(Credit: JOAQUIN SARMIENTO/AFP via Getty Images)
(CNN Spanish) --
Luis Gilberto Murillo is a new face at the Colombian Embassy in the US Gustavo Petro appointed him as the next ambassador after the resignation of Juan Carlos Pinzón.
Murillo, who lived and worked in Washington and was Sergio Fajardo's vice-presidential candidate, will occupy what is one of the most important diplomatic positions in the country.
He will be the first Afro-Colombian ambassador to the United States.
He was born in the department of Chocó, which has the second largest black population in the country and the one with the highest density of Afro-Colombian people, according to DANE figures.
Murillo is a mining engineer: he studied on a scholarship at the Moscow State University of Geological Prospecting.
He was part of the Seventh Ballot student movement, which promoted the 1991 Constitution. He worked at the Chocó Development Corporation during the term of César Gaviria and later was director in charge of the Department of the Environment of Bogotá during the first mayoralty of Antanas Mockus .
He was governor of Chocó between 1998 and 1999, when he had to retire after being convicted of embezzlement for allocating resources from an environmental sanitation plan to repair a school.
The crime was later withdrawn from the Penal Code.
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He left Colombia at the beginning of the century and lived in Washington, where he worked for the Lutheran World Relief (LWR) cooperation agency and vice president of the Phelps Stokes Foundation.
In 2011 he was elected governor of Chocó but his election was challenged before the National Electoral Council on account of the 1999 conviction, despite the fact that he was qualified, according to the Attorney General's Office.
Although the CNE agreed with Murillo, the Council of State suspended him.
At that time he passed to the government of Juan Manuel Santos, in which he was director of the Presidential Program for the Afro-Colombian Population, coordinator of the Pacific Plan and then Minister of the Environment.
In 2019 he returned to Washington, was part of the Center for Latin American Studies at the American University and was a consultant to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) of the United Nations. .
In 2020, he was the first Colombian to join the Environmental Solutions Initiative of the Martin Luther King program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Murillo has expressed that Dr. King is one of his references.
In 2019, he was one of the founders of the Colombia Renaciente party and tried to be one of the candidates for the Centro Esperanza Coalition, but finally joined Sergio Fajardo as vice-presidential candidate, who won the referendum.
After the defeat in the first round, Murillo supported Gustavo Petro, today the president-elect.
Murillo supported the peace agreement with the FARC, opposes fracking and defends the Escazú Agreement, the first regional environmental agreement and with specific details to protect environmental defenders.
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Gustavo Petro