Santiago Jiménez, former head of the cabinet of Iglesias and Belarra, new ambassador to Colombia

Eduardo González The Council of Ministers has appointed this Tuesday Santiago Jiménez Martín as the new ambassador of Spain in Colombia, a position that remained vacant since October 29 after the transfer of its previous holder, Joaquín María de Arístegui, to Argentina, according to official sources from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who have informed The Diplomat. Santiago Jiménez held until now the position of ambassador of Spain in Uruguay, to which he was appointed in October 2022 after serving as deputy head of the Cabinet of Pablo Iglesias, when he was vice president of the Government; and as director of the Cabinet of the then Minister of Social Rights and Agenda 2020, Ione Belarra. One of Jiménez's objectives at the head of the Embassy in Bogotá will be to prepare Spain's participation in the IV Summit of Heads of State and Government of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the European Union (EU), which will take place this year in the Colombian capital and which is expected to be attended by 60 heads of State and Government from the two regions. Santiago Jiménez, born in Madrid in 1978 and a graduate in Law from the Complutense University of Madrid, joined the Diplomatic Service in 2005. Between 2008 and 2012 he worked as a technical advisor in the General Secretariat of the Presidency of the Government (2008-2012), during the mandate of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. He also worked at the Spanish Embassies in Yaoundé (Cameroon) and Banjul (Gambia), but his greatest diplomatic experience has taken place in the Middle East, as he was posted to the Embassies in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, where he was ‘number two’, and was Chargé d'Affaires ad interim at the Spanish Embassy in Damascus, between 2012 and 2015, during the hardest years of the war in Syria, during which he lived in Beirut for security reasons. In addition, Santiago Jiménez has held positions related to the media. He was posted to the Diplomatic Information Office on several occasions, the last in 2019, as deputy director general. His experience led him to write the book “Diplomacy and Journalism. Cooperation or competition?”, in which he analyses the influence of the media on foreign policy. Following the formation of the coalition government between the PSOE and Unidas Podemos in January 2020, the newly appointed second vice-president of the Government and Minister of Social Rights and the 2030 Agenda, Pablo Iglesias, called him to be deputy director of his Cabinet, headed by the former Chief of the Defence Staff Julio Rodríguez. Santiago Jiménez has been a personal friend of Pablo Iglesias since his youth and in his cabinet he was one of his main advisers on international affairs, accompanying him on some of his trips, such as the one he made to La Paz to attend the inauguration of Luis Arce as President of Bolivia. In March 2021, after Iglesias left the Vice-Presidency of the Executive, Santiago Jiménez became the director of the Cabinet of the new Minister of Social Rights and the 2030 Agenda, Ione Belarra, until he resigned in May 2022 to rejoin the Diplomatic Service. Jiménez then went on to work at the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation and Development (AECID) and participated in an OSCE election observation mission in Bosnia.

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