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.
TONY GARZA, AWAY FROM HIS MARBLE residence in Mexico City, was learning about the "migration problem." He strolled through the plaza in the little town of Altar, Sonora, and observed the men gathered everywhere. There were several hundred of them—dark-skinned, moonfaced men who had made their way here from throughout Mexico in worn-out tennis shoes. They carried their lives in small backpacks. Their hair stood up like it hadn't seen water for days. Some of them wore knit caps and layers of sweatshirts and fleece jackets because they'd heard that at night the northern Mexican desert was freezing. The Mexican consul general traveling with Garza told him that this was where the migrants connected with the drivers who would shuttle them to Sásabe, which sits right on the border with Arizona some fifty miles down an unmarked dirt road. There they'd meet up with the polleros, their walking guides, and hit the trails into the mountains, dodging Mexican thieves, border cops, and scorpions as they went. In the serenity of this cold January afternoon, a few of the migrants disappeared into the old stucco church to say a last prayer, while groups of bright-eyed children purchased their own bottled water and snacks for the journey, which they carried in white plastic bags that hung from their hands like wilted flowers.
Garza, who is 45, stood in sharp contrast to them. He was tall, handsome, güero, americano. They had no idea that he was the United States ambassador, of course—that he was, in fact, the most important diplomat in Mexico. Nor did they know that three weeks before, he'd stood in Washington beside his close friend George W. Bush, the president of the United States, and watched him announce a sweeping new proposal for immigration reform. The plan, Bush had said, would acknowledge that the U.S. critically needs Mexican laborers to function. It would provide work permits for those who agreed to return to their countries after a yet-to-be-determined period. It would institutionalize legal, safe, orderly migration.
The discourse had excited the ambassador, who even before he'd taken office had insisted that immigration was the most important issue facing the U.S. Indeed, the timing had once seemed perfect for putting his own stamp on the subject. Bush had begun his presidency, in 2001, as a man whose vision was set south—who believed, like Garza, that Mexico was the country that most influenced the day-to-day life of the United States. And Garza, whom some observers view as a future Republican candidate for governor, seemed just the man to help usher in the new era of "convergence" that he felt was dawning nearly a decade after NAFTA. Think about it, Garza would say excitedly in conversations. The Latino story is written every day in the U.S., and the new age of democracy and change is written all the time in Mexico. He felt with conviction that the two countries needed to transition from being distant neighbors to strategic partners; their challenge would be figuring out how to manage the vast movement of labor north and the movement of capital south.
But during Garza's first year in office, any rumblings about the need for migration accords had faded into echoes. September 11 had shifted the administration's gaze to the Middle East, and after assuming his post, in November 2002, the ambassador was consumed with persuading the Mexicans to support a war. To the Bush administration, Mexico suddenly looked less like a migration partner and more like a key vote on the United Nations Security Council. Garza found himself finessing conversations at the highest levels of government to get that vote, and he failed soundly. He was working in a pacifist nation with a historic grudge against what it perceives as the United States' penchant for telling others what to do. Less than six months into his new job, any talk about how the U.S.-Mexico relationship needed to change had ended in silence. And at least some observers posited that Garza was the right ambassador, but for a time that had already passed.
Garza is an optimist, however. He's sophisticated but simple, philosophical but practical. Bush's January announcement on immigration, coming after a year of paralysis, had at least brought the issue back to the table. Which is why, on this day, the ambassador was on the border, observing the "migration problem" firsthand—and witnessing how the grand rhetoric of neoliberalism and globalism can sometimes be deflated by the weight of broken spirits. No dollar dreams could have prepared the migrants for the austereness of the border, this part of their country that felt so strange and foreign. Garza watched as members of Grupo Beta, a federal Mexican border rescue team in hazard-orange jackets, stopped each of the shuttles on their way to Sásabe and made everyone get out for a lecture. Their litany of warnings would have been enough to dissuade some of the most tough-minded American campers: If a Border Patrol agent catches you, they explained, don't resist, or he could use excessive force. If you get lost, start a fire so that someone will spot you. Beware of the scorpions and the tarantulas and the centipedes. If you don't have grooves in your soles, you're wearing the wrong shoes. If you don't take at least three liters of water with you, there's a good chance you won't make it through all three days of the trek. Don't let your guide abandon you for anything, even if he says he's just going to the bathroom. The men listened silently with their heads cocked, feigning defiance. The women clutched their children by the shoulders and stared terrified at their inappropriate shoes. But none of them turned around.
One of the women was carrying a small bundle, and when the ambassador's staff noticed that it was a baby, they gasped and went to coo over her. Juliana—the baby's mother said with the hesitancy of someone revealing nuclear secrets—was only four months old. Garza reached out to touch her, and Juliana latched on to his index finger and refused to let go. The group laughed nervously. The baby clenched. When the Beta agent was finished with his lecture, the mother finally shook the baby's tiny hand off of Garza's finger and climbed back into the van, which lurched forward and vanished into the desert. The ambassador's team boarded their white sport utility vehicles and followed, driving the same road that scenes from the movie Traffic had been filmed on.
That night, Garza slept at the Tubac Golf Resort, near Tucson, where another movie, Tin Cup, had been made. But he didn't immediately fall asleep. As his fireplace crackled, the ambassador wondered whether Juliana had clenched his finger out of fear, out of some kind of intuition about what lay before her. He wondered how far she'd made it by then, where she was spending that frigid night.
IT SURE IS DIFFERENT COMING down to Mexico as ambassador," Garza once told a group of American consulate employees. "The food is better. The drinks come quicker." It was meant to be a joke, but there was a great amount of truth to it. To be an ambassador is to have everyone stand anytime you enter a room and remain standing until you take a seat or instruct them to do otherwise. It's counting on an impeccably punctual staff and being escorted to the bathroom by a bodyguard. To be an ambassador is to see lunch and "free time" on trips get measured in increments of ten minutes, and to have motorcycle cops block intersections well before your armored vehicle pulls up to them. It's being handed by seven-thirty in the morning a blue folder with all of the previous day's press coverage of you.
After Bush's election, in 2000, the press speculated that Garza, a former Texas Secretary of State and railroad commissioner, was in line for a Cabinet position, possibly to head the Department of Energy. But he says that the ambassador's post was the one appointment he wanted. "It's really the only thing that I think I knew I'd leave Texas for," he says. An avid reader, Garza is familiar with everything from American popular culture to Gabriel García Márquez's novels. He has a pronounced nose that tilts slightly to the right and fair skin that accents his brown hair and eyes. He is exceedingly charming and quick-witted. He laughs at his own jokes. He uses words like "tactile" and "magnanimous" in conversation, and his staff, who seem to glow in his presence, call him Top Gun and Big Guy.
There are ambassadors who are career foreign service workers and then there are ambassadors like Garza, who are appointed by the president to handle politically important or sensitive countries. Mexico is the largest non-military American diplomatic mission in the world, with 1,700 employees nationwide and 35 government agencies. It's also a job that comes with the messy complications of history and the high expectations of a citizenry that feels that the United States forgets about its dependence on Mexico and treats the country as its own backyard. "If he expresses an opinion about Mexico, the people jump all over him," Magdalena Carral Cuevas, the commissioner for Mexico's National Migration Institute, said of the ambassador. "And if he doesn't, we provoke him so that he'll emit a position. So it's a very delicate role he plays, and I think that up to now he has demonstrated intelligence in managing the relationship."
In fact, the U.S.-Mexico relationship constitutes a whole field of academic study, with majors and experts and libraries. As ambassador, Garza has access to the best sources—the very politicians, intellectuals, and artists who are shaping the Mexican and binational agendas. One morning he'll have breakfast at his residence with former Mexican Fulbright scholars who went on to serve in the Cabinets of presidents; the next day it might be a group of journalists or historians or members of the Foreign Ministry. "That's the neat part about this job," he told me as we snaked through Mexico City's traffic-clogged streets in a spanking-new Cadillac. His curiosity is the one attribute that Mexicans most credit Garza with: In his eagerness to learn, he shatters the stereotype of the Ugly American. All of the Mexican government officials I spoke with also consistently complimented his humility, his accessibility, and his concern for the human cost of public policy.
My Library
