Bill Richardson died on Saturday, September 2, announced the vice-president of his foundation, Mickey Bergman, in a press release. The former American diplomat specializing in the release of detainees and former American ambassador to the United Nations (UN) died “in his sleep during the night” at the age of 75. “The world has lost a defender of those unjustly detained overseas,” he added.
It was he who led the discussions leading to the release of basketball player Brittney Griner in 2022, while she was detained in Russia. He had also played a major role in negotiations with Saddam Hussein for the release in 1995 of two Americans who had crossed the border.
Born in California in 1947, Bill Richardson grew up in Mexico before joining the United States as a teenager, in the suburbs of Boston (northeast). He later served as Governor of New Mexico and Secretary of Energy to former President Bill Clinton.
He became one of the first representatives of the Hispanic community to have reached high political office and had declared himself a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidential election of 2008, again the first candidate of the Latin American minority. . He had finally withdrawn to support Barak Obama and was to join his government after his election, but a campaign finance affair had forced him to give up becoming his Secretary of Commerce.
Parliamentarian, ambassador to the UN and then Bill Clinton’s Energy Secretary in the late 1990s, Bill Richardson had carved out a reputation as an adventurer, nicknamed “the Indiana Jones of American diplomacy” for his unofficial missions to pet peeves of the United States.
Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Fidel Castro in Cuba, Kim Jong Il in North Korea, Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela… For nearly thirty years, the bubbling emissary multiplied private mediations with Washington’s worst enemies.
