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Name: McFarland, Stephen
Current Position: Former Ambassador
Stephen G. McFarland was sworn in as US ambassador to the Republic of Guatemala on June 30, 2008. The son of a diplomat, McFarland grew up in Latin America and the Middle East, as well as in central Texas and suburban Washington, DC. He is a graduate of the Colegio Roosevelt in Lima, Peru, Yale University and the US Air War College. He also attended the Marine Corps Platoon Leaders Course.
He joined the Foreign Service in 1977 and was posted to Maracaibo, Venezuela. He has held positions including political officer in Ecuador and Peru, desk officer for Nicaragua, and political counselor in El Salvador, Bolivia and Peru. He was the US member of the interim cease-fire monitoring group on the Peru-Ecuador border in 1995. He later served as the deputy chief of mission and the chargé d'affaires in both Paraguay and Guatemala, as the deputy chief of mission in Venezuela and as the director of Cuban affairs in the State Department.
In 2007, he led a civilian-military provincial reconstruction team embedded with Marine Corps Regimental Combat Team 2 in western Iraq. He later served as director of stability operations training in the Foreign Service Institute.
McFarland speaks fluent Spanish and some Guarani, and he is currently studying K’iche’, a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala.