The guests included Xiana Margarida Méndez, Spain’s Secretary of State for Trade, Flavia Santoro, president of ProColombia, and María Peña, CEO of ICEX, Spain’s export and investment promotion agency.

On Monday, the director of InvestChile, Andrés Rodríguez, participated in “The Key to Development in Ibero-America: PPC” a conference about the importance of public-private collaboration in the recovery of the area’s countries from the global Covid-19 pandemic and the creation of resilience for the future.

Xiana Margarida Méndez, Spain’s Secretary of State for Trade; Flavia Santoro, president of ProColombia; Núria Vilanova, president of the Alliance for Ibero-America Business Council (CEAPI); and María Peña, CEO of ICEX Spain Export and Investments also participated in the event, organized by The Business Year, a specialized media company.

The debate focused on the key sectors for recovery, strategies to restore the productive fabric, recover employment rates, protect companies and ensure mechanisms of legal security mechanisms and the need to study reasonable returns to attract investors and, above all, create new strategic forms of collaboration between Latin America and Spain.

Méndez stressed that Spain is the second largest investor in the region after the United States and that, in the face of such an uncertain international outlook, “Latin America remains an attractive destination for Spanish investment.”

On the sectors that will drive recovery, Rodríguez pointed out that, in Chile’s case, energy is playing a fundamental role, with a considerable increase in the participation of non-conventional renewable energies (NCRE) in the country’s electricity matrix and a decarbonization program drawn up in conjunction with the private sector.

“The issue of green hydrogen is also very much to the fore at the moment and I believe it will change Chile’s place in the energy world,” added the director of InvestChile.