Astrid Coraima Torres Bermúdez, a UPS-Guayaquil student majoring in social communication, was awarded a scholarship by Fundación Botín and will now represent Ecuador in the "VI Edición del Programa para el Fortalecimiento de la Función Pública en América Latina".

Torres is one of 32 Latin American students, out of 5,300 candidates from 353 universities, who were chosen by Fundación Botin to take part in this program whose aim is to strengthen the public sector in Latin America by having workers who are highly trained, committed and will lead the future of their countries.

It will be an eight week program that will begin on October 3rd in Brown University, USA. Then the participants will go to Spain to visit the "Monasterio del Escorial" and the Instituto Iberoamericano de la Universidad de Salamanca. After that they will go to Santander en el Valle del Nansa to visit the "Centro Fundación Botín". Finally, their trip will end on November 18th when they go to Fundación "Getulio Vargas" in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 

Students from several Latin American universities will participate in this program; 6 students from Brazil, 5 from Argentina, 5 from Mexico, 3 from Colombia, 2 from Chile, 2 from Ecuador and 1 from Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela.

In previous editions of the program, the participants have visited over 100 companies and public institutions. Several former Latin American Presidents such as Andrés Pastrana and Álvaro Uribe (Colombia), Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón (México) and Ricardo Lagos (Chile) have taken part of the program. 

Coraima was very happy to have received this international scholarship from Fundación Botín and thanked University officials for their support. She said she would do her best to represent Ecuador and UPS.