Ricardo Lagos Weber

Ricardo Andrés Lagos Weber (born February 21, 1962), son of former Chilean president Ricardo Lagos, is a politician who served as the Ministry General Secretariat of Government of Chile in the administration of former President Michelle Bachelet after having worked for Bachelet's 2005-2006 campaign. He is trained in law and economics, and has served the majority of his government career in economic positions. He was also an organizer and the senior representative for Chile at the Annual Meeting of APEC held in Chile in 2004, in addition to being one of the architects of the free trade agreements that Chile signed with the United States (United States-Chile Free Trade Agreement) and the European Union (European Union Association Agreement) as the head of the Foreign Ministry's Department of Trade Policy. He is a member of the Party for Democracy (PPD). Between March 2016 and March 2017 he was President of the Senate of Chile. Early life Lagos Weber was born in the United States, the son of then-University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor and now former president Ricardo Lagos Escobar and ex-wife Carmen Weber Aliaga. Due to the constant traveling caused by the exile of his father during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Lagos Weber was forced to complete his studies in eight different schools, finishing his secondary education at Colegio San Agustin. He completed his undergraduate studies at the Universidad de Chile School of Law, receiving his Bachelor of Law and Social Sciences degree in 1985. He continued his education at the University of Sussex in England, where he obtained a Masters in Economic Development at the Institute of Development Studies. His postgraduate thesis was about flexibility in the labor market. He began work on his doctorate in Economics at the University of Cambridge with a President of the Republic Scholarship (Beca Presidente de la República), which he applied for in 1990, but he returned to Chile to work in the Chilean section of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and did not finish the doctorate program. Political career In 1995, he became the Chilean representative to the APEC forum, conducting trade negotiations on economic cooperation. That same year he was part of a diplomatic team negotiating a free trade agreement between Canada and Chile. Lagoes Weber continued to negotiate trade agreements over the next few years.