Jennifer Webb Jones: forty-six years in the same consulate

On Monday 17 August, at the Consulate General of Chile in Sydney, Foreign Minister Francisco Pérez Mackenna decorated Jennifer Webb Jones with the Order of Merit Bernardo O’Higgins. The reason: forty-six years working in that same consular office.

The figure is worth pausing on. Forty-six years span more than a dozen Chilean governments, several generations of consuls who arrived and left, and a Chilean community in Australia whose make-up changed completely in the meantime. She stayed.

“She is a person loved and respected across the board by the Chilean community,” the minister said. “Jennifer has built trust and respect across the board, becoming a true meeting point for our community. Her career is marked by four words: loyalty, commitment, professionalism and love for Chile.”

What a consulate actually does

The stated purpose of the minister’s visit was to recognise the staff’s work assisting Chileans abroad. That phrase, in Foreign Ministry language, covers a trade almost nobody knows about until they need it.

A consulate is not a small embassy. An embassy represents one state before another: it negotiates, reports, conducts policy. A consulate attends to people. It renews passports and identity cards, registers the births of Chilean children born abroad, legalises documents, records marriages and deaths, guides those who have lost everything, visits those who end up in detention, and helps repatriate those who die far from home.

It is administrative work until it stops being administrative. And at that moment, whoever stands on the other side of the counter matters more than any treaty.

Why staying put is an asset

In diplomacy, consuls rotate. It is by design: a career officer spends three or four years in a posting and moves on. That rotation makes sense, since it prevents local capture and circulates experience.

But it also means the memory of a consular office does not live in its head of mission. It lives with the local staff, who do stay. Knowing how to push a difficult case through the Australian authorities, who can be relied on within the community, what happened the last time there was an emergency: none of that is in a manual. It is in a person.

Forty-six years are exactly that. Beyond the protocol, the decoration recognises a function the organisation chart does not show.

The Order of Merit

The Order of Merit Bernardo O’Higgins is the distinction the Chilean state confers on those who render outstanding service to the country, and it usually goes to foreign officials and public figures. Awarding it to a consular staff member for length of service and work with the community moves it away from its customary use.

Chile maintains consulates general, consulates and consular sections in dozens of cities. In each there is someone like Jennifer Webb Jones, though they almost never appear in press releases. This is the rare case where one did.

Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile.