The promise behind the candidacy.

From a basement in Beirut to the world's convening table

Ambassador A-Baki was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and raised between Ecuador and Lebanon, the child of a diaspora that built a new home in the Andes without letting go of the old one. Before she was a diplomat, she was an artist, trained at the Sorbonne. Painting, she has said, taught her to listen to what a room is saying before it speaks.

Her life changed in a basement in Beirut. At the height of the Lebanese civil war, as bombs fell on the building above, she held her three children in a basement passageway. Her eldest daughter asked the question no mother is prepared for: “Mommy, are we going to die?” In that moment she made a promise: if her children were spared, she would spend her life making sure no mother had to answer that question.

She has spent the forty years since keeping it. She studied at the Harvard Kennedy School and served on the board of Roger Fisher's Conflict Management Group. When Ecuador and Peru slid back toward war over the Cenepa border, Fisher brought her into the peace process. Three years of patient diplomacy produced the 1998 Brasilia Presidential Act, the agreement that ended the last armed conflict between two South American states.

She went on to serve as Ambassador to the United States twice, then to France, and as resident Ambassador to Qatar with accreditation across most of the Arab world. She led Ecuador's Ministry of Foreign Trade, presided over the Andean Parliament, and designed the Yasuní-ITT Initiative. Across every posting the method has been the same: she convenes, setting tables where adversaries meet as people before they meet as opposition.