Eduardo González
This past Tuesday, the Council of Ministers approved the appointment of Ximena Bartolomé to the position of general director for Africa of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She replaces Alicia Rico, who held this position since September 2021.
Ximena Bartolomé, graduated in Law from the Complutense University of Madrid, has been a career diplomat since 2006. Until now she held the position of member advisor to the Secretary of State for Foreign and Global Affairs, Diego Martínez Belío, in charge of the affairs of Africa and the Middle East.
Previously, she was assigned as second head at the Spanish Embassy in Mozambique, counselor at the Spanish Embassy in Mexico and second head at the Spanish Embassy in Guinea Bissau. She has been decorated with the Cross of the Order of Isabel la Católica and the Cross of the Order of Civil Merit. She is the daughter of Isabel Tocino, Minister of the Environment during the presidency of José María Aznar (PP).
On the other hand, the Council of Ministers appointed the diplomat and writer Luis Martínez Montes to the position of ambassador of Spain in Kazakhstan, as The Diplomat had anticipated. A career diplomat since 1998, he will replace Jorge Urbiola, who was in charge of the Embassy since August 2021.
Martínez Montes was already stationed at the Spanish Embassy in Kazakhstan between 1999 and 2002, when the capital was in Almaty, where he held the second position in charge of the Spanish Embassy. He was also at the Permanent Representation of Spain to the OSCE (Vienna). in the Permanent Representation of Spain to the United Nations (New York) and in the Permanent Representation of Spain in the European Union (Brussels). In the central services he has been head of service in the Diplomatic Information Office, advisor in the Cabinet of the Secretary of State for Foreign and Ibero-American Affairs and, since 2016, executive advisor for parliamentary affairs in the Cabinet of the Minister of Foreign Affairs.
He has combined his work as a diplomat with intense activity as a writer of historical essays, among them “Spain, a global history” (2018), “Historias del mundo. The great adventure of Spanish diplomacy” (2019), “Enlightened worlds. The global history of Spain in twelve illuminated codices” and “Diplomats, collectors and bibliophiles” (2022).
The Council of Ministers also appointed David Navarro García (former general director of Casa Asia, director of the Cabinet of the Secretary of State for Ibero-America and director of the Technical Cabinet of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation) to the position of general director of Integration and Coordination of General Affairs of the European Union and Ana María Alonso Giganto for the position of ambassador in Special Mission for Feminist Foreign Policy. He replaces María Jesús Conde Zabala, who has been in office since October 2021.
