Montague

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Dr Kenneth Baugh, has announced the appointment of Delrose Montague as Jamaica's ambassador to Venezuela.

A career foreign service officer, Montague has extensive experience in diplomacy and foreign policy.

Montague, who is director of the Diaspora and Consular Affairs Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, will take up office next January. She succeeds Ambassador Audley Rodriques, who has been re-assigned to South Africa.

Seminal role

As director of the Diaspora and Consular Affairs Department, Montague plays a seminal role in the development and implementation of policies and programmes relating to the Jamaican diaspora, especially its involvement in national development.

She had primary responsibility for the staging of the second and third Biennial Jamaican Diaspora Conference held in 2006 and 2008, respectively. The latter brought together approximately 600 representatives from diaspora communities in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Africa, Cuba and the Caribbean.

Montague has served as Jamaica's deputy representative to the Organisation of American States, counsellor at the Embassy of Jamaica in Mexico and first secretary in Jamaica's permanent mission to the United Nations in Geneva. She previously held the position of director at the Caribbean and Americas Department.

She has participated in numerous bilateral, regional and international conferences and trade negotiations, including the Free Trade Area of the Americas and CARICOM/Venezuela, CARICOM/Colombia CARICOM/Dominican Republic trade agreements.

The new ambassador holds a BA (Hon) degree in political science from York University, Toronto, Canada and a master's in international public policy from Johns Hopkins University, in the US.

She speaks Spanish and French.