presidential summit for the fight against drugs in Cartagena and in San Antonio, Texas.

In 1993, Gabriel Silva succeeded Jaime García Parra as Ambassador of Colombia to the United States. As ambassador it befell him to implement the ATPA and to place Colombia on the list of candidates to integrate NAFTA after the entrance of Mexico. On several occasions he successfully negotiated before American authorities vital issues regarding national interest. In his status of Ambassador he was in charge of coordinating the Security and Military Cooperation with the United States.

On the multilateral front, Gabriel Silva was a delegate at the GATT Ministerial Conference, in Belgium; at the UNCTAD, and on three occasions at the Meeting of Head of States of the Río Group and of the Andean Community. Upon leaving his diplomatic position in Washington, he entered the Organization of American States as Special Consultant of the Secretary General. His participation was decisive in the consolidation of the initiatives of free commerce of the Americas in the ALCA process. The National Coffee Growers Committee appointed him as member of the Adjustment Committee of the Coffee Institutionality, ending the study thereof in May, 2002.

Silva has been a guest speaker at the University of Oxford, at the Foreign Service Institute, at the Brookings Institute and at the National Defense University in the United States. He has been a guest professor at the University of los Andes and at the graduate school of Political Science at the Javeriana University. He has also published various books about the economy, history, and politics in Colombia, and was a daily columnist for the newspaper El Tiempo.

In July of 2002, Gabriel Silva assumed the position of General Manager of the Colombian National Federation of Coffee Growers, and as such lead an intense international diplomatic offensive in order to find outlets from the worlds coffee crisis and the re-entry of the United States into the International Organization of Coffee. He also undertook significant measures to improve the productivity and well being of the coffee growers of Colombia.

In 2009 Silva was called by the president Alvaro Uribe to lead the Defense Portfolio, and under the motto of, “advance, advance, advance” he has expressed his commitment to support and provide continuity to the principle programs and operations of the Defense Sector, with the primordial objective to deepen the process of consolidation of the Democratic Security Policy, so that all Colombian may exercise their right and freedoms fully and freely.