Biography | Bernadette Meehan — The Montt Varas Hall Where She Handed Chile Her Letters

People treat an ambassador as posted the day the Senate votes.

Chile dates the start of Bernadette Meehan's mission to this palace.

On 30 September 2022 she presented her letters of credence to President Gabriel Boric Font in the Salón Montt Varas of the Palacio de La Moneda.

Chile's foreign ministry recorded the same ceremony for six new ambassadors that afternoon.

The group included the envoys of Israel, Finland, Denmark, the United States, the Czech Republic, and Mexico.

Foreign Minister Antonia Urrejola stood with the president.

The U.S. Embassy in Santiago posted photographs of Meehan in the hall with the letters in her hand.

La Moneda occupies a full block of Santiago's civic district.

Joaquín Toesca designed the neoclassical mint house in the late eighteenth century. Coin striking continued here into the twentieth century before the building became the presidential seat.

The palace sits between Moneda, Morandé, the Alameda, and Teatinos.

Meehan had landed in Santiago on 13 September 2022, more than a month after the Foggy Bottom oath.

The United States had gone without a confirmed ambassador in Chile for about three and a half years before her arrival.

The letters did not change the building. They changed who could speak for Washington inside it.

The embassy photographs are works of a State Department office and sit in the public domain on Wikimedia Commons.

The palace facade on Plaza de la Constitución is the public face of the pin.

The inner hall used that Friday is a working state room, not a tourist circuit on every day of the week.

Photo: Office of the U.S. Ambassador to Chile, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons