Eduardo Sáenz de Cabezón | Winner of ‘El Cazador Stars’: Sáenz de Cabezón donates his prize to the “forgotten” Sahrawi people, who suffer “a very great injustice”

Eduardo Sáenz de Cabezón lives with distance the prize he won in the ‘El Cazador Stars’ contest on TVE. The professor of the Department of Mathematics and Computing at the University of La Rioja and presenter of the program ‘Órbita Laika’ is currently in Mexico offering lectures. The prize obtained in the contest, 33,500 euros, will be donated to the Association of Friends of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), as a show of support and solidarity for a people who have been living among the refugee camps for more than 45 years. Tindouf Desert (Algeria) and Western Sahara occupied by the Moroccan regime.

Your donation to the Sahrawi people is intended to support some long-term project. And he believes that his example can serve to raise awareness. “It is necessary that each of us do it from our own spheres, it has happened to me in this television world,” acknowledges the mathematician. This is not the first nor will it be the last time that I collaborate with a charitable cause. «It is a very great injustice, very left and abandoned, that does not worry public opinion much. I have a good relationship with the association and I will meet with them to see what to use the money for,” explains Sáenz de Cabezón.

«At first they asked me what cause I wanted to donate the prize to, and you can only choose one, so I chose that because it is a very forgotten town and I think that just having it appear on television is very good. The Rioja Association of Friends of the SADR and other entities do a very good job in the refugee camps, with the ‘Vacations in Peace’ program and with the entire social fabric,” declares the scientist.

But this should not draw our attention since the professor and presenter has already collaborated for many years with social entities such as Cáritas, it is more surprising that a scientist has sneaked onto the list of contestants of a television program by teaming up with the actor Santi Rodríguez, the food critic Mikel López Iturriaga and the former basketball player Juanma López Iturriaga.

Since last May 29, Sáenz de Cabezón was participating in the TVE contest and this past Thursday his team won the jackpot of 86,000 euros. The Rioja scientist is entitled to 33,500 (21,500 euros plus 12,000 accumulated from previous programs). «The program looks for well-known people from some field. I talked about it with the casting team because I think it’s not bad that among those I know there are people from science, and they received my suggestion well and I think that from now on there will be more scientists,” he says. For its part, it may not be the only contest in which it participates. «I have been called by several people but I went to this one because I was from the house and had a sense of solidarity. I do not accept all the proposals because first it is my work at the University of La Rioja and other tasks, but on some other occasion, in the future, and always on TVE, I may participate in another contest,” advances Sáenz de Cabezón.