Farewell to Ambassador Issa Kort of Chile

Thank you, Mr. Chair,

With the leave of our regional coordinator, Ambassador Roquebert of Panama, I wish to make this statement in my individual capacity:

Dear Ambassador and friend Issa Kort,

Today a valuable and fruitful stage of your professional and political life comes to an end. From your arrival in this Permanent Council, and from the time you visited us at our Mission, I had the honor of building with you an ever stronger relationship of professional respect, cooperation and friendship, which I believe was of great benefit to relations between our countries and to the work of our Organization.

I express my sadness, because someone of great worth is leaving, one who, despite the short time he spent in his post, is a worthy representative of Chile who joined at once in the urgent tasks of the Organization, with maturity, enthusiasm, unequalled energy and a singular creative curiosity. Your shrewdness, superior intelligence, capacity for abstraction, refined manner and intellectual honesty quickly set you apart; your performance has been a lesson to many of us.

You, Ambassador Kort, have always very actively represented the best interests of your country before our Organization, and the principles and values that unite us. In these months you achieved a great deal for your country, intelligently and diligently working to place and keep on the hemispheric agenda the conversation about matters indispensable to maintaining in our countries the rule of law and democracy, respect for human rights and freedom of expression, to mention only a few.

Ambassador Issa Kort, today we are not saying goodbye; it is simply a “see you soon”! I will miss our meetings, where we talked about the history of Chile, about your Rancagua, about the course of recent events in our region and the world, and where I always learned something. In our frequent encounters I met extraordinary people through you; thank you for that.

Our singular rapport may have to do with the fact that we are contemporaries: we were born in the same year, though you one day after me. So with your departure you leave me once again the youngest permanent representative in this Council. I will keep pushing; that is my part. But it is not only age that brings us close; it is a pragmatic and agile outlook in the face of adversity and challenges, a common interest in the collective well-being, and a passion for history.

On behalf of my delegation, I wish to express to you all our appreciation and gratitude for your great work on behalf of the OAS, and to wish you every success in your political, professional and personal life, and good health and well-being with your family and loved ones.

You have left many friends here, and I thank you for the privilege of being one of them.

See you soon, Ambassador Issa Kort!