ARTURO SARUKHAN – A CAREER AMBASSADOR IN THE MEXICAN FOREIGN SERVICE

AZG Armenian Daily
11/11/2008

Diaspora

Arturo Sarukhan is a career Ambassador in the Mexican Foreign Service
since 1993. He was promoted to ambassadorial rank on November 20, 2006.

Ambassador Sarukhan is married to Verónica Valencia and has a baby
daughter, Laia.

Professional and academic career:

Ambassador Sarukhan served as Coordinator for International Affairs
for the President elect’s Transition team and prior to that was the
Campaign Coordinator for International Affairs and International
spokesperson to Felipe Calderón. He was on a leave of absence form
the Foreign Service from February to November of 2006. He obtained a BA
in International Relations (1988) from El Colegio de México and read
History at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Recipient of
the Fulbright Scholar and Ford Foundation Fellow Scholarships (1989),
Mr. Sarukhan received an MA in U.S. Foreign Policy from the School of
Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of the Johns Hopkins University,
in Washington, D.C. (1991).

Previous to his career in government, he was Executive Secretary of the
non-governmental Bilateral Commission on the Future of Mexico-United
States Relations (1988-89), sponsored by the Ford Foundation and
headed by William D. Rogers and Hugo B. Margain. In 1991 he was
appointed as an advisor to the Secretary of Foreign Relations (SRE)
in charge of national and international security issues. In 1992, he
was appointed Director for Inter-American Negotiation at the Foreign
Ministry. During this tenure, he was responsible for the Ibero-American
Summit and Latin American cooperation mechanisms such as the Rio Group,
the G-3 (Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia) and the Tlatelolco Treaty. He
was responsible for the negotiation of the full adhesion of Argentina,
Chile, and Brazil to the Tlatelolco Treaty and was Mexico’s Permanent
Representative at the Agency for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons
in Latin America and the Caribbean (OPANAL).

In 1993 he was commissioned to the Mexican Embassy in Washington,
D.C. where he held the position of chief of staff to the
Ambassador. In 1994, he was appointed Head of the counternarcotics
and law enforcement section at the Embassy. In this capacity, he
coordinated the U.S.-Mexico Bilateral High Level Contact Group (HLCG)
and negotiated the steering and implementation documents that derived
from the Group. In 1998 he was posted to Mexico City as a Senior
Advisor to the Secretary of Foreign Affairs on North American issues,
including security and organized crime. Additionally, he was designated
in 2000 as the Mexico’s National Coordinator for the Multilateral
Evaluation Mechanism against Illicit Drugs (MEM) of the Organization of
American States. In December 2000, Ambassador Sarukhan was the liaison
official between the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs of Mexico and the
Transitional Team of the President Elect Vicente Fox and afterwards,
was designated Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Foreign Affairs.

In February 2003, the President appointed Mr. Sarukhan as Consul
General of Mexico in New York. In this capacity, he chaired a
multidisciplinary team of 62 people, in charge of the political agenda,
consular management, economic, trade, cultural and image promotion
of Mexico in Mexico. Mr. Sarukhan served as Consul General of Mexico
in New York until February 2006.

Other activities:

He has been a member of various organizations and fora, among them
the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations (COMEXI); the International
Institute for Strategic Studies of London (member of the 1991 "New
faces" group) and the Task Force for Inter-American Security of the
Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. He is also a fellow of the
Foreign Policy Association in New York.

He has written articles in Mexican and foreign journals on different
issues regarding international affairs. He is a professor at the
Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM); has been an annual
lecturer at the Center for Advanced Naval Studies of the Mexican Navy
and at the Mexican National Defense College; and a guest lecturer
at the Inter-American Defense College and the National Defense
University (NDU) in Washington, D.C. His most recent publication is
"Drug Trafficking and Terrorism: non traditional threats to security"
in Rafael Fernández de Castro, ed. Change and Continuity in Mexico’s
Foreign Policy, published by Planeta , Mexico, D. F., 2002.

The Kingdoms of Spain and Sweden decorated him with the Order of
Civil Merit, Officers Degree, and the Order of the Polar Star,
Commanders Degree, respectively. He recently (May 2008) received an
Honorary Doctorate in International Relations from Marian College
(Indianapolis, Indiana).

Mr. Sarukhan has full command of English and Catalan, and is fluent
in French. He reads Portuguese and Italian.

–Boundary_(ID_Q90TBORq0tZNwIpO9QL9LQ)–