People Profile - Carlos E Pascual, US
Carlos E Pascual, US
Who is he? Pascual is likely to be the US's next ambassador to Mexico.
Why watch him? Although he is a long-serving State Department official, Pascual has never worked on, or in, Latin America. His expertise is in dealing with failing states. This background suggests that foreign policymakers in the Barack Obama administration believe that there is a good chance that Mexico either is, or will become, a failed state.
Date of Birth: 1959.
Education: Pascual was born in Cuba, but left the island with his family in 1961. Graduate of Stanford, Master's from Harvard.
Public life: Pascual joined the State Department straight from Harvard. He has specialised in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and was the US ambassador to Ukraine from 2000 to 2003. In 2006 he joined the Brookings Institution, traditionally a finishing school for Democratic Party foreign policymakers.
Time Line
1980: Graduates from Stanford.
1982: Awarded an MA from the School of Government at Harvard.
1983: Joins State Department
1983-1995: Deputy Administrator for USAID in Europe and Central Asia and representative of USAID in Mozambique, Sudan and South Africa.
1995- 1998: Head of USAID for Europe and Central Asia.
July 1998-January 2000: Adviser to the White House National Security Committee.
2000-2003: US ambassador to Ukraine.
2006: Joins Brookings Institution as vice president and director of its foreign policy studies programme.
Strengths: Pascual is popular with US Latin Americanists. He advocates a return to a more multilateral foreign policy approach and is a prominent advocate of a change in US policy towards Cuba. Although he wants the US to unfreeze relations with Cuba, he also insists that the US should not offer unconditional gestures. He argues that the US should make demands on Havana, particularly to improve human rights and increase democracy, in return for making the changes to US policy that Cuba wants. Unlike many Cuban-Americans, he is neither a strident critic of the Castros nor of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who has propped them up over the past decade.
Weaknesses: The Mexican government has approved his nomination, but there are clearly some people in Mexico who fear that Pascual's lack of professional experience in Mexico and Latin America shows that the Barack Obama administration views Mexico as just another enfeebled state. Mexico-US relations are particularly tricky at the moment, because the US is clearly undecided over whether Mexico is danger of becoming a failed state. The US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, virtually said as much on her visit to Mexico on 25 and 26 March. At one point she said that there were no ungovernable areas in Mexico, only to later say that Mexico could not win the war against the drug gangs without the support of the US.
Prospects: Pascual has yet to be formally nominated. He will then have to be approved by the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and then the full Senate. What he says about US policy on Mexico during his approval procedure will affect US-Mexican relations.