SOLACI | Latin American Society of Interventional Cardiology

SOLACI Congress is back! Before a full hall, SOLACI and SOCIMIE authorities celebrated the return to face to face during the opening ceremony of SOLACI-SOCIME 2022, which started with the presentations of 3 opinion leaders, namely Ole de Backer (DNK), Juan Granada (USA) and Alain Cribier (FRN).

In this context, the President of the Latin American Society of Interventional Cardiology, Dr. Aníbal Damonte, congratulated the organizing committees and pondered the joint effort of both organizations. He underlined the magnitude of organizing such a big event in such challenging sanitary context, generated by the COVID-19 pandemic: “it was extremely hard to make the decision to hold this event, but we are confident it was the right thing to do (…), in 4 months we’ve managed to put together an event that would normally take us a whole year of preparations”.

On the other hand, the President of the Mexican Society of Interventional Cardiology and also Congress President, Dr. Andrés García Rincon, agreed with Damonte on cheering the decision to hold the event face to face, and thanked Dr. Guering Eid Lidt, Scientific Committee Director “for the high standards and scientific quality of the program that has been proven today”.

Next, Dr. Damonte took back the floor to honor Dr. Eduardo De Sousa, who passed away in March this year: “In March we were shocked by the loss of Dr. Eduardo Sousa. It was a significant one; Dr Sousa is irreplaceable. We all know he was an innovator, a leader, a trailblazer, a true researcher who built interventional cardiology from the ground up not only in Brazil, but the whole world. He was the first SBHCI president and a key participant in SOLACI’s foundation, which he also led as their president. I would like to honor him and celebrate his dear memory with a round of applause”.

And this is how SOLACI-SOCIME 2022 formally started.