Luis Ayllón
Following the appointments of the four new Secretaries of State, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, has begun with the changes in the Directorates-General of his department. Yesterday, the Council of Ministers appointed Carlos Moreno Blanco as the new Director General for North America, Eastern Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and Javier Gasso as the new Director General for Latin America.
Carlos Moreno, a diplomat since 2009, and who will be in charge of the Directorate General with the broadest powers, replaces Javier Salido Ortiz, whose name is being bandied about in the Ministry to head an embassy.
The new director general comes to the post from the Permanent Representation to the EU, where he was Finance Counsellor since May 2021. A law graduate, he has been posted in Nairobi, Beijing and Tel Aviv and has been deputy director general for Regional Fisheries Agreements and Organisations at the Ministry of Agriculture.
Javier Gassó, who will take charge of the Directorate General for Latin America, replacing Enroque Yturriaga, the future ambassador to Ecuador, had been ambassador to Bolivia since December 2020, and his appointment then put an end to the diplomatic crisis that lasted almost a year between that country and Spain during Jeanine Áñez’s term of office.
Javier Gasso, a law graduate, entered the diplomatic career in 1997 and has extensive experience in Ibero-American affairs, as, in addition to La Paz, he was previously posted in Santo Domingo and Montevideo. Between 2011 and 2017, he was also Counsellor at the Mission to the UN in New York, and after that, until 2020, Assistant Director-General of the United Nations. He has also been Deputy Assistant Director-General for Sub-Saharan Africa and served as second-in-command in Addis Ababa.
On the other hand, the Council of Ministers agreed to the dismissal of Arturo Virella as Ambassador-at-Large for the Africa Plan, a post he had held since 2020, and, at the same time, added these competencies to the current Ambassador-at-Large for the Sahel, Antonio Sánchez-Benedito.
This change has caused some surprise among the Ministry’s diplomats, because the Government, as The Diplomat reported, has already asked for Sánchez-Benedito’s approval to appoint him as ambassador to Iran, so it is foreseeable that within a few months it will have to appoint a person to replace him.
In addition, at its meeting yesterday, the Council of Ministers appointed, as this website also reported, the former Secretary of State for Foreign and Global Affairs, Ángeles Moreno, as the new ambassador to the United States, replacing Santiago Cabanas, who has held the post for more than five years. Ángeles Moreno was also Under-Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, when Josep Borrell was in charge of the Department, and Secretary of State for International Cooperation, when Arancha González Laya took charge of the Ministry.
Marta Betanzos, who until recently was ambassador in Lisbon, was also appointed as the new ambassador to China, replacing Rafael Dezcallar, who had been in the post since September 2018. Marta Betanzos, who was already second-in-command at the embassy in Pelin years ago, has also been ambassador to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), as well as in Mali.
Both Moreno and Betanzos are the first female diplomats to head Spain’s embassies in Washington and Beijing.
