United Nations Cyprus problem envoy Maria Angela Holguin has offered her support to Costa Rican diplomat Rebeca Grynspan’s campaign to succeed Antonio Guterres as the organisation’s next secretary-general, with security council votes to choose Guterres’ successor ongoing.

“What we want, and what I want, is that a woman from Latin America be the next secretary-general. This is really something that we are pushing so much, and I hope that Rebeca Grynspan can have the vote,” she told the Sunday Mail.

She also poured scorn on countries from elsewhere in the world which have nominated their own candidates, saying, “it is a pity to see countries put in candidates when it’s not their turn, like Turkey, the Emirates, and in Africa”.

“For the moment, we are pushing Rebeca,” she said.

Grynspan currently heads the UN’s conference on trade and development, an intergovernmental organisation which promotes the interests of developing countries in setting the rules on international trade.

She is Jewish, and her parents had emigrated from Poland to Central America prior to her birth, while her maternal grandparents were killed in the Holocaust.

Grynspan leads the way in security council straw polls

Internal straw polls at the UN security council appear to show her leading the way, with 12 security council members having expressed positive opinions of her candidacy at the most recent count on Thursday, while three expressed the opposite view.

Were she to be elected to the role and take office on January 1, she would be the first female UN secretary-general and the first from Latin America since Peru’s Javier Perez de Cuellar served two terms between 1982 and 1991. At 71 years old, she will also be the oldest person to ever take the office.

At present, no fewer than eight candidates remain in the race to be named the next secretary-general, with Argentina’s Rafael Grossi having won nine favourable votes and Guyana’s Carolyn Rodrigues having won eight favourable votes on Thursday.

The United Arab Emirates’ Lana Nusseibeh, who won the endorsement of the Republic of Cyprus, won seven favourable votes on Thursday, while Uganda’s Olara Otunnu won four favourable votes, Turkey’s Feridun Sinirlioglu and Ecuador’s Maria Fernanda Espinosa won three favourable votes apiece, and fellow Ecuadorian Ivonne Baki won two favourable votes.

Turkey’s nomination of Sinirlioglu was lambasted by Cypriot government spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis, who told the Cyprus News Agency that the decision constitutes an “oxymoron”, as his home country has “for continued to illegally occupy 37 per cent of the territory of the Republic of Cyprus, and to disregard security council resolutions”.