Chile and the United States wrapped up a second round of talks over Washington's tariff on Chilean exports this week without a deal, a joint statement, or a date for when negotiators will next meet in person, according to Infobae. Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Jeffrey Goettman spent two days at Chile's Foreign Ministry with Paula Estévez, the deputy secretary for international economic relations, in a session that wrapped up even as a separate pressure campaign out of Washington — this one over defense policy and international justice — was already rattling President José Antonio Kast's cabinet. The tariff sits outside the free-trade agreement the two countries have kept in force since 2004, and that mismatch is a big part of why Santiago walked into this round frustrated.
Tuesday's session ran shorter than Monday's opening meeting and produced no public breakthrough. Chile's negotiators are pushing to add more goods to the list already excused from the tariff, hoping to shield salmon, fresh fruit and wine shipments that have absorbed the cost since the surcharge took effect on July 23. The only official who spoke once the in-person talks wrapped was Claudio Alvarado — Kast's interior minister and government spokesman, who is also serving as the administration's point man on the tariff file, per BioBioChile. "We're trying to get the tariff issue back to its original levels," Alvarado said. He added that negotiations will now continue online, on no fixed schedule, ahead of any future face-to-face meeting.
Contrary to the impression that only copper has escaped the levy, roughly 60% of what Chile ships to the U.S. market is already exempt — a list that includes refined copper cathodes, silver, iodine, lithium carbonate, avocados, kiwis and fresh oranges, according to Cooperativa.cl. What's left exposed is the other 40%: salmon, wine, fresh fruit and forestry products, a basket that Infobae reports covers 20 of Chile's 34 largest export lines to the U.S.
The National Agricultural Society's president, Antonio Walker, has put the toll on fresh-fruit shipments at somewhere between $300 million and $400 million, according to CNN Chile, arguing the U.S. is charging Chilean exporters over a trade practice — forced labor — that Chile's own labor standards were built to prevent. "We urgently need to return to zero tariffs," Walker said. Salmon exporters, who ship most of their product to the U.S. market, have separately pressed for their own carve-out from the levy.
While the tariff table produced nothing, a different front of the U.S.-Chile relationship was making noise in Panama. Pete Hegseth — the Pentagon chief now formally titled Secretary of War — used an Aug. 12 gathering of Latin American defense officials to press the region's governments to fold anti-narcotrafficking operations into a broader U.S.-led coalition, lift military budgets, and quit the International Criminal Court, according to El Mostrador. That request runs through a separate arm of the U.S. government from the trade office and isn't formally tied to the tariff negotiation — but the two campaigns are landing in Santiago within days of each other, just as Chile tries to stay close to Washington without giving up its trade ties to China, its largest trading partner.
Chile's defense minister, Fernando Barros, attended the Panama meeting as an observer, and it was a question about Washington's talk of reviving the Monroe Doctrine — not the ICC demand specifically — that drew his sharpest response, according to BioBioChile. "We are not any country's backyard," he said. On the actual request to leave the ICC, Barros was more circumspect, telling local television it wasn't a defense-ministry matter and that other parts of the government would decide. The remark still rattled the coalition: Foreign Minister Francisco Pérez Mackenna, who leads the tariff talks, later said he wouldn't comment on Barros's statements beyond noting the two ministries "are working together."
Pérez Mackenna gave his own answer on the court days later, telling reporters at La Moneda that "we remain members of the ICC," according to La Tercera — effectively ruling out an immediate withdrawal. That's a firmer answer than it might appear next to a separate detail: local reporting also indicates the government has set November — when the U.S. holds its midterm elections — as the deadline for a formal decision on the broader security package Hegseth is pitching, ICC included. In other words, Chile has already said no to leaving the court for now, even as it keeps its options open on the wider security bundle until it sees how much political capital Trump still holds after November.
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This isn't the first flare-up this year. In late July, U.S. Ambassador Brandon Judd called it "very disappointing" that ministers who have nothing to do with the tariff talks — a reference to Barros and Agriculture Minister Jaime Campos — kept criticizing the levy in public, per Diario Financiero. The remark drew criticism from politicians across Chile's spectrum, from the governing coalition to the opposition, according to BioBioChile.
With the tariff talks now moved online and no fixed date to resume in person, and with Chile's answer on the full security package pushed past the U.S. midterms, Kast's government is managing two open fronts at once: protecting exporters from a tariff that has already cost the fruit industry hundreds of millions of dollars, and weighing a security alliance that, by its own defense minister's telling, isn't something Chile has to join wholesale. Neither question has a closing date yet.