Roberto Urdaneta Arbeláez

Roberto Urdaneta Arbeláez

Roberto Urdaneta Arbeláez (born June 27, 1890 in Bogotá , † June 20, 1972 ibid) was a Colombian diplomat , politician of the conservative Partido Conservador Colombiano and from 1951 to 1953 incumbent President of Colombia .

biography

After attending school, he studied law at the Universidad de Deusto in Bilbao and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and then worked as a lawyer and journalist .

In July 1931 he was appointed foreign minister by President Enrique Olaya Herrera in his cabinet and held this office under his successor Alfonso López Pumarejo until December 1934. In 1935 he was accredited as ambassador to Peru . He held this office until he was appointed ambassador to Argentina in 1939, where he worked until 1942.

In March 1945, President López Pumarejo appointed him Minister of Finance and Public Loans. However, he handed this office back to his predecessor Carlos Sanz de Santamaría after ten days in April 1945. In December 1946 he took over the post of Minister of the Interior in President Mariano Ospina Pérez's cabinet .

He then became Colombia's second ambassador to the United Nations in New York City in January 1948 as the successor to López Pumarejo and remained in this post until 1949.

After his return to Colombia, he was appointed Minister of War in his government in August 1950 by President Laureano Gómez . As part of a cabinet reshuffle, he became Minister of the Interior in July 1951.

After increasing domestic political crises and rising criticism of President Gómez, he became his successor as incumbent President of Colombia on November 5, 1951. On June 13, 1953, however, he was deposed and replaced by a military coup by General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, who had been appointed by him as commander-in-chief of the armed forces . The military coup was actually directed against the exiled elected President Gómez, who had announced his return to Colombia.

predecessor	Office	successor
Laureano Gomez	President of Colombia 1951–1953	Gustavo Rojas Pinilla