Foreign Ministry relieves ambassador in Caracas and puts Urtasun’s chief of staff in his place

Eduardo González The Council of Ministers has appointed this Tuesday Álvaro Albacete, current director of the Cabinet of the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, for the position of ambassador of Spain in Venezuela, in which he will replace Ramón Santos, who is about to reach the mandatory retirement age for diplomats. As El País had anticipated and other media confirmed, the diplomat Álvaro Albacete will replace Ramón Santos, who will turn 70 next summer. This is “a completely normal change,” the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, told the press. “The current ambassador was almost seventy years old, which is the retirement age for diplomats, he had a few months left, and therefore it had to be done,” he continued from Brussels, where he is attending the NATO ministerial meeting. “The ambassador we have appointed today is an ambassador with enormous experience in very different scenarios, multilaterally and bilaterally, both abroad and also with high positions in Spain, and who offered us all the guarantees so that Spain's interests, which is what is important, are perfectly protected in Caracas,” he concluded. Albacete, who joined the Diplomatic Service in 2010 (like Urtasun), had already been granted the agrément to be appointed ambassador to Libya, but the call for general elections in July 2023 delayed his appointment, as well as that of ten other diplomats for ten other embassies. Therefore, his choice by Urtasun to lead his cabinet forced Albares to look for someone else to take charge of the Embassy in Tripoli, which finally fell last May to Javier Soria. Álvaro Albacete has been Deputy Director of the Office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs and parliamentary advisor (2004-2011), General Director of the Sefarad Center, Ambassador on Special Mission for Relations with the Jewish Community and Organizations (2011-2014), Deputy Director in the Office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs Miguel Ángel Moratinos, Deputy Secretary General of the King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz International Center for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue (KAICIID), based in Vienna (2014-2021), Diplomatic Advisor in the Office of the President of the Government (2021-2022) and, between 2022 and 2023, Deputy Secretary General of the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM), before taking over the Urtasun Cabinet. He also worked for the European Commission in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as a specialised adviser in the area of good governance to the Presidency of the State and the Ministry of European Integration, between 1999 and 2002, and for the Inter-American Development Bank in Argentina, Bolivia, Panama and Paraguay. With his appointment, Albares manages to close the appointment of a new ambassador in Caracas before 10 January, the day on which the transfer of power in the country should take place. President Nicolás Maduro has not recognised the opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia as the winner of the presidential elections. González Urrutia, who has been living in Spain since September with political asylum, has recently asked Spain to support the United States, the European Parliament and other countries and recognise him as the “elected president” of Venezuela.

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