Arturo Sarukhan

Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan is an international strategic consultant and advisor, public speaker, and media contributor based in Washington, D.C., and a former Mexican ambassador to the U.S. (2007-2013). President of Sarukhan + Associates, LLC, he’s also a distinguished visiting scholar at the USC Annenberg Public Diplomacy School; an associate fellow at Chatham House in London; and an adjunct professor at George Washington University. Ambassador Sarukhan is a digital diplomacy pioneer, becoming the first ambassador accredited to the U.S. to use Twitter in an official capacity. He writes a biweekly column on international issues for Mexico City’s El Universal newspaper — as well as op-eds in U.S. media — and has a weekly radio and TV program in Mexico.

The grandson of conflict refugees in Mexico, he is a career diplomat and received the rank of career ambassador in 2006. He served in the Mexican Foreign Ministry as deputy assistant secretary for inter-American affairs, chief of policy planning, and consul general to New York, among other positions. He was a member of the diplomatic team that secured congressional passage of NAFTA in 1993. In 2006, after requesting a leave of absence from the Foreign Service, he joined the presidential campaign of Felipe Calderon as foreign policy advisor and international spokesperson. He then became coordinator of the foreign policy transition team and was appointed ambassador to the U.S. in February 2007.

Ambassador Sarukhan was dean of the Latin American Ambassadors to the U.S. He has been decorated by the governments of Spain and Sweden, and has received numerous awards in recognition of his diplomatic achievements. He sits on several boards, including the Americas Society, the Annenberg-Drier Commission at Sunnylands, the Inter-American Dialogue, the National Immigration Forum, and chairs the advisory board of Opens Society’s International Migration Initiative. He has been a distinguished diplomat-in-residence at the Woodrow Wilson Center and a Pacific Leadership Fellow at UCSD. He holds a bachelor’s in international relations from El Colegio de México and a master’s in U.S. foreign policy from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University, where he was a Fulbright Scholar and Ford Foundation Fellow. He was included in the list of global leaders of Monocle magazine, and was on “The 300 Most Influential Mexican Leaders” list of Líderes Mexicanos magazine five years in a row.