Maury Gurgel Valente

Maury Gurgel Valente entered Itamaraty in 1940 while studying law at the Universidade do Brasil. In 1943 he became a liaison officer with foreign authorities in Belém and married his fellow law student, the writer Clarice Lispector. They spent sixteen years together, moving through diplomatic postings abroad before separating in 1959. Their surviving correspondence forms part of the Instituto Moreira Salles’s Clarice Lispector archive. ¹

Valente served in Naples during and immediately after the Second World War, in Bern from 1946 to 1949, and at the Washington embassy from 1952 to 1960, advancing from secretary to counselor. He attended the Torquay trade negotiations in 1950 and acted as chargé in Washington in 1959. That July, he accompanied Henrique Rodrigues Valle to the State Department as Brazil sought assistance after its negotiations with the International Monetary Fund reached an impasse. ^{2, 3}

His later career centered on the Americas: ambassadorships in Poland and Panama, senior responsibility for American affairs at Itamaraty, and a decade with Brazil’s delegation to the Latin American Free Trade Association in Montevideo. Nominated to the Netherlands in 1983, he ultimately retired from that embassy. His son Paulo remembered his later direction of the Historical and Diplomatic Museum in Rio and his enthusiasm for Cervantes and Shakespeare. Valente died in 1994. ^{2, 4, 1}