The young ambassador Edmundo González Urrutia was one of those responsible for Felipe González’s return to Spain in the mid-seventies, during the beginnings of the Spanish Transition. It was a mission coordinated by the then-President of Venezuela, Carlos Andrés Pérez, which González Urrutia remembers perfectly: “I was on a mission in Geneva, and President Pérez was also there on an official visit. At one point, Chancellor Escovar Salom asked me: ‘Stop by this hotel; this person will be waiting for you to help them board the presidential plane because they are going back to their country. You find them and take them with you.’ That’s what I did: I introduced myself, saw who it was. I took him through the back of the plane and we brought him to Spain. When we got off at Barajas, President Pérez jokingly said to Adolfo Suárez: ‘Here, I bring you a stowaway.’ So that’s how I brought Felipe back to his country.”
A diplomat with a long career in the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry, González Urrutia, the candidate facing Nicolás Maduro in the presidential elections, was Venezuela’s ambassador to Algeria, Tunisia, and Argentina. He is a professor and writer with a significant body of intellectual work. He speaks four languages. He worked on Venezuela’s incorporation into Mercosur and was the pro tempore secretary of the Ibero-American Summit of Nations organized on Margarita Island in 1997.
With this record of service and the numerous studies and contributions to the programmatic work of the Democratic Unity Table (now Unitary Platform), it is surprising how unknown he was until very recently. Edmundo González Urrutia did not seek power; power came knocking on his door. María Corina Machado, the absolute leader of the opposition, thought of him after she was disqualified and the next one she appointed, historian Corina Yoris. Then the moment came for Edmundo, whom they had to convince. At this point in his life, he did not see himself on a mission of this caliber. In the end, he accepted, and here he is, on the ledge of history.
There is an important reason for his low profile: he is a shy person. Very disciplined and hardworking, he is reluctant to engage in polemics and does not like to attract attention. Until the demands of politics knocked on his door, it can be said that he was “a gentleman of his house”: someone with a family life, attached to his wife, daughters, and grandchildren, with academic routines and learned procedures.
“As a boss, he is a very respectful, kind, and approachable man. He may seem distant because he is shy. I worked with him in the foreign ministry; I was part of his assistant group. He is a very good diplomat. A good tennis player. He likes to eat well. He loves music, The Beatles, Céline Dion.” This is how one of his personal friends from his time in the Foreign Ministry describes him, who preferred to remain anonymous.
“González Urrutia was very friendly with Thomas Shannon, the U.S. diplomat. They really enjoyed playing tennis matches,” recalls the source. González Urrutia is the great-great-grandson of Wenceslao Urrutia, Venezuela’s chancellor during Julián Castro’s government in 1868. His close associates agree that he has a sharp sense of humor within his tight-knit circle of friends, although he tends to be somewhat reserved and distant in formal settings.
“Edmundo is a lifetime member of the Venezuelan diplomatic service, a career diplomat,” comments historian Edgardo Mondolfi, who worked with him at the Venezuelan Embassy in Buenos Aires.
A graduate of the School of International Studies at the Central University of Venezuela, he spent his entire career in the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry. González Urrutia was part of the country’s diplomatic service even well into Hugo Chávez’s government. Career diplomats in the Foreign Ministry were progressively replaced by personnel loyal to the ideological principles and hegemonic objectives of Chavismo. He held out, according to sources, until 2006.
“I would say he is a man of great serenity. He rarely gets agitated. He is careful with details in his actions. He likes to write, and has intellectual pursuits. He is the author of several important biographies, such as the one he wrote about the historian Carracciolo Parra Pérez, and has compiled several books on international political issues,” recalls Mondolfi.
Although he has been very careful not to antagonize María Corina Machado, who is promoting his candidacy, González Urrutia definitely has different styles and a different approach to politics and has sought to find opportunities to listen to his interlocutors and form his impressions regarding his new responsibilities.
Some of these politicians, like Ramón Guillermo Aveledo (for a long time, executive secretary of the MUD) or Ramón José Medina, have different views from those of Machado. González Urrutia is not a man of extremes: his thinking is close to Christian democracy, and his personal style tends naturally towards the creation of dialogue spaces, political realism, and the search for consensus.
Although he has advised various factions of the opposition, González Urrutia is one of those officials who does not work for the parties, but for the unitary instances that the opposition maintains as a political block (formerly the Democratic Unity Table, now the Unitary Platform), which are generally quite small. During these years, without raising antagonisms, González Urrutia has been very close to the Fermín Toro Institute of Parliamentary Studies, founded by Aveledo, and assists the Platform. In this professional support work for the needs of the Unitary Platform, González Urrutia has allied himself with leaders such as José Luis Cartaya, Gerardo Blyde, Medina, and Fernando Martínez Mottola.
“He is a gentleman,” says one of his assistants, who preferred not to be identified. “Sometimes he is a bit impatient,” a trait that coincides with reports from some journalists, who attest that he has become irritated by certain types of difficult questions or the scarcity of time imposed by television.
The appointment of González Urrutia was a small miracle: his name and his trajectory, aligned with the current needs of the opposition, emerged from nowhere. “When I was approached to ask me to take on the candidacy, and they ended up leaving me without arguments, I told María Corina and the other leaders present: all very well, now go convince my wife that I’m going to be the candidate,” González Urrutia recalls. The mission was successfully accomplished: it is she, and his daughters, as he himself confesses, who accompany him and assist him in all the details of the campaign. Although he did not want it, although he did not seek it, the hope of a part of the country that wants a change fell on his shoulders during the campaign.
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