Garcia Robles, Alfonso (1911-1991), a Mexican diplomat, won the Nobel Prize for peace in 1982 for his patient and tireless work in connection with nuclear disarmament. He shared the prize with Alva Myrdal of Sweden (see Myrdal, Alva Reimer ). Garcia Robles’s chief contribution was in helping to bring into force an agreement to make Latin America a nuclear-free zone. The agreement, which he helped negotiate, was signed at Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico city, in 1967. Some 22 countries signed the Treaty of Tlatelolco.
Alfonso Garcia Robles was born in Zamora, Mexico. During the 1930’s, he studied law at the University of Mexico, the University of Paris, and the Academy of International Law in the Netherlands. He entered the Mexican foreign diplomatic service in 1939 and held various embassy posts. From 1962 to 1964, he was Mexico’s ambassador to Brazil. In 1964, he became a member of the Mexican government and served for six years as state secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In this post, he played a crucial role in launching the Tlatelolco Treaty to ban nuclear weapons from South and Central America. The treaty was the brainchild of Adolfo Lopes Mateos, the Mexican president at the time. But Garcia Robles was responsible for the delicate negotiations. The Tlatelolco Treaty was signed on March 12, 1967.
From 1971 to 1975, Garcia Robles was Mexico’s permanent representative at the United Nations (UN). In 1975 and 1976, he was Mexico’s foreign minister. In 1977, he became his country’s permanent representative to the Committee on Disarmament, based in Geneva, Switzerland. He became particularly associated with the UN sessions on disarmament, the first of which was held in 1978. In these sessions, Garcia Robles became known for his patient diplomacy in seeking an end to the worldwide arms race. Largely through his painstaking efforts, the UN General Assembly adopted the final document of the 1978 disarmament session. The UN disarmament session of 1982 backed his idea of a world disarmament campaign, but the assembly failed to adopt it.
