Ambassador
Juan Gabriel Valdés
- Ambassador of Chile.
He studied law at the Catholic University of Chile and holds a PhD in Political Science from Princeton University. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Latin American Studies at Princeton University and at the Kellogg Institute for International Relations at the University of Notre Dame.
He was Minister of Foreign Affairs during the government of President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, Permanent Representative of Chile to the United Nations and Ambassador of Chile to Spain, Argentina and the United States. He was also Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General and Head of the UN Mission in Haiti, and a member of the UN High-Level Advisory Board on Mediation.
In the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he also served as Director of International Economic Relations between 1996 and 2000, during which time the negotiations leading to the Chile-US Free Trade Agreement were initiated. He was also negotiator of the Free Trade Agreement with Canada.
He also directed the Chile-Imagen País Project and the Fundación Imagen de Chile and coordinated the programme of the Latin American Council on International Relations (RIAL), which operates at the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).