Luis Ayllón
The current State Secretary for International Cooperation, Ángeles Moreno Bau, will be the new “number two” in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, after the head of this department, José Manuel Albares, promoted her to the post of State Secretary for Foreign and Global Affairs.
The appointment was approved by yesterday’s Council of Ministers, to which Albares brought a wide-ranging reshuffle of the Ministry’s leadership, which he arrived at ten days ago. Of the four state secretaries inherited from his predecessor, Arancha González Laya, only the head of the European Union, Juan González-Barba, remains in his post, as The Diplomat reported.
Ángeles Moreno replaces Cristina Gallach and her post as State Secretary for International Cooperation will be filled by Pilar Cancela Rodríguez, a member of the Galician Socialist Party in Congress, where she chaired the Commission for Equality and the Commission for Monitoring the State Pact on Gender Violence. She was Director General of Labour Relations in the Xunta de Galicia on two occasions, in 2003 and 2005-2009. Since June 2017, she has been part of the Federal Executive Committee of the PSOE as head of the Area of Migration Policies and PSOE-Exterior,
To take charge of the recovered State Secretariat for Ibero-America, Albares has chosen Juan Fernández Trigo, who, since November 2020, was in charge of the Spanish Embassy in Venezuela, as Chargé d’Affaires with Cabinet Letters. The government relieved him of his post as ambassador to Cuba, to which he had been appointed two years earlier, in order for him to take charge of the representation in Caracas, following the dismissal of Jesús Silva, but without giving him ambassadorial status in order to express that relations with the Maduro regime were not the best.
Albares thus surrounds himself with people close to him and whom he fully trusts in order to take on his new role at the Ministry. For the moment, he is keeping Celsa Nuño in the post of under-secretary, although she could be replaced at a forthcoming Council of Ministers. The name that has been most talked about in the corridors of the Ministry for this post is that of Juan Duarte, the current Director General of Consular Affairs.
Another of the most important decisions taken is the dismissal of the current ambassador permanent representative of Spain to the European Union, Pablo García Berdoy, who had been in the post since December 2016, appointed by the government of Mariano Rajoy. To replace him, Albares has opted for Marcos Alonso, current ambassador to Albania and another diplomat of the minister’s full confidence, with whom he was already director general of European Affairs and G-20 in the Presidency of the Government.
The changes also affect the General Technical Secretariat, where José María Muriel has been replaced by Rosa Velázquez Álvarez, who has held various legal posts in both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of the Interior.
María Sebastián de Erice has been appointed Director General of Protocol, Chancellery and Orders, to fill the vacancy left by Caridad Batalla, the new Consul General in New York. María Sebastián de Erice had been the Second Introducer of Ambassadors since October 2018 and was responsible, on many occasions, for receiving the Style Copies of the new ambassadors accredited in Spain.
In the so-called ‘political directorates general‘, that of Ibero-America and the Caribbean -where Rafael Garranzo was- will be taken over by Xavier Martí, until now director of Ángeles Moreno’s Cabinet as State Secretary for International Cooperation and who has been Deputy Consul at Spain’s Consulates General in Lima and São Paulo.
Heading the Directorate General for North America, Eastern Europe, Asia and the Pacific, which Ana Salomon is vacating, will be Javier Salido, who was Director General for Sustainable Development Policies at the State Secretariat for International Cooperation and has been posted to the Embassies in Brazil, India and Trinidad and Tobago.
Likewise, the new director general for the Maghreb, Mediterranean and Middle East will be Alberto Ucelay, currently ambassador to Sudan, who was deputy director general for the Middle East and held second posts in the Spanish embassies in Morocco, Kuwait and Tunisia.
Finally, the Council of Ministers proceeded to make several appointments of new ambassadors. The most important is that of José María Ridao, as ambassador to India, since the post had been vacant for almost nine months, following the retirement at the end of October of the incumbent, José Ramón Barañano. Ridao was currently assigned to the Diplomatic School and was ambassador to UNESCO, as well as having worked for years as a journalist for the newspaper El País.
Ana Salomon, for her part, leaves the post of Director General for North America, Eastern Europe, Asia and the Pacific to take charge of the embassy in Israel, replacing Manuel Gómez-Acebo. She has been ambassador to Cyprus.
Finally, Teresa Lizaranzu, who was Spain’s ambassador to UNESCO, will be the new ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina. The post had been vacant since the retirement of the incumbent, José María Valdemoro, in March this year.
