11

Virtuous New World (2014–2016)

An ill-defined sense of disorientation, then an unmistakeable trembling, followed by a vigorous rocking and swaying. My wife Suzanne and I were sitting at our kitchen table. The motion swelled, subsided and swelled again, accompanied this time by a shuddering. It seemed a wall might break, the ceiling crack or the floor give way. The combined and contradictory motions of swaying and pulsing, the sliding back and forth, continued in intensity until – after several minutes – all gave way to a vestigial wave motion at our feet.

It was September 16, 2015, and we had just experienced an earthquake of 8.3 magnitude on the Richter scale – a major tremor. We were at home in our apartment on the 13th floor of a 15-storey apartment in the comuna, or municipality, of Las Condes in Santiago de Chile.

The earthquake was the most powerful of what became an unpredictable series. Several strong réplicas, or after-shocks, followed that evening, and during the next day in my office on the 12th floor of Santiago’s unfortunately named World Trade Center, where I was the Canadian Embassy’s senior trade commissioner, great jolts from below continued to rattle through the giant twin-towered, 20-storey structure.

That we were at work the day after the first major shock, and during aftershocks that registered in the 6 and 7 Richter ranges, testified to Chile’s readiness for such events, and especially to the strength of its building codes, set so that high-rise structures could reliably withstand these literally earthshaking events. In the embassy, porcelain hinges set at intervals along the interior walls had shattered to partly absorb the energy of the shocks, and expansion and contraction joints in the elevator foyer had allowed the building’s adjoining towers to sway independently, leaving a gap in the floor through which you could now peer into the basement. Thanks to these and other structural safeguards, the building was still standing, with minor damage.

The quake did claim its victims. Its epicenter had been near the town of Illapel about 120 kilometres northwest of Santiago. Its source had been another sudden thrust of the Pacific Ocean’s Nazca tectonic plate under the South American continent. Fifteen deaths were reported. Some 30,000 people were left temporarily homeless. A tsunami struck the shoreline of the coastal cities of Coquimbo and La Serena, destroying harbour works and beach-front restaurants. Yet given the vast power involved, the damage was relatively limited and our life and work in Santiago was little affected. As many Chileans do, we would become accustomed, even blasé, to these events, which would strike frequently, though at irregular intervals.

My responsibility as senior trade commissioner was to a manage a team of Chilean and Canadian officers charged with connecting Canadian companies with new markets in one of the most business-oriented South American countries. The defence and strengthening of Canada’s international security and the promotion of our commercial interests abroad represent the key priorities of Canada’s foreign policy. Only the protection of individual Canadian citizens from hazards abroad will at times supplant them. The evacuations of Canadians from Lebanon during civil conflict there in 2006, and the efforts to stop the SARS virus from entering Canada in 2003 are instances when, in my experience, the department’s focus on harm reduction pushed our more usual diplomatic and commercial concerns aside.

But crises or no, Global Affairs’ ongoing goal of keeping doors open for Canadian trade and investment abroad is always on the menu. It is the day-to-day work of Canada’s Trade Commissioner Service, a network of more than 1000 trade specialists working in Canada’s more than 160 embassies and consulates abroad. In the context of the ongoing efforts to further trade liberalization which characterized my nearly 30 years in the department, the trade commissioners are the foot soldiers that put policy into practice. Having won market access, we want to use it. Our team of trade commissioners in Santiago was recognized as one of the best in the network.

I knew before arrival that Chile was already well-trodden ground for Canadian business. Canada and Chile had a free trade agreement of nearly 20 years’ duration and close to $3 billion in two-way trade. Even more significantly, Canadian firms had an accumulated investment of nearly $18 billion in Chilean electrical utilities, toll highways, sanitation works, mines, banking and industrial production. Canadian companies were number one among foreign investors in mining and third in the Chilean economy overall.

The attraction of Canadian firms to Chile is indeed linked to the country’s proclivity for terrestrial disasters, including not just frequent earthquakes, but volcanoes and floods and threatening tides. The instability of Chile’s physical foundations, shaken by great tectonic movements exposing once hidden rock structures and filling underground caverns with superhot magma, made the country, through countless millennia, a bountiful receptacle of rich ores and mineral wealth.

Canadian firms have been confident of the strength of the Chilean economy since the return to democracy in 1990, after 17 years of the notorious dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Chile followed policies of open markets, business freedom, fiscal discipline and the rule of law since that time, and Canadian investors were keen to take advantage of the consequent opportunities.

The priorities that I pursued as the embassy’s trade program manager were to maintain and enhance both the pace of Canadian exports to Chile and build the policy framework in which that trade took place.

The timing was not altogether propitious. Chile had weathered well the international financial crisis of 2008 to 2009, and after this sharp economic contraction, the economy bounced back fuelled by strong international demand for minerals, particularly for Chile’s most important metal, copper. This was largely based on the massive appetite of a rapidly growing China. But by 2014 the so-called commodities super-cycle ebbed, and the Chinese economy slowed substantially. The impact was marked, and growth slowed to an insipid rate of less than two per cent annually. This decline corresponded almost exactly with the return to power of President Michelle Bachelet in March 2014. Bachelet led the centre-left coalition that had governed Chile since the democratic restoration, save for one four-year presidential term for the country’s centre-right coalition between 2010 and 2014.

Several months into Bachelet’s second term (she had also been president from 2006 to 2010) a narrative emerged among the Chilean business class that the decelerating economy was primarily the government’s fault. A major reform agenda and implementation of new regulatory measures had brought uncertainty. The government’s efforts to enforce compliance with increasingly important and complex environmental regulations had become incoherent, the critics said. Neither officials nor companies were certain how regulatory processes were supposed to work. Regional and national officials, although ostensibly part of the same bureaucratic structure in the highly centralized Chilean state, would make different and conflicting decisions according to distinct and uncertain schedules. Regulatory agencies would also make judgements, which courts would later nullify; so, government institutions were feuding among themselves. The confusion was compounded by the Bachelet government’s decision to adopt as domestic law Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO), a United Nations body, in which the government agreed that no major project – be it mine, dam, electrical grid extension – be approved without aboriginal communities’ “free, prior and informed consent.”

The business critique went further. The government was also implementing a major business tax reform that, through transferring a portion of companies’ tax burdens to the personal accounts of their beneficial owners, effectively reduced the companies’ ability to re-invest profits. Chile’s rate of investment was falling, thus impeding economic expansion. A new labor relations law had been approved which – if not as strong as legislation in most North American and European jurisdictions – gave more power to labor unions. To these specifically business-related issues, conservative commentators added the launch of constitutional reform, fearing that the government planned to abridge property rights. All of this, businesses were saying, had contributed to an uncertain economic and social environment that was compromising growth. They likened this to the government’s taking a bulldozer to Chile’s economic success. This analogy took inspiration from the unfortunate assertion of a senior congressman in Bachelet’s coalition that the government would take a backhoe to the too-timid reforms of the earlier post-Pinochet governments.1

Hermann von Mühlenbrock was the president of one of Chile’s most powerful business organizations, SOFOFA, or Sociedad de Fomento Fabril, which represents the country’s manufacturers. On November 5, 2014, I witnessed the rather extraordinary spectacle of his delivering a startlingly audacious public chiding to President Bachelet. SOFOFA is one of numerous Chilean business organizations that represent the range of the country’s economic sectors. Each hosts an annual dinner where it is generally expected the President and several cabinet colleagues will attend, along with hundreds of association members, government officials and diplomats. That these associations, or gremios, can expect such high-level attention is a deep-seated tradition in Chile, and ministers’ schedules are arranged to accommodate these almost compulsory events. It’s a modern equivalent of corporatism derived from some of the less malevolent strains of fascist theory, which found traction in Chile dating from the 1920s. The notion is that society is ordered not so much around individuals but around the economic groups to which people belong,2 and politics should be managed accordingly.

While Chilean politicians can expect to hear the gremios’ leaders’ policy observations during these annual dinners, von Mühlenbrock’s musings at the Espacio Riesco, a giant convention and trade fair centre in Santiago’s north industrial park, were remarkably severe. The physically imposing and white-haired Mühlenbrock, the host of the event, was seated as protocol demands beside the President throughout the dinner. When he finally took the podium, he released a salvo of criticism that blamed President Bachelet for installing a climate of “growing preoccupation and uncertainty,” unleashing a public campaign “severely critical of the private sector” and fomenting an “anti-business attitude” that can only impede the country’s growth.3 Throughout his nearly half-hour diatribe, Bachelet sat stone-faced. Then her response was reserved, even muted. “We have always sought dialogue . . . Modern societies know well, and their businesspeople as well . . . how to make changes that in time gain confidence,” changes that must continue rather than be abandoned and leave society “to continue to stand still.” In the following days, there was no one I spoke to who did not think that von Mühlenbrock had gone too far. Over lunch, the head of one of Chile’s mining gremios told me that the SOFOFA president had badly hurt his capacity to influence the government in the future. And in fact, a campaign began to unseat von Mühlenbrock, which he only managed to fend off by a narrow margin in an election the following year. Bachelet, breaking long tradition, did not appear at the next annual dinner.

Canadian companies in Chile shared to various degrees these critical attitudes toward the government. Many of their Chilean managers were members of the same business and social class and shared similar attitudes and assumptions. As foreign investors, however, most of the firms would exercise great caution in their public pronouncements, understanding at any time, they may need to make representations to senior officials or ministers in pursuit of their corporate interests. Companies, of course, paid close attention to Chile’s regulatory regime, and for the most part sought to engage the government on issues that were directly relevant to them and the development of their projects. To develop a better understanding among the companies and to better position the Canadian embassy to assist them, if necessary, the Canadian Ambassador, Patricia Fuller, began to convene regular meetings at the embassy of the top Canadian mining companies. Fuller was a career diplomat with an extensive background in economics, strongly dedicated to maintaining Canada’s profile in Chile and advancing Canada’s interests.

The modern mining industry has evolved in recent years. Although its public image suffers from the perception that its projects inevitably despoil the environment and destroy communities, many of the industry’s biggest firms see the incorporation of environmental and social concerns as vital to their business models. This was brought very much to my attention when, in preparation for my posting in Chile, I visited the offices in Ottawa of the Mining Association of Canada (MAC) to learn how they support their members in foreign markets. It was a revelation to me at the time that the MAC had developed guidelines of best practices under the title Toward Sustainable Mining, guidelines with which it requires that all member companies comply in their Canadian operations. They are urged to do so abroad as well. Far from this being a public relations gloss, the MAC has established a process whereby auditors review compliance and report when companies fall short. As explained to me by Rick Meyers, MAC’s vice-president of technical and northern affairs at the time, the risks to multi-billion investments that damage the environment and harm communities is so significant that high standards are not just an option; they are a must. The purchase of “social licence” is in fact an integral cost in any major project.

Clearly guidelines, and their regular enforcement, are no guarantee against accident or neglect. Negative public impressions of mining are supported by plenty of evidence. On the day I spoke to Meyers in Ottawa, he was dealing with a flood of reporters’ calls over the collapse of Imperial Metals’ large tailings dam at the Mount Polley project in northeastern British Columbia. Imperial Metals is a MAC member and therefore a signatory of Towards Sustainable Mining. Such accidents are rare. But particularly pertinent to Chile, the Canadian mining company Barrick, one of the world’s largest gold miners, had become the bête noire of Chile’s environmental movement. Works under construction at its prospective multi-billion-dollar Pascua Lama gold mine in Chile’s high Andes washed away into local rivers after an unusual high-altitude rainfall. The company had failed to install structures that would have prevented the damage. Barrick admitted that the accident was the company’s fault, for not having sequenced its works properly under environmental regulations specifically to avoid damage caused by rare, but possible, Andean rains.

So, in the context of the industry’s always vulnerable image on the one hand and its shared vision of “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) on the other, the Chilean country managers of Barrick, Goldcorp, Lundin, Kinross, KGHM and Yamana Gold – the largest Canadian miners in Chile – would gather in the embassy boardroom on a roughly monthly basis at Ambassador Fuller’s invitation to review the Chilean mining scene. All the companies were making special efforts to integrate communities in their project planning and seeking to ensure that benefits would be achieved locally. The mantra for all of them was early engagement in consultations to win broad-based community support. And once begun, the importance of patience and perseverance until arriving at a positive consensus. Some companies had established specific programs, such as Lundin’s special foundation for community improvement projects in Tierra Amarillo, or Teck’s establishment of a project to increase the participation of women in mining. But the embassy round tables were not just to highlight their CSR initiatives, they also served as sounding boards for the challenges of the Chilean regulatory process.

During the round table discussions, it was evident that the Canadian companies were not “feeling the love” from the government despite their efforts to be good corporate citizens. During one session with Chile’s then-environment minister Pablo Badenier, the executives let their frustration show. One complained of having to obtain “283 permits,” and another of having to submit the same information to two or three levels of government. Still another complained of the “enormous cost” in both time and money. The well-publicized travails of Goldcorp’s El Morro project put the companies’ quandary into sharp relief. Chile’s Supreme Court in October 2014 over-turned the Chilean environmental commission’s approval of the company’s planned a $4.5 billion investment 4 in an Atacama region copper mine. The reason? The Chilean commission for Indigenous development had not conducted an adequate consultation process. The essence of the court’s judgement did not relate to any failing of the company, but rather the fault lay with Chile’s own authorities as they had failed to manage, sequence and fulfill their own regulatory requirements.

All the Canadian companies who sat at the round table had encountered incoherence in the approval process and had become deeply frustrated that their efforts to invest billions in the Chilean economy during a period of generally slow growth were being thwarted.

Ambassador Fuller suggested to the minister that the answer to the companies’ grievances should be: “one project-one review.” And she pressed this view subsequently on several other Chilean cabinet ministers, including those responsible for mining, the economy, industry, social development and the treasury. She would refer, during these meetings to a Canadian process to expedite large-project approvals, known as the major projects management office (MPMO) housed in Natural Resources Canada. The reference to the Canadian domestic initiative sparked interest among the Chilean authorities and a wish to know more. The ambassador decided then to have the embassy invite a representative of the MPMO to visit Santiago to make a presentation on how the Canadian process worked.

Given the difficulty that Canada has had in recent years finalizing approvals for major projects, one might question the value of promoting the Canadian experience. After all, several oil pipelines and liquefied natural gas plants – to name just these – have languished as blueprints while their proponents have been unable to negotiate their way past the obstacles of provincial and first nations approvals, let alone the federal government’s own energy and environmental hurdles. That said, the concept of the MPMO and its principle of close tracking of projects through the variety of regulatory hoops and the disciplined imposition of a “bring-forward” schedule had much to recommend it.

We convened the seminar on the MPMO in Club 50, an event centre in the heart of Santiago’s modern business district. The club is in an ultra-modern tower at the edge of the still-cobblestoned circle of El Golf, which connects the hard-driving, all business avenue of Apoquindo with Isadora Goyenechea, the more relaxed boulevard of restaurants and high-end shops. Our presenter was Jim Clarke, the MPMO’s executive director, a Canadian civil servant of lean physique and friendly demeanour who evinced a singular commitment to his office’s mandate, which was, essentially, “to get things done.” The crowd comprised top government officials, including Luis Felipe Céspedes, minister of industry, and the undersecretary of mining, Ignacio Moreno, and businesspeople, including the soon to be president of the Chilean mining association, Diego Hernandez. Also, in attendance, were some of Chile’s top regulators including representatives of the environmental evaluation commission and the mineral and geological service.

The response to this event exceeded our expectations. In the following weeks, the Chilean government established a high-level, regulatory monitoring committee, comprising senior economic ministers reporting directly to then-Treasury Minister Rodrigo Valdés. And gradually some of the projects that had been waiting in the wings began to wend their way through the system of permits and approvals. It was not that the government was short-circuiting the regulatory regime. Rather, it was riding herd on the various processes to ensure they were undertaken in appropriate sequence and completed in a timely manner, without sacrificing due diligence. From 2015 to 2017, major projects for Canadian major mining companies Teck and Lundin and smaller Canadian players such as Los Andes Copper, among others, obtained important certificates allowing them to move ahead. These results stemmed at least in part from the Canadian embassy’s initiative. They represented clear achievements that were significant examples of the value of economic diplomacy.

***

During the introduction of an embassy-sponsored seminar on mines tailings management, Alberto Salas, the head of Chile’s equivalent of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce (Confederación de la Producción y del Comercio) made the following observation: “Chile’s mines are among the largest producers of minerals in the world. They are even larger producers of mine tailings.” The truth of this is obvious, but it is brought home on any visit to any mine anywhere. It is particularly so when it is the world’s largest copper mine, El Teniente, that had been in operation since 1904.

The mine is located at about 2,300 metres in the Andes about 120 kilometres southeast of Santiago. The continuous production of copper ore for more than a century has resulted in the accumulation of vast tailings deposits that cover the bottoms of two adjacent valleys, Cauquenes and Colihues. Despite its long history of copper production, Chile’s remaining reserves of the still-indispensable industrial mineral are immense. But many of these reserves are in Chile’s central zone of mediterranean climate and verdant agriculture, where most of Chile’s population lives. Much of Chile’s current mining is done in the arid desert zones, which have ecological challenges of their own, but not the level of impact that would accompany mining in the central zone. El Teniente is just such a mine, and the work done here needs to inform future developments in this region.

One spring morning in 2017, I joined several interested industry and embassy observers in traveling to a Canadian-owned project near El Teniente that, for more than a decade, has been mining the tailings themselves to extract copper left behind. The concentrations in the historical deposits are high due to the less efficient extraction processes used in the past, but even the fresh tailings there contained a substantial copper residue. Vancouver-based Amerigo Resources is the owner and operator of the facility, in which old tailings, a thick grey sludge, are washed away by high-pressure hoses into a canal that flows into a series of separation tanks in which copper is effectively floated away or skimmed from the surface. Since the use of chemicals is minimal, there is no contamination of the watershed. Of course, the “used” tailings are then returned to their original impoundments, and little has been done to reduce the volumes significantly. Despite improving the economic efficiency of the mine, the material remains a challenge for present and future generations.

Chile is acutely aware of these challenges and a consortium of business, government and academia, styling itself Valor Minero, or Mining Value, has been established to tackle these issues. But the scale of hard-rock mining is such that tailings will remain a perpetual legacy and setting the boundary between the original contours of the Andean valleys and the altered post-mining landscape will always be a difficult task for governments, industry and communities.

I became more directly acquainted with these issues when the town of Putaendo (population about 1,000) attempted to implicate the Canadian embassy in a controversy around a local mining project. Canadian-owned Los Andes Copper was undertaking a drilling program to prove the extent and concentration of a copper ore body near the town. Putaendo is on a tributary of the Aconcagua River, some 100 kilometres north of Santiago near the town of Los Andes, in the heart of one of Chile’s northernmost wine regions. A vocal group of local activists was attempting to raise opposition to the project, accusing it of not having received regulatory authority for its drilling program. Among their concerns was that the waters to be drawn from the river might reduce the quantities available for agricultural irrigation and be contaminated by drilling chemicals. They had drawn attention to its Canadian ownership and had called for a meeting with the embassy to raise their concerns. There was the implication that Canada was condoning irresponsible resource exploitation. The opponents hoped that the embassy would be embarrassed into condemning the company’s behaviour as a violation of Canadian values supporting corporate social responsibility. Ambassador Marcel Lebleu (who had recently replaced Ambassador Fuller) was reluctant to give the activists an increased profile. But he agreed it would be damaging if we were accused of refusing to meet. The solution was that he would not meet the activists, but that I would. Should the encounter go awry, the ambassador would still have his own reputation unblemished and might be able to mitigate damage.

On the appointed day, Putaendo Mayor (or alcalde) Guillermo Reyes came to my office accompanied by a spokesperson for the activists, who had organized themselves under the banner Putaendo Resiste (Putaendo Resists). I was joined by our trade section’s expert on corporate social responsibility, Margot Edwards, a Canadian who had lived in Chile for many years and was recognized for her knowledge and tact. The activist argued that Los Andes Copper was not abiding by drilling regulations, was affecting water flows in the river and the development was detrimental to local agriculture. We had informed ourselves in advance about the regulatory status of the project. The company seemed to be complying with the law. There was a case currently before the courts on one issue, but it was our view that the Chilean legal process must be allowed to work. At one point I asked – all technicalities aside – whether the group desired that the project not be allowed to go ahead, simply because they didn’t want a mining project in their town. The mayor answered without equivocation that that was exactly his position.

To our relief, Mayor Reyes and the activists’ representative did not try to capitalize on the meeting to create negative publicity. The mayor mentioned the meeting in a press release but made no accusations. We had made a judgement call to meet him and it appeared to have paid off.

The future of the Putaendo project was uncertain. Los Andes Copper’s prospecting confirmed that the ore body is of high grade and contained some 25 years of production. Nonetheless many in the community remained concerned that should the mine be developed, a local valley, albeit at altitudes higher than the agricultural zone in which the town is located, might alter the mountain landscape forever. There would obviously have to be a trade-off between local jobs and development and impact on the environment, even if the impact was mitigated by the highest standards envisioned in “towards sustainable mining.”

***

Among Latin American countries, Chile is much admired for its adherence to the rule of law. It is an important feature of its attractiveness as an investment destination. However, the country’s reputation in this regard was cast in a rather dubious light with the eruption in 2014 of a political financing scandal that swept up nearly all the countries’ political parties. The agent in this affair was the renowned Chilean non-metallic mining company SQM (Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile), a producer of potassium and nitrates, key fertilizer components, and lithium, the highly prized material that powers electric vehicle batteries. SQM mines deposits in northern Chile from leases that are granted by the state, and it was revealed that for several years running, the company had been hedging its bets, relative to possible future political transitions, by systematic secret contributions to virtually all major political parties. The paymaster was Patricio Contesse, the company’s executive director, and the “under-the-table” payments were carried out apparently under his sole discretion – or at least without any formal directive from SQM’s board of directors.

This matter would normally be of interest to the Canadian embassy. It is one of the embassy’s roles to report important political developments to headquarters in Ottawa. However, this case was particularly relevant since one of SQM’s controlling shareholders was Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan (PCS), giving rise to the concern that a major Canadian investor might be implicated. The danger to its reputation was not at all lost on PCS.

For Canadian trade commissioners to offer services to Canadian companies – especially if it might involve communication with local governments – it is imperative to know that the companies’ practices comply with ethical standards. Specifically, companies since 2014 have been asked – when they seek the aid of the Trade Commissioner Service – to sign declarations that they have not been involved in such activity as offering bribes.

PCS had a 32 per cent ownership stake in SQM. There was an agreement with the other controlling shareholder Juan Ponce Lerou that neither owner would acquire a greater share of the firm than the other – guaranteeing a continuing deadlock in beneficial ownership. What made the SQM political funding scandal particularly radioactive was that Ponce was the ex-son-in-law of the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, an unsavory connection for much of the Chilean public, as well as for Bachelet’s governing coalition.

As senior trade commissioner, I needed to get PCS’s side of the story. From his office in Saskatoon, Wayne Brownlee, the executive vice-president, explained that the company had been caught off-guard and had not only been offended by the political payouts, which, he said, none of PCS’s representatives on the board had been informed of, but worried also about possible legal problems that could descend on the company’s directors from – especially – the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The mechanism of Contesse’s clandestine political donations was through his solicitation of “consulting” reports from individuals associated with one or other of the main political parties. Many of these reports contained little original content, and at times were merely compendia of material gleaned from the internet. The “authors” were paid for these reports, and the receipts would be recycled into political campaigns. Among prominent practitioners of this art was Rodrigo Peñailillo, one of Bachelet’s senior organizers for her 2013 presidential election campaign and later her minister of the interior.

Following the first of the revelations, PCS’s reaction was rapid. They advised the board of directors that they were withdrawing their three members from the eight-person board and they insisted on Contesse’s departure. That Contesse had been able to carry out this scheme – which at one point was said to have disbursed more than $20 million (Cdn) – brought into question the adequacy of SQM’s corporate governance. So, during the formal absence of PCS directors on the board, PCS negotiated a complete overhaul that brought in a new set of directors, that included, for PCS’s representation, three senior executives of PCS itself. Although US authorities did eventually impose a heavy fine on SQM that materially affected the company’s share value, none of the directors, except Contesse, faced legal prosecution.

***

When I first arrived in Chile, I was welcomed by a handover note written by my predecessor, Peter Furesz. He said I was about to take on the best job in the entire trade commissioner service. He had good reason to say that. There are few countries where Canada’s business interests are as prominent as they are in Chile. I was to learn in practice that my job was not only to help Canadian companies sell their goods and services, but also to help build an appreciation that industry could and would respect and foster the social and environmental conditions so important to the Chilean government and its people. Even when bound to finding profits for their shareholders, it was a genuinely held conviction that modern business – and emphatically the mining industry – could operate successfully in a virtuous new world quite at odds with its exploitive reputation of old.

Beyond that nuanced role of enhanced commercial promotion, as senior trade commissioner I also needed to work with Chilean colleagues to promote the policy rules that govern trade and investment within the broader international policy framework. That framework, which I have noted throughout this memoir, was founded on an international consensus generally accepted by the member nations of the WTO. But despite having always been the subject of some criticism from those opposed to “neo-liberal globalization,” it was soon to come under sudden and much more profound attack with the unexpected election victory of US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Trump’s surprising arrival in the White House, a metaphorical earthquake of a Richter scale rivalling the physical one that had shaken us in our Santiago apartment, was high among the conditions that would drive a reboot of the embassy’s trade policy initiatives in my final year in Chile.