Jorge Castañeda was Foreign Minister of Mexico from 2000 to 2003. He is a renowned public intellectual, political scientist, and prolific writer, with an interest in Mexican and Latin American politics, comparative politics and US-Mexican and U.S.-Latin American relations.

Born in Mexico City in 1953, Dr. Castañeda received a B. A. from Princeton University and a B. A. from Université de Paris-I (Pantheon-Sorbonne), an M. A. from the École Pratique de Hautes Etudes, and his Ph. D. in Economic History from the University of Paris-I.

He taught at Mexico's National Autonomous University (UNAM) from 1978 through 2004, at Princeton University, the University of California, Berkeley; at NYU from 1997 through 2025, and at Sciences Po in Paris since 2022. Jorge Castañeda was a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1985-87) and was a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Grant Recipient (1989-1991).

Among his more than 15 books published in the United States and elsewhere are: Limits to Friendship: The United States and Mexico (with Robert Pastor), Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War (Knopf, 1993), The Mexican Shock (New Press, 1995), Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara (Knopf, 1997), and Perpetuating Power: How Mexican Presidents Were Chosen (New Press, 2000); Ex-Mex: From Migrants to Immigrants (The New Press, 2007); Mañana Forever? Mexico and the Mexicans (Vintage, Random House, 2012); America Through Foreign Eyes (Oxford University Press, 2020).

He was a member of the Board of Human Rights Watch from 2003 to 2019. In April 2008, Castañeda was elected Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and International Member of the American Philosophical Society.