The Papers of Alfonso García Robles on the Committee of Disarmament

Alfonso García Robles was born in Zamora, Michoacán on March 20, 1911. He studied law at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City and in 1936 he received a LLM degree from the University of Paris. Two years later he got an International Law Diploma from The Hague Academy of International Law. He wrote his first books in French: Le Panaméricanisme et la Politique de Bon Voisinage (1938) y La Question du Petróle au Mexique et Ie Droit International (1939). In 1939 he entered the Mexican Foreign Service and in 1945 he participated in the founding of the United Nations as Mexico’s delegate to the San Francisco Conference. García Robles was the Director of the Division of Political Affairs at the United Nations Secretariat from 1948 to 1957 when he returned to the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores as Director of European, Asian, African Affairs and International Organizations. From 1961-1964 he was ambassador in Brazil and later that year he was named President of the Preparatory Commission for the Denuclearization of Latin America, whose work produced the Tratado de Tlatelolco that declared Latin America a nuclear weapon free zone in 1967 and was signed by twenty-two countries. In 1975 he was named Secretario de Relaciones Exteriores. In 1968, he co-wrote the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 and was the Mexican representative to the United Nations Disarmament Committee in Geneva. In 1982, García Robles and the Swedish sociologist Alva Myrdal, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. García Robles died September 2, 1991 in Mexico City.