By Bernadette M. Meehan

Good afternoon from wintery Santiago.  I am so excited to be with you today for this “First Monday Forum.” Thank you to the Public Diplomacy Council of America for honoring me with the 2024 Award for “Public Diplomacy Leadership by a Senior Officer.” Your leadership in support of the practice of public diplomacy and academic study, and your advocacy throughout the world, is vital to all we do. Public Diplomacy is a team effort, and organizations and forums like this make us all better practitioners.

This award belongs to every agency and section within Embassy Santiago, and today, I am proud to share with you our public diplomacy story. As Chief of Mission I get the credit, but I am only one part of an outstanding team that I am privileged to lead. And our team on the ground is supported by an entire ecosystem in Washington. 
 
I am a firm believer that interactive conversations are more interesting than lectures, so I will endeavor to be brief. I will provide some context about the U.S.-Chile relationship, offer some examples of Embassy Santiago’s Public Diplomacy strategy, and share some lessons learned.

When I arrived in Chile in September 2022, four years had passed without a U.S. Ambassador and a new left-wing government that was skeptical of the United States had recently come to power. In 2023 our bilateral relationship had two major milestones: the bicentennial of U.S.-Chile relations and 50 years since a military coup overthrew Chile’s democratically elected president. With only 3.5 months until the start of the year, there was a lot for our team to sort out.

We started by introducing me to the people of Chile. Of course I did all the formal, official meetings, but we wanted to develop a strategy for me to communicate directly with the public. 

We strove to establish a personal brand for me, of a serious, smart, experienced diplomat but accessible and down-to-earth. Our communications clearly explained our policy priorities, while also demonstrating my genuine personal interest in Chile, its people, and its culture. Our postings were interactive, encouraging people to engage with me directly and create a dialogue. Thanks to the work of our incredible PD team, I became a recognized entity, and our messaging gained hundreds of thousands of views and engagements. When our social media postings went viral, the traditional media would cover them as news, providing us with a wealth of earned media – in stark contrast to the drab, sternly worded content that the PRC was paying to publish.
We alternated between serious policy messaging and cultural and personal interludes. We integrated strategic traditional media engagements, including press conferences and interviews.

Having introduced myself, we turned to building a year-long, mission-wide campaign to help achieve our policy goals. 

The bicentennial offered a clear and definitive marker of a longstanding relationship. We centered our campaign around a slogan, Partners for a Better Future. We designed an accompanying logo by launching a contest, won by a young Chilean artist, who incorporated the shared colors of our flag and our national birds – the Eagle and Condor.

Part of our goal was to create a campaign that didn’t rely on one person, since Ambassadors come and go, and that would be flexible enough to remain relevant beyond the bicentennial year. We radiated this theme from every aspect of our relationship – economic, political, security, military, academic, scientific, people-to-people, and more. Every section and agency in Embassy Santiago embraced this branding and used it to thread our activities together, even if there was no other obvious connection.
 
Everything we did as an Embassy throughout the year was branded with the logo. And when I say everything, I mean everything: we hung an enormous banner from the Embassy’s exterior wall, we branded stationery, menus, videos, email signatures, swag, humanitarian donations, educational donations, and so on. 
 
We asked partners like AmCham to use the logo. The logo and slogan became so ubiquitous that the Government of Chile adopted the slogan at bilateral events, and polling indicated that a remarkable 34% of Chileans were aware that 2023 was the 200-year anniversary of U.S.-Chile relations.
 
We raised private sector funding for bicentennial activities throughout the year, including stands at concerts like Lollapalooza, education conferences, activities at American Corners, and a massive Independence Day celebration. We co-hosted events with the Government of Chile. We ensured that every USG official working on Chile had the anniversary at the top of their talking points. President Biden, Secretary Blinken, Secretary Yellen, and others referenced the bicentennial in their meetings with Chilean counterparts and public comments.
 
Celebrations of the bicentennial were so popular, that by June, when the AmCham hosted an anniversary gala in honor of the 20th anniversary of our bilateral Free Trade Agreement, Chilean President Gabriel Boric spoke at the event, even though he entered his presidency less than two years earlier vowing to revisit FTAs and was a skeptic of the United States’ historic role in the region.
 
While the bicentennial presented a positive opportunity, the 50th anniversary of the coup was a significant challenge, and any engagement entailed a great deal of risk for the United States, the Embassy, and me as Ambassador. The September 11, 1973, coup led to the death of democratically-elected President Salvador Allende and ushered in a 17-year dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet, known for its assassinations, torture, and disappearances. On September 21, 1976, agents working for Pinochet planted a car bomb that exploded in Washington, D.C.’s Sheridan Circle, killing Orlando Letelier, a leading Chilean opposition figure in exile, and his 25-year-old American assistant, Ronni Moffit. It was a state-sponsored assassination in the heart of the United States.

Fifty years later, in 2023, there was lasting bitterness over the destabilizing role the United States played in Chile for years leading up to the coup, a widespread belief that the United States participated in the coup itself, and anger over the United States’ long support for Pinochet. The Government of Chile announced its Plan de Busqueda, an official search for the remains of more than 1,000 people still missing from that era, including one American citizen.
 
The initial inclination among many in Washington was for us to steer clear of a subject that didn’t show the United States in a positive light. Skeptics believed that our engagement would raise unpleasant questions about the U.S. commitment to democracy and human rights. But I strongly believed that we needed to proactively engage if we wanted to retain credibility and influence in Chile. Also, it was the right thing to do. 

Transparency was paramount, and we worked closely with Washington on the declassification and publication of key U.S. documents related to the coup, including the Presidential Daily Brief from the day of the coup. We initiated a grant to translate into Spanish and make widely available an additional 23,000 previously declassified documents related to that period, to make the information more accessible to the Chilean public. We convinced the White House to send a delegation to the official commemoration events and release a public statement.
 
We also decide to lift up a less prominent milestone taking place in 2023: the 35th anniversary of the 1988 plebiscite in which Chileans voted to return to democracy. Then-U.S. Ambassador Harry G. Barnes, Jr., led a change in U.S. policy in favor of democratic elections and human rights. He is a revered figure in Chile for the risks he took to support Chileans who were fighting peacefully to return to democracy, but his actions were being forgotten with the passage of time. 

We lobbied the Department of State to officially name the Chief of Mission residence “Barnes House.” 
On the October anniversary of the plebiscite, our mission-wide team gathered Chileans and U.S. citizens to celebrate the naming and pay tribute to the Chileans who resisted the dictatorship. Democracy activists, government representatives, and academic, business, and civil society leaders joined Ambassador Barnes’s 98-year-old widow and two daughters for a poignant ceremony at Barnes House. We partnered with a local production company, La Ventana Chile, to create a documentary about Ambassador Barnes’s role.

The international press coverage of USG actions around the anniversaries of the coup and plebiscite was widespread and laudatory. The overall takeaway was that after 50 years, the United States was living up to its values and that the United States and Chile had overcome the darkest of histories to emerge as partners.
For the first time since 1973, we were able to move past this dark period of our shared history, into a new era of our relationship, again embracing the theme of our bicentennial celebration, as “partners for a better future.”
As we look to that future, the practice of public diplomacy is more vital than ever.  

In closing, I offer 10 of the best practices and lessons learned from Embassy Santiago’s Public Diplomacy strategy:

And with that, I will close by thanking the incredible Embassy Santiago team and by noting that the best advice I can give on the practice of public diplomacy in the field is to rely on your Local Engaged Staff colleagues.  
Thank you again to the Public Diplomacy Council of America for this recognition. It is a reminder of the importance of public diplomacy in building a better world, one conversation at a time.