Héctor M. Timerman was appointed Ambassador of the Argentine Republic to the United States in December 2007. He was born in Buenos Aires on December 16, 1953. His father, Jacobo Timerman, was a well-known crusading journalist and editor of a leading Buenos Aires newspaper, La Opinión, which exposed human rights abuses committed by the military junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. That government arrested Jacobo Timerman in 1977 on false charges of attempting to establish a Jewish state in southern Argentina, and imprisoned and tortured him for 30 months. Héctor Timerman left Argentina in 1978 for his own safety and became an exile activist in New York City, where he earned a Master's degree in International Affairs from Columbia University in 1981. He returned to Argentina in 1984, after the fall of the junta. As a prominent human rights activist, Timerman was co-founder and board member of Human Rights Watch in New York from 1981 to 1989, Director of the Fund for Free Expression in London from 1983 to 1989, member of the Board of Directors of the Asamblea Permanente por los Derechos Humanos (Permanent Assembly for Human Rights) in Buenos Aires from 2002 to 2004, and President of the Board of Directors of the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience. He has also built a career as a well-respected journalist, writing for different graphic and audio-visual media. In Argentina, he was a column writer for Noticias magazine and the Ámbito Financiero newspaper, as well as co-director of Debate magazine and host of several television and radio shows. In the United States he has contributed articles for The New York Times, Newsweek, The Nation, and The Los Angeles Times.Timerman served as Consul General of the Argentine Republic in New York from July 2004 until December 2007. 

 

An Ambassador Born of the “Dirty Wars” (by Nora Boustany, Washington Post)