Carlos Rico is Minister for Political Affairs at the Embassy of Mexico in Washington. He has served as Deputy Chief of Mission at the Mexican Embassy in Japan, (1992-1994) and most recently as Consul of Mexico in Boston (1999-2002) He has held the posts of Director General for North America (1998-1999) and Director General for Latin America and the Caribbean (1997-1998) at Mexico´s Secretariat of Foreign Affairs.
Carlos Rico has been a senior member of the faculties of El Colegio de México (1987-1992) and of the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) in Mexico City (1976-1980), where he was Director of the Institute for U.S. Studies (1983-1986). He has been Visiting Professor at the universities of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Duke (1986-1987), as well as Visiting Scholar at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego (1983-1984), where he served in the Center´s International Board of Advisors (1980-1988). He has been a member of the Editorial Boards of several academic journals in Mexico and the United States.
Minister Rico was a Senior Consultant to the Inter-American Dialogue (1982-1983), has held fellowships at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York (1980) and at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. (1990) and lectured in universities and academic institutions in Europe, Japan and Latin America. He has published three books (US-Latin American Relations in the Second Half of the Eighties, with Kevin Middlebrook; Images of Mexico in the United States, with John Coatsworth; and Hacia la Globalidad: México y el Mundo 1970-1988) and is the author of over 40 articles on U.S.-Latin American relations and Mexico's foreign policy, published in books and academic journals in Europe, Latin America, and the United States.
Carlos Rico was born in Mexico City in 1950, received a B.A. degree in International Relations from el Colegio de México, and a M.A. in Diplomatic Studies from the Instituto Matias Romero de Estudios Diplomáticos. He is a Ph.D. candidate in Government from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, where he studied from 1980 to 1982. He has received decorations from the Governments of Argentina, Nicaragua, Paraguay and the Dominican Republic.