The Purple Line: Episode 58 with José R. Cárdenas

The Purple Line · Oct 29, 2026 · 38m

José R. Cárdenas has spent nearly forty years at the center of Washington’s work in the Americas, at the State Department, the National Security Council, USAID, the Organization of American States, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A first-generation Colombian-American, he grew up in 1960s Northern Virginia, where his father stayed after a medical residency at Georgetown and a close Cuban-American community shaped his world. He came of age at Catholic University and Georgetown during the Reagan years, reading history as told by opposing camps, a habit that drew him to foreign…