The Spanish consulate in Buenos Aires delivers the data on the grandchildren law on time, without any nationalized due to exile

The budget that Foreign Affairs has invested in digitizing documents did not reach the consulates in time to manage the data of those nationalized by the law on grandchildren. For this reason, the work faced by some of these offices was "enormous" to comply with the five calendar days given by the Supreme Court to deliver the data of those naturalized citizens affected by the early elections. One of the key locations was the Spanish consulate in Buenos Aires, which had an "unmanageable" amount of information to process and 66 tons of paper documents to consult and transfer to Excel. As EL MUNDO has learned, this consular office managed to deliver the papers to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a timely manner yesterday.

The consulates had been working on dumping this data since September. His minister, José Manuel Albares, had promised the installation of a computer system that would be connected to the Census Office, in such a way that the names of those naturalized would be derived from there automatically to the voter lists. However, the application never arrived and they did receive a court order that seemed impossible: deliver the lists to the Supreme Court within five calendar days.

The consulates received this news last Friday, with a telegram reminding them that the deadline for them was shorter, one day less, and that the papers had to be at the Santa Cruz Palace on Tuesday at 3 p.m. To comply with the judges, Foreign Affairs gave an order to suspend all permits and vacations of the consulates and was reminded of the need for them to allocate all the personnel "that was necessary" to comply with the orders and they were informed that this task was urgent and a priority. In addition, they authorized requests for staff reinforcements and embassy workers were asked to make themselves available to the consuls.

All of these measures would have worked in Buenos Aires, where there were 645,000 applications that had to be processed, organized and decided. The Consulates General in Havana, Rosario, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Caracas and Mendoza were those that brought together 80% of the data required by the Supreme Court. After a huge amount of work, working 16 hours a day, the three aforementioned consulates of Argentina - especially the one in Buenos Aires - managed to send the data to Madrid.

The singular circumstance occurs that of all those naturalized in Argentine consulates, none of them alleged the reasons for exile established by the law on grandchildren. "Everyone is because their father or mother were Spanish and they left to 'do the Americas,'" explains a consulted source.