The Diplomat
The president of the Republic of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, has appointed Joaquín Alexander Maza Martelli as the country’s new ambassador to Spain, replacing Mauricio Peñate, who held the post since July 2020.
Maza Martelli, who is already in Madrid, has extensive diplomatic experience and since October 2014 was ambassador to Switzerland and permanent representative of El Salvador to the United Nations Office and other international organisations based in Geneva. During 2017, as representative of El Salvador he assumed the position of president of the Human Rights Council.
Previously, the new Salvadoran ambassador to Spain had been ambassador to Panama in 1984 and to Colombia between 2005 and 2009. A year later, in 2010, after being, for a short period of time, director general of Foreign Policy at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he became permanent representative to the Organisation of American States (OAS), based in Washington.
In 2011, he was appointed Ambassador Permanent Representative of El Salvador to the United Nations in New York and remained there until 2013, when he returned to represent his country at the OAS, where he remained until his transfer to Geneva in October 2014.
A graduate of the University of El Salvador in International Relations, Joaquín Maza Martelli has held various positions in the public and private sectors, in the areas of agriculture, tourism, senior management and diplomacy.
From November 1986 to May 1989, he was appointed Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs of El Salvador, after having been Director General of Foreign Policy, Technical Advisor in the Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Chargé d’Affaires at the Embassy in Nicaragua, Minister Counsellor at the Embassy in Honduras, Chargé d’Affaires at the Embassy in Mexico, first Secretary and Consul General in Great Britain, and Deputy Director for Central American Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Maza Martinelli, who will shortly present his Copies of Style to the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has already met recently at the Embassy with the Secretary General of the Organisation of Ibero-American States (OEI), Mariano Jabonero, with whom he analysed initiatives that this entity promotes related to education and early childhood.
For his part, the new ambassador thanked the OEI for its “valuable” contribution to El Salvador, according to the Embassy’s Twitter account.
