The Diplomat
Javier Hergueta, until now ambassador of Spain to Turkey, will replace Ángel Martin Peccis at the head of the Embassy in Cuba. His position in Ankara will be occupied by Cristina Latorre, who is leaving the Embassy in Sweden.
Yesterday the Council of Ministers approved the appointments of Hergueta and Latorre, which were reported on February 2 by The Diplomat.
Martín Peccis was one of the ambassadors not members of the Diplomatic Career that the Government has and had been in Havana since November 2020. Now his position is occupied by a veteran diplomat, who began his professional career in 1986 and who has already been assigned in Cuba as advisor of cultural affairs, between 2006 and 2009. In addition, in Latin America he was in Lima and held the second position in Panama.
Since July 2020, Javier Hergueta was ambassador to Turkey, after having been in Yemen, between 2010 and 2012, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, between 2014 and 2017, and after having been in charge of Casa Mediterráneo from 2017 until his appointment for Ankara. He has also been posted in Malta, Hungary, Croatia, Belgrade and the permanent representation to the EU.
For her part, Cistina Latorre, who was ambassador in Stockholm since September 2020, becomes ambassador in Turkey, filling the vacancy left by Javier Hergueta.
Latorre, who entered the Diplomatic Career in 1991, was undersecretary of the Ministry of Justice with Dolores Delgado, and was responsible for piloting the exhumation process of the mortal remains of Francisco Franco. From her position, she was in charge of preparing the file to transfer them from his tomb in the Valley of the Fallen to the family pantheon in the Mingorrubio-El Pardo cemetery.
In her first years as a diplomat she was posted in the Diplomatic Information Office and in the Embassies in Tanzania, Guatemala or Lisbon. After that, between 2004 and 2006, she was director of the Cabinet of the undersecretary of the Ministry of Education; and between 2006 and 2008, she was general director of International Legal Cooperation at the Ministry of Justice.
In 2008, during the second Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, she made the leap to Moncloa, called by the then Secretary General of the Presidency of the Government, also a diplomat Bernardino León, with whom she was Deputy Secretary General. In 2011 she replaced him in that position and, as general secretary, at the end of the year she was in charge of organizing the transition between the mandates of Zapatero and Mariano Rajoy, who had just won the elections. In 2012 she was assigned to Paris as deputy permanent delegate of Spain to the OECD, and in 2017, as ‘number two’ to the Embassy in Belgrade.
Likewise, the Council of Ministers appointed Carmen Díez Orejas as ambassador to the Republic of the Congo or Congo-Brazzaville, who will carry out her duties from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where she was appointed ambassador at the end of November last year.