Dr. Mario Arturo Ruiz Estrada is a Guatemalan academic, he is currently Head of the Centre of Latin American Studies (CLAS) in the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Professor at the University of Economics and Human Sciences at Warsaw, Poland. He was Senior Research Fellow at the Social Security Research Centre (SSRC) and Centre of Poverty and Development Studies (CPDS) in the Faculty of Economics and Administration (FEA) of the University of Malaya (UM) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which he joined in April 2002.