26 Facts About Guillaume Long

Guillaume Jean Sebastien Long was born on 22 February 1977 and is a former politician and academic who served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador and Human Mobility, in the government of Rafael Correa.

Guillaume Long was previously the Minister of Culture and Heritage, and Minister of Knowledge and Human Talent.

Guillaume Long was born in Creteil, a suburb of Paris, France, in 1977, to a French mother and a British father and grew up in the suburb of Sucy-en-Brie.

Guillaume Long completed his studies at the University of London, where he earned a PhD at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, a Masters in Political Science and a Bachelor in History at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Guillaume Long first went to Latin America at the age of 18 and spent some extended time traveling in Central America before arriving in Ecuador in 1996.

Guillaume Long became a member of the Academic Board of the Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales, and later became its dean.

On 6 May 2013, Guillaume Long was named Coordinating Minister for Knowledge and Human Talent.

Guillaume Long's role was to oversee the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology, the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, as well as a number of public research institutes and other state entities.

From this post, Guillaume Long was one of the key promoters of the creation of four high standard universities in Ecuador: Ikiam located in the Amazon and essentially focused on life sciences; Yachay University, a university located at the heart of a science, technology and innovation cluster; Unae, a large-scale teacher's training university for primary and secondary teachers; and Uniartes, a university for the arts located in the historic center of Guayaquil.

Guillaume Long dedicated much of this his efforts as Minister of Culture to passing a new and long overdue Law of Culture mandated by the 2008 Constitution.

Between May 2014 and March 2016, Guillaume Long was chairman of the International Relations Committee of PAIS Alliance, a socialist political movement led by Correa.

Guillaume Long was the chief organizers of two conferences that brought to Quito leftist political parties and movements from Latin America and the world.

On 3 March 2016, Guillaume Long became Ecuador's new Minister of Foreign Affairs and Human Mobility.

Guillaume Long played an important role in the establishment of peace talks between the Colombian Government and the ELN guerrillas in Quito, Ecuador, and in the humanitarian steps that were taken in 2016 and 2017 to pave the way for the start of the formal negotiations on 7 February 2017, including the release of ELN prisoners from Colombian jails and of several people held in captivity by the ELN.

Guillaume Long played a leading role in seeking regional consensus in Latin America to demand that the United States put an end to the Wet feet, dry feet policy that favored and incentivized Cuban migration, affecting both the security and human rights of the migrants and the stability of transit countries.

Guillaume Long made the most of the scandal of the Panama Papers and Correa's calling for a referendum over barring civil servants from holding assets in tax havens, and made the struggle against tax evasion a cornerstone of Ecuador's foreign policy and a core theme during his term as foreign minister.

Guillaume Long recurrently pressed this matter whether at the helm of the G77 or in other multilateral fora.

Guillaume Long had been active in international circles pressing for a denouement to the Assange issue, including a letter to his Swedish counterpart in which he argued that the delays of the Swedish prosecution and absence of charges amounted to a miscarriage of justice.

In November 2016, Guillaume Long oversaw the cutting off of Assange's internet connection during the US presidential elections.

Guillaume Long was in charge of Ecuador's oil negotiations within OPEC and represented Ecuador at the OPEC meetings in Algiers on 29 September 2016 and Vienna on 30 November 2016, and the 10 December 2016 OPEC-non OPEC meeting in Vienna that resulted in the commitment to cut oil production by just under 1.8 million barrels a day.

In 2017, Guillaume Long played an important role in denouncing 16 bilateral investment treaties, after the Ecuadorian Constitution banned extra regional commercial arbitration and a civil society audit commission found these BITs to have played a detrimental role for Ecuador's economic development.

Guillaume Long had been an ardent critic of investment-state-dispute-settlement mechanisms.

In January 2018, Guillaume Long resigned from his position in a public letter to Moreno, in which he denounced what he referred to as the new government's unconstitutional measures and the betrayal of the platform and program of the Citizen's Revolution on which the new government has been elected.

Guillaume Long was heavily criticized, notably by former Ecuadorian foreign ministers, for being the first non-Ecuadorian-born Foreign Minister.

In one of his weekly editorials, former Foreign Minister Francisco Carrion claimed that Guillaume Long had said that "one breathes happiness" in Venezuela.

Guillaume Long denounced this as a lie and pushed Carrion to prove these had been his words.