El Salvador’s Ambassador to the U.S. to Speak at College on Future Prospects for Democracy

The Goldstein Program in Public Affairs will bring El Salvador’s Ambassador to the United States, Rubén Zamora, to Washington College on Tuesday, March 18. Zamora’s lecture, “Twenty-two Years of the Salvadoran Peace Accords and Future Prospects for El Salvador’s Democracy,” will take place from 5 to 6:30 p.m. in Hynson Lounge, Hodson Hall and is free and open to the public.

Ambassador Rubén Zamora

Rubén Zamora was named his country’s Ambassador to the U.S. in April 2013 after four years of service as its Ambassador to India. He has been intimately involved in Salvadoran politics for more than four decades. In 1980, at the beginning of El Salvador’s civil war, he co-founded the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR) but was soon forced to flee the country and live in exile.

Upon returning to the country in 1988, he co-founded the Democratic Convergence (CD) in advance of the 1989 elections. He served on the Commission for the Consolidation of Peace (1991-1993), which was created during the UN-mediated peace process to oversee the implementation of the peace accords. He was the FMLN-CD’s presidential candidate in El Salvador’s historic 1994 elections, widely dubbed “the elections of the century.” He served as a deputy in the Legislative Assembly from 1991 to 1994, when he also served as Vice President of the Assembly, and again from 1997 to 2007.

“It’s incredibly gratifying to bring a politician and analyst of Ambassador Zamora’s caliber to Washington College,” says Christine Wade, associate professor of political science and international studies and curator of the Goldstein Program. “I have known and admired him for many years as a voice of reason and justness in a landscape that was often inhospitable to both.”

Zamora is currently a member of the Democratic Change party. He received a law degree from the University of El Salvador and a master’s degree in political science from the University of Essex. He has been a visiting professor at Stanford University and a visiting researcher at the University of Notre Dame and the Wilson Center. His publications include El Salvador, heridas que no cierran: Los partidos políticos en la post Guerra, and La izquierda partidaria salvadoreña: Entre la identidad y el poder.

The Louis L. Goldstein Program in Public Affairs was established in 1990 to encourage students to enter public service by introducing them to exemplary leaders both in and out of government.