President Joe Biden nominated this Friday for ambassador to Nicaragua Hugo F. Rodríguez Jr., senior adviser in the Western Hemisphere Affairs office of the State Department.
Rodríguez Jr. is a career diplomat who holds the rank of Minister-Counselor. He was deputy assistant secretary of the State Department’s Western Hemisphere Affairs office, according to his biography released by the White House.
His nomination is known a day after New York Times revealed that the son of the presidential couple, Laureano Ortega, sought a rapprochement with the Biden Administration in which the release of political prisoners in Nicaragua was raised.
The State Department sent an emissary in March, but the Ortegas retracted, according to information in the US newspaper.
Career and professional profile
The American diplomat was born in Pennsylvania, has an MBA from the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, and is also an economist from Hampden-Sydney College.
In addition to his native language, he speaks Spanish and Italian. If confirmed by the Legislature, Rodríguez Jr. will succeed the current Ambassador Kevin K. Sullivanwho in his years of service in Nicaragua has been the object of attack by the Ortega regime.
The dictatorship accuses the United States of having financed a coup to overthrow it in 2018, when massive protests by opponents demanded the departure of the Nicaraguan ruler from power, which was responded by the State with a brutal repression against citizens.
The US is the largest trading partner, despite Ortega’s rhetoric that it is currently isolated from the international community. Both the United States, the European Union and Canada have imposed sanctions for the human rights violations perpetrated by the regime.
According to official biography de Rodríguez, was consul general in Mexico between 2014 and 2015, also in that country he was minister counselor for consular affairs. In that nation he led “the effort to document and have access to social services for approximately 500,000 children of United States citizens of Mexican parents who live in the country.” He was also deputy chief of the mission in Asunción Paraguay between 2016 and 2019.