Stephen McFarland is a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer and former ambassador to Guatemala. A veteran Peru watcher, he grew up in a Foreign Service family, graduating from high school in Lima, Peru during the Velasco military government; his step-mother’s family is Peruvian. His father, a political officer, took him to observe political events, and he met agrarian reform beneficiaries in the countryside. Stephen served twice in the U.S. Embassy in Peru: as the insurgency and human rights reporting officer in the 1980s, and later as the political counselor during the presidency of Alberto Fujimori. He was a cease-fire observer during the 1995 Peru-Ecuador war. His reporting on the wars in Peru and later El Salvador marked him and led him towards a more activist diplomacy predicated on knowing what goes on outside capital cities. His other ten overseas assignments were mostly in the Andes and Central America, but he also served in Afghanistan, and he led a “surge” provincial reconstruction team embedded in a Marine regiment in Iraq in 2007. As ambassador to Guatemala, he led critical efforts to strengthen democracy and the rule of law, to combat transnational crime, and to promote respect for Indigenous rights.

Upon retirement in 2014, Stephen led a USAID justice project in Colombia’s conflict zones. He received an MA in Security Studies in 2020 from Georgetown University, which also provided him a grant to write about the armed conflict in Peru and to meet with former combatants. In 2024 he joined the Due Process of Law Foundation’s international observation mission to evaluate the selection process for Peru’s new National Judicial Board (Junta Nacional de Justicia). He has written twice about Peru for the Foreign Service Journal: witnessing Shining Path insurgent recruitment in Peru (“Like Lightning from a Clear Sky”), and resilience in conflict zones (“Right of Boom: a Bomb and a Book”).

McFarland was a speaker at the Dialogue.