People

José Maria Argueta

Jose Maria Argueta has served as Guatemala’s ambassador to Peru and Japan. Previous to this he served as the National Security Advisor to President Ramiro de Leon Carpio of Guatemala where he authored and implemented the “Crisis Committee”, an entity designed to institutionalize the presidential decision making process. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he coauthored and implemented the widely recognized ESTNA Methodology, a conflict resolution method that was instrumental in the peace processes of Guatemala and El Salvador. While serving as ambassador to Japan, he authored the Central America-Japan Initiative which resulted in the August 2005 “Tokyo Declaration”. He has served as a consultant to the Inter-American Development Bank, Harvard University’s Center for Conflict Resolution, and the National Endowment of Democracy. He is on the Board of the Project of Justice in Times of Transition and is currently a Scholar/Practitioner in Residence at Tufts University Institute for Global Leadership, IGL. He lives in Washington DC where he heads the Institute for Central American Strategic Studies, ICASS.