve as a platform to expand the business relationship.
The Argentine Undersecretary for Trade Promotion, Guillermo Merediz, said that soccer will serve "to promote yerba mate and Argentine products that allow actions to be deployed in this market," in addition to traditional soybean exports.
A representative of the River Plate club also traveled in the Argentine delegation, which promised to export its player training model to help the development of Bangladeshi football.
The commercial promotion of Argentina will be completed with the signing of Jamal Bhuyan, captain of the Bangladesh national team, in the Sol de Mayo team in Viedma, in the extreme south of the province of Buenos Aires.
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