The government hopes to take greater advantage of the fact that the ABMCV has been a member of the Confederation of Municipalities of European Union Ultra-peripheral Regions since April 2004. The Confederation includes representatives of Portugal’s Madeira and Azores archipelagoes, Spain’s Canary Islands and France’s Guadalupe and Martinique. Since joining the Confederation, the ANMCV has participated in all of its annual meetings, the last of which took place in April of last year in Ponta Delgada in the Azores, where a Declaration of Support for a special statute for Cape Verde alongside the European Union was unanimously approved.

The meeting in the Azores was also attended by European Commission President Durão Barroso, who was present to explain the EU’s new neighbor policy, which will go into effect beginning next January and which will, for example, allow Cape Verdean municipalities to present proposals for projects directly to the EU. This will be a major and substantial difference from current practice, in which they are, in a way, treated equally to the autonomous regions of European countries.

In the meeting with José Maria Neves last week, Cape Verde’s mayors also received information on what the government has done in terms of strategies for achieving a special status alongside the European Union.

According to one source, it was the Prime Minister who proposed that the municipal chamber presidents accept the idea of the meeting with the Minister of Foreign Affairs.