The State Department’s Ricardo Zúniga on the U.S., Mexico, and Northern Central America

Ricardo Zúniga is the principal deputy assistant secretary and special envoy for the Northern Triangle in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs. A career member of the Senior Foreign Service, he previously served as a senior diplomatic fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center Latin America Program, director of the International Student Management Office at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., and as U.S. Consul General in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Zúniga was a special assistant to the president and senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council from 2012 to 2015. He has worked overseas in Mexico, Portugal, Cuba, and Spain. Domestically, he served in the State Department’s Office of Cuban Affairs, the U.S. Mission to the Organization of American States, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and as the desk officer for Uganda and Tanzania.

He was born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and has a B.A. in foreign affairs and Latin American studies from the University of Virginia.

David Leblang, the Randolph P. Compton Professor at the Miller Center, is the Ambassador Henry J. Taylor and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Endowed Professor of Politics. He is also professor of public policy at the UVA’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, where he is director of the Global Policy Center. A scholar in the area of international political economy, he is currently working on two major projects. The first is a book-length study of the role that global migration plays in linking host and home countries and how these linkages help explain observed patterns of international investment, remittance flows, and the spread of democracy. The second project is related but focuses on the destination choices of refugees and illegal migrants.