Wymberley DeRenne Coerr

US Ambassador to Uraguay and Ecuador

• Reference: Find A Grave Memorial - SmartCopy: Feb 7 2018, 20:42:48 UTC

Wymberley deRenne Coerr, an American career diplomat who was Ambassador to Uruguay and Ecuador in the 1960's, died on Oct. 5 in a hospital in Ajijic, Mexico, where he and his wife had rented a house for three months. He was 83.

His death was announced by his family last week. The cause was complications from Parkinson's disease, said his wife, Eleanor, of Clearwater, Fla.

Mr. Coerr (pronounced core), a native New Yorker, had tense moments in his career. He was Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American affairs in 1961, when he was summoned to the White House to help with the hurried drafting of a key speech, given hours later by President John F. Kennedy, urging the Council of the Organization of American States to expedite the work of the Alliance for Progress.

Earlier, as the No. 2 diplomat at the embassy in Bolivia for part of the 1950's, Mr. Coerr won a State Department award for, among other things, supervising the burning of the embassy's files while anti-American crowds attacked the mission.

He was Ambassador to Ecuador from 1965 to 1967, when the State Department recalled him at the demand of the Ecuadorean Government, which asserted that he had issued public, open criticism of President Otto Arosemena Gomez.