Luis Ayllón
Senior officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the previous legislature continue to leave the department to head an embassy abroad. The latest known placets requested is that of Alejandro Abellán to become ambassador to Peru, as The Diplomat has been able to learn from reliable sources.
Alejandro Abellán was, since January 2022, director general for the Coordination of the Internal Market and other Community Policies and a good part of his diplomatic career, which began in 1991, has been spent in posts related to the European Union. In fact, he held the post he currently occupies between 2008 and 2010 with the Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and then went on to also take charge of the Directorate General for General Affairs and EU Policies, where he continued with the arrival of the ‘popular’ Mariano Rajoy at La Moncloa.
Previously, he was advisor to the Permanent Representation of Spain in Brussels and on several occasions advisor to the Secretary of State for the EU. He was also a counsellor at Spain’s Permanent Representation to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg.
In spite of everything, Abellán – who, once Peru grants the green light, will replace Alejandro Alvargonzález in Lima – is no stranger to the Ibero-American world, as one of his first posts was the Embassy in El Salvador and, between 2017 and 2021, he was ambassador to the Dominican Republic.
The departure of Alejandro Abellán, who has been one of those involved in the recent Spanish Presidency of the European Union, will join those of the four State Secretaries that the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, had until the current government was formed.
With the exception of the Socialist Pilar Cancela, who moved from the State Secretary for International Cooperation to the State Secretary for Migration, the rest have gone on to occupy or will soon occupy a mission chief post: Ángeles Moreno, in Washington; Juan Fernández-Trigo, in Lisbon; and Pascual Navarro, in Berlin.
Likewise, the director general for Latin America, Enrique Yturriaga, will soon be appointed ambassador to Ecuador, while Javier Salido, director general for North America, Eastern Europe, Asia and the Pacific, who was relieved of his duties on the 16th, is waiting to find out where he will be posted. In any case, it does not seem that it will be India, as was rumoured a few days ago in the corridors of the Ministry, according to the sources consulted, who, on the other hand, did not rule out the possibility that some more of the directors general who have been in the post for some years may be appointed to some embassy, once the new state secretaries have settled into their posts.
