Continental Rift
When George W. Bush appointed him U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Brownsville native Tony Garza talked of strengthening our ties to our most important neighbor. Then came Iraq—and his best laid plans became another casualty of war.
(Page 2 of 3)
Although Garza read up significantly on Mexico before moving there, he says that his real classroom was Brownsville, where he was born in 1959, the second of three children. He attended the University of Texas as an undergraduate and was only five years out of Southern Methodist University's law school when, at age 28, he was elected to public office in his hometown. As a county judge for one of the poorest counties in Texas, he worked on policy issues involving wastewater management and international bridges and health centers. But he says the border was a laboratory for what awaited the broader U.S.-Mexico relationship. The economic integration that the two countries are seeing today was already in progress along the international boundary in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Border leaders had to confront challenges that now beset Texas writ large—poor health care, low incomes, and problems in funding public education. In this way, Garza views the ambassador's job in Mexico as a natural extension of his life experiences. "There's that great saying about home, that it's not simply where you're from but who you are," he told me. "And part of what I see myself doing is trying to keep people focused on that sense of possibility between our two countries. That sense of possibility that I grew up just intuitively knowing was special."
His trajectory, however, was shaped profoundly by something of a godfather. In 1988 Garza encountered George W. Bush campaigning in the Rio Grande Valley for his father's presidential bid. Garza invited him to return to the Valley for his swearing-in ceremony as county judge—and, much to his delight, Bush showed up. Two years later Bush accepted another invitation from Garza, this one to help him raise funds for his reelection campaign. It was something the oilman said when he stepped off the plane that sold the county judge on his style: "All right, Garza," he drawled, "let's do battle."
They stayed in touch, and when Bush began entertaining thoughts of running for governor, he included Garza in an intimate group that helped him explore the possibility. One of those conversations took place at a Texas Rangers ball game. "We'd gone beyond just that this was a guy who had supported me and that I liked a lot as a friend," Garza recalled. "And as I watched him talk about the prospect of the campaign—he still hadn't made a decision at that point—I remember thinking, 'This is the guy that I want to see be governor.' I'll never forget it. It was one of those moments." Bush's 1994 victory over the Democratic incumbent, Ann Richards, is now a part of Texas history. Shortly after being elected governor, he made Antonio O. Garza Jr., who was then 35 years old and who had finished a low fourth in the Republican primary for attorney general that year, his first appointment. Garza's new job as Secretary of State made him the chief elections officer; he was also the lead liaison for the governor on Mexican and border issues. Their friendship grew. Their birthdays are a day apart, and every year when July rolled around, Laura Bush threw the governor and the Secretary of State a joint dinner party. Garza became politically popular and began to turn heads as the Republican party's rising Latino star. When the governor campaigned for his reelection four years later, Garza ran for railroad commissioner and won easily, becoming only the second Hispanic elected to a state executive office, after Dan Morales—and the first Hispanic Republican.
Garza is at ease when talking about both his ethnicity and his politics. "Look," he said, "as a partisan, I'd like to see more Latino participation in the Republican party, and I encourage it. I campaign for it. As an ethnic, I think participation in the process period is important. And I think that if you look at the Latino community, we are growing rapidly, we are independent, we are drawn to individuals more than parties. And that's not true of just Latinos. Increasingly, that's the reality of American voters." The son of a filling station owner and a woman who worked her way through college as a young mother, Garza says his political leanings probably have their seeds in his Mexican American family's experiences, which centered on hard work and education. His mother, Lita, introduced him to the world of libraries, and until she died of cancer, when he was thirteen, she always attended his swim meets.
Today his conservatism is a moderate one that hinges on creating opportunity for everyone, through education and limited government. There are even ways in which Garza could be misconstrued as being left-of-center. As railroad commissioner, he advocated stiffening cleanup standards for oil spills, raising fines for oil and gas producers for failing to plug orphaned wells, punishing construction contractors who didn't alert utility companies before excavating, and creating an ethics rule that would have forced commissioners to reveal conflicts of interest when doing commission business. Reminded of this, Garza was quick to couch his seemingly environmentalist and consumer-advocate attitudes in more recognizable conservative terms—through the prism of stewardship and property rights. "I'm pretty comfortable where I am," he said. "I believe in markets. I believe in empowering individuals. I believe in capitalistic systems and respect of personal property rights. It doesn't suggest that I am anti-government. I think government has a responsibility to educate. Public education is one of the things that's fundamental to competitive societies. And so I'm very comfortable in my party."
THE AMBASSADOR IS FOND OF ANALOGIES, and his favorite ones for describing the U.S.-Mexico relationship have to do with friends and flight. When President Vicente Fox took office in December 2000 and Bush followed the next month, the possibility for good relations seemed endless. The two ranchers had known each other when Fox was the governor of Guanajuato and Bush of Texas, and they professed more appreciation for each other's countries than any two leaders ever had. Fox seemed unencumbered by the burden of nationality that had kept his predecessors from fully trusting the U.S. Unlike them, he was publicly concerned about his countrymen who migrated north. And he wasn't just the next president either; Fox was the president who had inspired Mexicans to vote out 71 years of one-party rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) by pledging to usher in a new era of democracy, clean up corruption, and give Mexico a respectable place in the world. For his part, Bush carried a reputation as a politician who recognized the interdependence of the two countries. He had defended the education of the children of the undocumented when California governor Pete Wilson had advocated the opposite, in 1994, and had penned letters to members of Congress encouraging them to support a loan for an economically crippled Mexico that same year. Although some Americans criticized him for it, calling him unworldly, he pronounced at the beginning of his presidency that Mexico was the United States' most important relationship. Only every twelve years do the new American and Mexican presidential administrations coincide, and so when Bush and Fox exchanged abrazos in Mexico on February 16, 2001, and then dined together in the White House on September 4, the meeting of the cowboy bootwearing men made for a buoyant takeoff.
"I don't think they appreciate in Mexico how our psyche changed after 9/11," Garza said, and this is where his analogy applies: "I took my seat in Mexico right when the pilot said, 'Buckle up. We're about to experience some turbulence,'" he's said in his speeches. Garza was sworn in as ambassador to Mexico on November 18, 2002. But only one senator attended his nomination hearing because the rest of the Foreign Relations Committee was receiving briefings about Iraq. The following January, the United States transferred responsibility for immigration to the new Department of Homeland Security. His priority became to persuade Mexico, which the previous year had returned to a seat on the fifteen-member U.N. Security Council for the first time in twenty years, to support the Americans' resolution to enter Iraq by force.
Mexico fiercely resisted the thought of war, however. A poll by one of the country's major daily newspapers found that 80 percent of its citizens opposed supporting the U.S. in Geneva. (Mexico had voted in favor of a U.N. resolution providing immediate unrestricted access to weapons inspectors in Iraq.) As ambassador, Garza remained a loyal soldier to the administration's goal. In late February the papers quoted him suggesting that countries with close relationships had to help each other out in times of difficulty. "There is an old saying that in good times your friends find out who you are; in bad times you find out who your friends are," he said. The Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes shot back, calling Garza a "meddling, inexperienced, and greenhorn" ambassador who "needs to learn." On the other side of the border, President Bush told the Copley News Service that there would be "a certain sense of discipline" in Washington with regard to nations that weren't supportive, while the Economist quoted an unnamed U.S. diplomat who hypothesized that a no vote by Mexico could "stir up feelings" against Mexicans in the United States.
"You have to take a step back and get some sense of the time," Garza suggested to me in retrospect. He said he had first pressed the issue in countless private conversations with Mexican government officials, but, when it had seemed that Fox's position wasn't going to shift, he had had to rely on his judgment to make a more public case. "You have to recognize, I was a new ambassador, so there was no honeymoon per se," he said. "I don't think people knew me very well . . . I think now there's some appreciation for the fact that because I was not a career diplomat, I didn't engage in a lot of 'diplomatese.'"
My Library
