Roberto Izurieta

Roberto Augusto Izurieta Canoba (Montevideo, 1963) is an Ecuadorian professor, political strategist and diplomat of Uruguayan origin. Was the Secretary of Communication of Ecuador, during the governments of Daniel Noboa, previously was the Secretary of Communication during the government of Jamil Mahuad, from 1998 to 2000. He was also Ecuador's ambassador to Chile (from 2022 to 2023) and a professor at George Washington University for more than two decades. His political work has earned him recognitions such as the Rising Star award from the American magazine Campaigns and Elections, from which he was the first Latin American to receive it.

Biography He was born in January 1963 in Montevideo, Uruguay,

After moving to the United States, he began working in 2001 as a professor at George Washington University, where he taught for the next two decades and was also director of Latin American projects at the Graduate School of Political Management. As a trainer of generations of professionals, among their students of strategic communication and governance in Washington, various Latin American leaders have appeared, some have become presidents of their respective countries, as is the case of Daniel Noboa, president of Ecuador, as well as others professionals who have stood out both in academia and in politics, as is the case of the Columbia University professor and CNN columnist, Geovanny Vicente, who under the leadership and supervision of Roberto Izurieta had the academic tutoring of Santiago Peña, president of Paraguay, at George Washington University.

On December 8, 2022, he was appointed by President Guillermo Lasso as Ecuador's ambassador to Chile, for which he had to leave his position as a political analyst on the program Choque de opiniones, on the CNN en Español. As Ecuador's ambassador to Chile, he was decorated with the Order of Merit of Chile, in the Degree of Grand Cross, by the Chilean government upon his departure from office.

In November 2023, he was appointed Secretary of Communication by President Daniel Noboa. Since 1982, Izurieta began attending clandestine LGBT bars in Quito with some of his friends. friends, like Luis Miguel Campos. Among the bars he visited was El Hueco, an establishment that, according to Izurieta, received that nickname after he himself named it this way because of how difficult it was to access.

Due to the criminalization of homosexuality, which at that time carried a sentence of four to six years in prison in the country, Izurieta experienced police raids on LGBT bars in Quito on several occasions, which ended with many of those who did not manage to escape arrested.

In 2010, Izurieta and his partner,