Carlos Pascual yesterday offered rhetorical support for the use of the military in domestic security tasks, and encouraged Mexico not to isolate the army in its tasks. (He was commenting before the death of Arturo Beltrán Leyva in a shootout with Marines.) That comment probably strikes some as an undue interference on domestic policy from a foreign ambassador (and indeed struck me as such at first), but, rightly or wrongly, the use of the Mexican military is a central pillar of the binational drug strategy. As long as that remains the case and the US remains a big sponsor of the Mexican drug strategy, the ambassador has the obligation as well as the right to defend the strategy in broad terms.
Another thing about Pascual: he is the second consecutive Latino to be sent to Mexico, and there has long seemed to exist a vague tendency to fill the ranks of the Western Hemisphere-focused areas of the State Department with people who have Spanish last names. I always wonder how Mexicans (and other nations' citizens) feel about that. I can't imagine they have a greater affinity for Pascual because of his Cuban heritage than they had for Jeff Davidow.
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Actually, the third. Ronald Reagan's Ambassador to Mexico was John Galvin. That was the name he took when he became a Hollywood actor, being born Juan Galván. There was a lot of grumbling about sending a cowboy actor (by a cowboy actor) to Mexico, but Galvin did a credible job considering he had to represent an extremely unpopular U.S. administration. Unlike Tony Garza, Galvin was "polite as a Mexican" in his dealings with high level officials.
Aaa I was familiar with the name but I didn't know he was Mexican. There was another ambassador in the 80s too I think, Julian Nava or something along those lines, that sounded Mexican as well.
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