Politics
Affairs of State
In her first year as the mayor of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, Mónica García Velásquez has mastered issues like infrastructure and international trade— but all people want to talk about is her love life.
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For all her precociousness, though, she found herself somewhat at loose ends in 1990—“Feeling a bit restless,” as she put it—when Cavazos Lerma arrived in Nuevo Laredo to set up the local offices of Solidarity, the federal government’s national anti-poverty program. Along with a few fellow students at the University of Tamaulipas, García Velásquez took the bold step of proposing several innovative ways of administering the program. And she struck a nerve. Cavazos Lerma, who has a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, made her the local coordinator of Women in Solidarity. In 1993, after he was elected governor, he put her in charge of Solidarity for all of Nuevo Laredo, a powerful and prestigious post, particularly for a 23-year-old. But García Velásquez quickly demonstrated her ability to get things done—she secured funds for low-cost housing and a new sewer plant, for example—in an agency that, in other hands, had been corrupt and inefficient. None of her predecessors had lasted more than seven months in the job, yet she held on for two and a half years, and throughout her term, the government rated the Nuevo Laredo program number one in the state.
Then, after her surprising nomination as the PRI candidate for mayor—“No one over here knew who the hell she was before it was announced,” remembers Laredo Morning Times managing editor Odie Arambula—word of a love connection with Cavazos Lerma began to surface. The rumor was abetted by the PRI’s notoriously murky, closed-door nominating process, but its persistence can be traced back to its chief proponent: Ninfa Deandar Martínez, the local power broker who owns and publishes Nuevo Laredo’s leading daily newspaper, El Mañana. After putting together a coalition of opposition parties, Ninfa, as she is known, decided to run for mayor pro tem, support the mayoral bid of former mayor Carlos Cantú Rosas, and attack the PRI and its young candidate in the pages of her paper. Cantú Rosas was expected to prevail, especially given the success that opposition parties have had in other border cities, but a surprisingly resilient García Velásquez pulled in 47 percent of the vote and beat him by 15 points.
She may have simply outworked her opponents. For ninety days she toured Nuevo Laredo’s neighborhoods, logging 150 miles on foot and 3,000 by car, meeting some 40,000 people—just about the number of votes she received. “Usually in Nuevo Laredo you have some old guy who shows up at big rallies to talk for twenty minutes and you never see him again,” says Roberto García, a former news director at Laredo’s KVTV, “but Mónica wasn’t afraid to get her shoes dirty.”
As is typical in Mexico, however, the election was far from the end of the story. If anything, Ninfa’s attacks only escalated after her candidate lost. She turned up on the Spanish-language tabloid TV show Ocurrió Así, for instance, to accuse the PRI of corruption and voter fraud, and she granted interviews to Texas papers, including the Houston Chronicle, in which she described García Velásquez as better suited to be a domestic worker, “a pretty maid,” than mayor. Ninfa also published a supposedly incriminating photo of García Velásquez dancing with Cavazos Lerma. Most recently, in October, Ninfa ran a story in El Mañana accusing the mayor of drug addiction (the mayor heatedly denied the charge).
The broadest attacks on the PRI have found many a sympathetic ear, especially in Texas, which regards Mexico’s politics with even more suspicion than its own. “Making that young woman the candidate was a ploy—it was a desperate move by Cavazos Lerma whether or not she’s his girlfriend,” Richard Geissler, the editor of the alternative monthly LareDos, said at the time. “The PRI knew it was losing control of the northern cities, so it picked someone to deliver the youth vote and the female vote at once. It turned out to be a stroke of genius, but it’s still the same old PRI. Sure, Mónica seems nice and smart, but she’ll be their puppet before long.”
Despite the attacks, however, the voices of the mayor’s admirers are beginning to drown out those of her critics. Rumors about her love life persist, but they are at least more tame: The latest gossip—true, it turns out—has it that her boyfriend is a young PRI official who accompanied her on a trip to Washington, D.C., where she discussed border issues with U.S. senator Phil Gramm. “Maybe it’s partly a result of her youth,” says Laredo city councilman Alfonso Casso, “but Mónica is not hung up on the old rivalries. She understands we’re not two cities but one: los dos Laredos.” Casso noticed that even the metaphors García Velásquez used in dealing with the Bridge to Nowhere dispute tip off her modern worldview. “She explained to the people of Tamaulipas and Nuevo León that one of them has the hardware—meaning the bridge—and the other the software—the customs brokers—so they need to work together. I liked that.”
The mayor’s growth as a public official was on display when I accompanied her on one of her weekly visits to the colonias of Nuevo Laredo, where she listens to the concerns of the people in a kind of open forum. Her destination that day was lower-middle-class Colonia Mirador. With the dignitaries gathered under a tent on a cleared lot, local officials voiced their concerns: a dangerous intersection by the entrance to the grade school, leaky water mains, potholes the size of taco stands. As they spoke, a few young girls slipped under the back of the tent to be near García Velásquez. One touched her dress while another squeezed her ankle. She smiled, bent down, and gave each of them a hug. Then, when it was her turn to talk, she responded to each of the requests without looking at her notes. She would take care of the school-crossing problem immediately, she promised; the water mains would be fixed. (The potholes? Well, Nuevo Laredo can’t be rebuilt in a day.) The crowd murmured in assent, attesting to her credibility.
But what of the future? Mexican mayors are not allowed to serve consecutive terms and often find themselves strapped for pesos and short of power in Mexico’s highly centralized political system. “You have to ask yourself who would want to be mayor of Nuevo Laredo,” says Odie Arambula. “You have most of the people living in shacks, serious infrastructure problems. Plus, you’re caught in a squeeze between what Mexico City wants, U.S. federal agencies, and Texas politics. Then you have to deal with the drug lords. Really, who would want that job?”
As Mónica García Velásquez walked the streets of Colonia Mirador—stopping for tacos de picadillo at a local stand, patting the adoring young girls who followed her around, walking so briskly at times that her entourage gasped to keep up with her—it appeared that this young woman, at least, wants it. And it appeared, finally, that Nuevo Laredo wants her. As we passed one of the many walls in the city adorned with PRI symbols and the words “Mónica García Velásquez” in green and red, we noticed, as usual, that the party’s insignia had been defaced. The mayor’s good name, however, had not been touched.
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