Ambassador Visit Marks Chile Chamber’s Revival

Chile’s ambassador to the United States visited Atlanta to mark the revival of a long-dormant organization focused on drumming up business between the Southeast U.S. and the South American nation.

Representatives from some of Chile’s largest companies joined a business roundtable with Ambassador Juan Gabriel Valdés and multiple Chilean government organizations at the Metro Atlanta Chamber April 23.

Mr. Valdés, serving for a second time as ambassador in Washington, was on hand to witness a signing of an agreement between the two chambers heralding a new era of cooperation.

The ambassador commended the assembled group, a powerhouse crew representing of some of Chile’s most recognizable multinational firms, for its desire to promote the country the year after celebrating the bicentennial of Chile-U.S. relations.

The executives on hand expressed enthusiasm at the prospect of reviving the Chilean-American Chamber of Commerce of the South.

“We feel that we are a little behind in terms of promotion of the beauty of our country,” said Horacio Fuentes, a wine importer at Ventisquero Wine Estates who will help lead the chamber. “Definitely, we need to catch up.”

More than a decade ago, Chile operated a ProChile trade office in Atlanta, but since its closing, the country’s formal presence here has been solely through Honorary Consul Erika Monckeberg, who was present for the meeting.

Georgia, meanwhile, has operated a trade office in Chile for more than 15 years, and Delta Air Lines has long flown nonstop from Atlanta to Santiago, the capital. The aviation links were bolstered when Delta and LATAM Airlines, formed from a combination of Chilean and Brazilian airlines in 2012, set up a joint venture approved in 2022.

Chile, a country of about 20 million people along South America’s Pacific Coast, has steadily embraced open trade, leading the charge among Latin American nations in setting up a free-trade agreement with the United States that entered into force in 2004.

Since then, the country has become a major supplier of agricultural products to the U.S. like grapes and avocados, complementing offseason in the Northern Hemisphere.

Chile is also the world’s top copper producer, and its section of the Atacama Desert holds the some of the largest lithium reserves in the world, making it an indispensable player in the global clean-energy transition.

Mr. Fuentes said the chamber’s board of directors will be sourced from companies that have carved out a Chilean enclave in Dunwoody.

The four headquarters include forestry, pulp and paper firm CMPC, plywood and molding supplier Arauco, lithium and chemical producer SQM, and protein exporter AgroSuper, each of which sent a representative to the roundtable. Combined, the firms have invested more than $3 billion and employ more than 1,500 people in the U.S., Mr. Fuentes said.

As roundtable participants gave introductions, attendees learned that Arauco has invested more than a billion dollars in United States, and that CMPC in 2023 acquired two mills in Kentucky and is poised to invest further in the Southeast U.S. For CMPC, the U.S. market produces $530 million in revenues, 40 percent of which comes from timber.

Also around the table were the agricultural office of the Chilean embassy, Invest Chile and ProChile, the trade promotion agency now with its closest office in Miami.

Atlanta companies at the event included Eskuad, a startup founded by a Chilean that recently won a grant through the Atlantic Metro Export Challenge, and Edge Solutions, an Alpharetta-based tech firm that has been sourcing talent across Latin America and is looking into doing so in Chile. Other local institutions represented included the Georgia Department of Economic Development and Georgia Tech.

The Chilean signing was the latest in a string of South American engagements for the Metro Atlanta Chamber, coming just a week after hosting a delegation of software firms from Argentina and after John Woodward, vice president of global commerce, recently visited Brazil on a SelectUSA roadshow. The chamber also last month held a similar roundtable with the trade commissioner of Spain visiting from Miami.