Ricardo Lagos

Ricardo Lagos is the former President of Chile, he served from 2000 to 2006. He is the founder and President of the Fundación Democracia y Desarrollo (Foundation for Democracy and Development) and chair emeritus of the Inter-American Dialogue. Mr. Lagos has a distinguished career in academia and politics. He was a professor and later Director of the University of Chile’s Institute of Law. During the 1980s he was deeply involved in the drive towards a democratic Chile, as leader of the Alianza Demócrata and the Comité Independiente para Elecciones Libres and founder of the Partido por la Democracia. Following the end of the Pinochet regime, Mr. Lagos served as Minister for Education and for Public Works, and was then elected to the Presidency in 2000. He served as UN special envoy for climate change from 2007 to 2010 and is the former president of the Madrid Club. From 2007 to 2012 he taught at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, where until 2015 he was Professor at Large. Mr. Lagos is the recipient of numerous awards and an established academic author.