/04.02.13/.- José María Aznar participated on Monday, February 4, in the presentation of the documentary archive on Gregorio Ordoñez in Madrid, murdered 18 years ago by the terrorist group ETA. This archive gathers and asserts the legacy of the fight for freedom and against terrorism initiated by the man that used to be councillor of the PP in San Sebastián and MP representing Guipúzcoa in the Basque Parliament. Organized by FAES and the Gregorio Ordoñez Foundation, the event also hosted as speakers the former mayor of Lizarza Regina Otaola, and Ana Iribar, the widow of the former popular leader, who is also the president of the Ordoñez Foundation. Read here Aznar’s address (in Spanish)

José María Aznar received at the headquarters of the Foundation, to Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez, who is on a visit to Spain.

José María Aznar met with the president of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, CCHRNR, Elizardo Sanchez Santacruz.

José María Aznar took part in the launch in Guatemala city of the Escuela de Gobierno, an academic project for public management and political leadership promoted by Guatemalan personalities from the civil, business and administrative spheres. The president of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, and the former president of El Salvador, Francisco Flores, also participated in the event.

November 9, 2004 was the fifteenth anniversary of the ?fall? of the Berlin Wall. To commemorate the event, the FAES Foundation organized a series of lectures called ?The Freedom Revolution?, in which twelve figures from the political and intellectual world in the East and West took part. The series was coordinated by Ana Palacio, a member of the Spanish Parliament and former Minister for Foreign Affairs, and it ran from November 2004 to May 2005.One of the main theses of the ?Freedom Revolution? is that the Berlin Wall did not collapse of its own accord. The Wall was pulled down by the determination of people who risked their lives in order to regain their freedom. If the Wall fell it was also because of the steadfastness of a generation of politicians who were determined to stop the advance of totalitarian tyranny despite of the incomprehension of a large proportion of intellectuals in the West. These efforts helped to bring freedom and peace to the other side of the Iron Curtain.Some of the eye witnesses of that time, many of whom played key roles in the process, took part in the lecture series and explained their vision of events and their response. Helmut Kohl, Bronislaw Geremek, Giovanni Sartori, Nicolas Baverez, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Jesús Huerta de Soto, Francis Fukuyama, Guy Sorman, André Glucksmann, Richard Perle, Joseph Weiler and Christopher DeMuth took us through what happened in the Freedom Revolution. Their words, their memories and their teachings, given in the Great Hall of San Pablo-CEU University, are gathered together in this volume, which also includes the introductions made by José María Aznar, AnaPalacio and José María Lassalle.The FAES Foundation would like to give special thanks to Noah Clarke, Carmelo López-Arias, Elena Segura, Jessica Zorogastua and Miguel Ángel Quintanilla Navarro for their work in putting together this publication.We would also like to thank the Rector of San Pablo-CEU University, José Alberto Parejo Gámir, for the magnificent facilities offered by the university, which made this lecture series possible.

Europe is in the throes of two simultaneous crises: on the one hand, it is suffering from a political crisis, a crisis of leadership, one that has led to constitutional failure; on the other, it is suffering from a loss of identity, a phenomenon that results in cultural relativism. Marcello Pera, Speaker of the Italian Senate and Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Pisa, delivered a conference entitled “Strength of Identity” during the course of the FAES Campus 2005, a paper which the FAES Foundation is now publishing. Also known as the co-author of the book Senza Radici (“Without Roots”) alongside Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Professor Pera urges European culture to proudly recall and reaffirm its origins and its universal democratic principles: freedom, equality and tolerance. In this respect, Europe must recognise the intrinsic value of a civilisation, Western civilisation, that has given the world so many universal ideas. “Europe must be aware of the moral superiority of a series of values that have prevailed over centuries and that have produced beneficial results wherever they have become established”.