President Barack Obama is zipping along with nominations and appointments related to all things Latin America. I am not going to share a laundry list of every post coming from the administration, but here are some highlights and what people are saying. 

First, Arturo Valenzuela. As I wrote here months ago, he was nominated as assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs in May. Valenzeula, a Chilean-American, served at the State Department and the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton and was an adviser for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.  

If confirmed by the Senate, he’ll be leaving his current job as director of the Center for Latin American Studies in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. His expertise is democratization, security issues, and of course, Chile. And, he really knows how to deal with the media. That’s important.