A New President: A Familiar Face
Francisco “Tachi” Cazal is appointed as President of AFS International:
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ost of the readers of this publication will be familiar with Tachi Cazal; after all, he has been with AFS International since 1985. In May of this year, Tachi was unanimously appointed as President of AFS International by the Board of Trustees. Francisco Cazal was born in Asuncion, Paraguay. He was an AFS international exchange program participant from Paraguay to the United States in 1974, where he was hosted by the Siebert family in Luverne, a small town in Minnesota where he attended the local high school for a year. Upon his return to Asuncion, Tachi completed his secondary school education, earning a Masters degree in Engineering from the National University in Asuncion. Prior to joining the staff of AFS International in 1985, he served as a Managing Director at Fanego and Asociados, a large engineering firm in Asuncion. While there, he began volunteering at the national level with AFS Paraguay. His work as a volunteer led to his appointment as the Chairperson of AFS Paraguay in 1980. From that term forward, and for the next 25 years, he assumed increasingly more responsible duties around the world on behalf of the organization. Most recently (2003), Tachi was appointed Interim President of the organization and was at the helm during a period in which AFS International earned the highest marks ever from its worldwide Partners with respect to service delivery and mobilization of the network to achieve financially viable growth with quality. At the time of his appointment, Tachi stated that: “AFS remains a powerful agent for peaceful global change that has touched many lives throughout its nearly six decades of existence. I was myself an AFS student in the midseventies and, as the son of a factory worker who strongly believed in the THE JANUS/SEPTEMBER 2005