Two generations with 29 new diplomats join the Chilean foreign service

In a ceremony that was attended by Foreign Minister Andrés Allamand, the Undersecretary of Foreign Relations, Carolina Valdivia, and the Secretary-General of the Ministry, Ambassador Gloria Navarrete, 29 students from the "Andrés Bello" Diplomatic Academy (Acade) sworn in today as new diplomats.

These are the 15 members of the "Marta Brunet Cáraves" generation, who began their studies in 2019 - but who, due to the confinement established in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, had not performed their graduation ceremony - and the 14 students of the "Carmen Vial Freire" generation, who entered in 2020.

"I found particularly appropriate the names you chose by yourselves for your generation, by highlighting two extraordinary women, who also had an outstanding performance in the Ministry: Marta Brunnet and Carmen Vial", Minister Allamand underlined. "It is still a pending issue to advance gender equality in our diplomatic representation and in our Foreign Ministry," he added.

The Foreign Minister referred to the "international vocation" that characterizes Chilean foreign policy, ensuring that Chile is integrated into the international community by making multiple contributions to it. "To make these contributions, what is needed are high-ranking diplomats," he told the graduate students.

"For you, being in this Foreign Ministry should be a source of pride, but at the same time it is a reason for responsibility, precisely to continue on a path as significant as the one I am reviewing," he added.

Among the students who finished their studies at the Acade, there is an Argentine exchange diplomat. "This shows that when we speak of good neighborliness we can go beyond declarations and adopt concrete forms of effective cooperation and fruitful coexistence," said the director of the Academy, Ambassador Miguel Ángel González.

The director of the Acade emphasized the changes incorporated in diplomatic training, as a result of the speed with which digitization has advanced, especially since the pandemic. "For these new times, our Academy has been working on a training focused on an innovative agenda, which places emphasis on the development of soft skills and on future issues, which will be those that correspond to handle in the short and medium-term" added.