Arturo Sarukhan is the founder and president of Sarukhan + Associates, a strategic consulting firm in Washington, DC. He is a an adjunct professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University and distinguished visiting professor at the Annenberg School of Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California. He is a digital diplomacy pioneer and the first ambassador accredited in Washington, DC to use Twitter in an official capacity as a public diplomacy and outreach and engagement tool. He writes a biweekly column in Mexico City’s El Universal newspaper, has a weekly radio and TV show in Mexico, and frequently publishes op-ed’s in U.S. media outlets.

He served as a career diplomat in the Mexican Foreign Service for 22 years and received the rank of career ambassador in 2006. Ambassador Sarukhan has held numerous positions in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He first served as deputy assistant secretary for inter-American affairs in 1991, where he was responsible for Latin American regional coordination mechanisms (Rio Group, G-3, Ibero-American Summit). At that time, he was also Mexico’s permanent representative to the Agency for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean (OPANAL). In 1993, at the onset of negotiations with the U.S. Congress over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), he was posted to the Embassy of Mexico in the United States, where he served as chief of staff to the ambassador. In 1995, he was appointed as head of the Counter-narcotics Office at the Embassy. In 2000, he was designated by the foreign secretary of Mexico as chief of policy planning at the Foreign Ministry, and in 2003 was appointed by the president of Mexico as consul general of Mexico in New York City, where he worked closely with Wall Street, the media, and the growing Mexican diaspora in the tri-state area. In 2006, after requesting a leave of absence from the Foreign Service, he joined the presidential campaign of Felipe Calderón as foreign policy advisor and international spokesperson. He then became coordinator of the foreign policy transition team for President-elect Calderón. 

In February 2007, after Senate confirmation, he was appointed as Mexico’s ambassador to the United States, where he served until 2013. He was the youngest and longest-serving Mexican ambassador in Washington in modern times and led a team of 250 diplomats, plus an additional staff of 1,500 in Mexico’s 50 consulates across the U.S. He became the dean of the Group of Latin American Ambassadors (GRULA) to the United States during his tenure.