Pablo Galarce, Chief of Party

Pablo Galarce is Democracy International’s Chief of Party in El Salvador. He is an accomplished senior level manager with more than 14 years of experience in managing and implementing international development projects focused on elections, civil society and governance and political parties. He has been responsible for the design, management, leadership, and evaluation of technical projects, including successfully developing strategies and implementing technical assistance related to municipal elections and general election in over 20 countries. Mr. Galarce is also an experienced trainer and facilitator to civil society organizations on institutional development, campaign finance, election observation and conducting a national election and has assisted previous USAID missions in Central America in strengthening civic participation of women and other vulnerable populations. He is extremely familiar with USAID regulations; in his previous positions as COP, he has served as a primary point of contact to USAID and has provided political briefings and project reports to U.S. embassy and USAID management. Mr. Galarce will bring to this project a strong combination of leadership skills, technical skills including expertise in electoral management and capacity building, experience with project implementation, and experience in cross-cultural communication and in developing and maintaining relationships with government officials and key civil society groups.

Prior to Democracy International, Mr. Galarce served as a Chief of Party with the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) in a Campaign Finance/ Anti-Corruption program Nicaragua (2008-09) and an Election Observation Mission in Paraguay (2008). In Nicaragua he managed all programmatic, administrative, financial, and logistical aspects of the program, including the program’s eight person staff, and acted as lead technical advisor, trainer, and implementer. In Paraguay, Mr. Galarce led a 22 member international election observation mission to the April 2008 General Election and was awarded the US Embassy’s Medal of Honor for contributing to the transparency of the election. Prior to acting as COP, he served as a Senior Program Officer (1997-2004), the Regional Deputy Director (2004-05) and Regional Director (2005-08) of IFES’ Latin American and Caribbean Division. In these capacities he managed program implementation for multi-million dollar projects and their budgets, supervised staff in U.S. headquarters and in field, provided substantive analysis regarding Latin American politics and culture, and developed new financial and programmatic initiatives.

Most recently, to support the strengthening and modernization of electoral administration in Paraguay, Mr. Galarce provided technical election advice to the election tribunal and maintained strong relationships with government officials, donors, and non-governmental institutions. He also assessed the Election Tribunal of Brazil’s electronic voting machine technical capacity for a third party independent audit. In another project in Paraguay, Mr. Galarce served as Team Leader on an Organization of American States (OAS) assessment of the voter list and in Guatemala, as part of another OAS team, he developed a business strategy for the civil registry to deliver four million voter ids in ten months.

Mr. Galarce holds an Executive Masters of Business Administration in Management and Leadership from the University of Maryland and a Masters of Arts in International Relations from Boston University. He is fluent in both Spanish and English.