Jaime Aparicio is the president of the Inter-American Juridical Committee of the Organization of American States (OAS), an advisory body on international juridical matters and on juridical problems in the Americas. Ambassador Aparicio was Bolivia’s ambassador to the United States from December 2002 to March 2006. Since June 2006, Ambassador Aparicio has also been an envoy on special missions for the Carter Center on issues related to election monitoring and political conflict resolution in Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Costa Rica. He is a political consultant and a partner of New World Advisor. From May 1997 to December 2002, he worked at the OAS as executive secretary of the Summit of the Americas. Ambassador Aparicio coordinated the Summit of the Americas on Sustainable Development and the Latin America and European Union summit held in Bolivia in 1996. From August 1993 to April 1997, he was under secretary of foreign affairs and acting minister of foreign affairs of Bolivia. He has led several missions to the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN); the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); and the OAS, as well as the Bolivian delegation to the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Indonesia. He has also served in Venezuela and, as Bolivia’s permanent representative to UNESCO, in France.

Marisol Argueta is the foreign minister of El Salvador. A lawyer and diplomat who specializes in international relations, human rights, conflict resolution, and development, she was an adviser to the Salvadoran Foreign Ministry from 2004 to 2007 and general director for bilateral and multilateral foreign policy in the ministry from 1999 to 2004. She previously served as a representative to the United Nations and the Embassy of El Salvador in the United States. Ambassador Argueta is also a board member of the International Institute of Women and the Salvadoran Foundation for Seniors. She has been a coordinator of the International Conference of Middle Income Countries and the Salvadoran representative for the Central-American Integration System.

Thor Halvorssen is the president of the New York–based Human Rights Foundation (HRF), an organization devoted to the liberation of prisoners of conscience and political prisoners and to the promotion of liberal democracy in the Americas. A lifelong civil liberties and civil rights advocate, Mr. Halvorssen was the first executive director and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech group he headed from its founding in 1999 until he stepped down in 2004 to create HRF. He has lectured at universities across the country on matters of liberty, and his opinions and views have appeared in numerous venues, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, TIME magazine, The National Journal, National Public Radio, Fox News’s The O’Reilly Factor, MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, and many others. Mr. Halvorssen is the founder of the Moving Picture Institute and the producer of several feature films and documentaries that focus on human freedom, including Freedom’s Fury (coproduced with Quentin Tarantino and Lucy Liu), Indoctrinate U, and Hammer & Tickle (2006 winner of the Zurich Film Festival). He is a contributing author of several books about freedom.

Roger F. Noriega is a visiting fellow at AEI, coordinating the Institute’s program on Western Hemisphere issues. Twice appointed by President George W. Bush (and confirmed by the U.S. Senate) and with a ten-year career on Capitol Hill, Ambassador Noriega’s breadth of experience offers strategic vision and practical insight on the Americas. As assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, he managed a three-thousand-person team of professionals in Washington, D.C., and fifty diplomatic posts to design and implement political and economic strategies in Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean. As U.S. permanent representative to the Organization of American States (OAS), Ambassador Noriega coordinated complex and sensitive multilateral diplomacy in a thirty-four-member international organization to bolster OAS efforts to promote trade, fight illicit drugs, and defend democracy. Ambassador Noriega has held various other positions, including senior policy adviser with the U.S. mission to the OAS; many program management and public affairs positions with the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Department of State; press secretary and foreign policy adviser for former representative Robert Whittaker (R-Kans.); and research assistant for the secretary of state of Kansas.

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