Hector Schamis is an experienced senior leader, strategist, and advisor at the highest levels of international organizations and governments. He is a recognized academic, media, and policy profile, and practitioner in the areas of democratization, human rights, economic development, and international security.

Hector has a track record in negotiation, design, and implementation of policies and programs on corruption, privatization strategies, and electoral administration in new democracies, in partnership with governments, donors, universities, and international agencies.

From 2017 to 2025 he served as a Special Envoy and Senior Advisor to the Secretary General of the Organization of American States.

Hector teaches at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Previously, he taught at Brown and Cornell Universities, and was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and a visiting scholar at Cambridge University and the Central European University. Hector has authored books and academic articles on privatization and state reform, authoritarianism, populism, democratization and human rights, among other topics.

He writes regularly for ABC (Madrid) and has been a weekly columnist and op-ed editor at El País América (Madrid), and an analyst at CNN and NTN24 among other organizations. His op-eds have appeared in The National Interest, Clarín, Infobae and La Nación (Buenos Aires), El Nacional (Caracas), Semana (Bogotá), Confidencial (Managua), La República (Bogotá), La República (Guayaquil) y Excelsior (Mexico), among other media outlets.

Hector received his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.