In the sunken living room in the house in Atascadero, where he and his wife, Muriel, have lived for over 35 years, the Colonel waits at a small wooden table topped with glass, an additional chair directly opposite him.

His face seems more relaxed than it has for years, and the smile of greeting that lights it makes him seem, momentarily, as youthful as the image of a young man in a fighter plane that is mounted, along with other images commemorating the Colonel's life, on a posterboard to the left of the desk.

Colonel Philip J. Maher retired in February as U.S. Consular Agent in San Miguel de Allende after 22 years of service. This was his third career. He joined the Air Force when he was a sophomore in college, a pre-med student, to fly fighter-pilot missions over Saipan and Iwo Jima during World War II. After the war, he was involved in military research and development: among other things, ejection seats for airplanes and-as Pentagon staff-in the development of the U2 surveillance plane. In 1964 he left the military, and the East Coast, for a six-year stint as president of two subsidiary companies to a shipping operation in Los Angeles.

The Mahers moved to San Miguel in 1970 after briefly living in Guadalajara. In 1983, the Colonel was taken to lunch by the then-consul general of Mexico and asked if he would accept the job of Consular Agent for the states of Guanajuato, Michoacán, and the City of Querétaro. Colonel Maher can't remember now whether or not he consulted Muriel about the decision-only that he said "yes."



"I had been in San Miguel for 13 years, and I was tired of just hanging out: playing golf and the other things I'd been doing. I was the president of the Biblioteca Pública for awhile; served more than two terms as treasurer of the golf club; taught English at a school. I was tired of volunteer work and all the chit-chat.

"John Negroponte (currently U.S. National Intelligence Director), who was in the diplomatic corps in Honduras then, told me that half of my job would be to protect Americans from themselves. He was right. People do dumb things. They get themselves in jail; they get involved in fraud; they get crossways with Mexican law; they get sick and die; they kill other people; they steal.

"The job is a people job, and although I had to learn to have a lot more patience than I'd ever had before, that has been the satisfying part-helping people. Two of my three careers were about service: being in the military and being consular agent.

"The most satisfying thing I've done here is rescue kidnapped children. Usually it's about custody issues. Once I had to go out into the countryside to get three children who were ten years old and younger. The mom was a U.S. citizen and she had custody. The father was Mexican and he smuggled the kids out of the States, took them to his mother, then abandoned them. It went smoothly-the grandmother had no idea what had happened. Generally, people never gave me trouble. I never went out on a mission like this alone, though. If I thought there were going to be problems, I asked someone to go with me-preferably someone large. I never carried a gun with me, although I own one, and belong to a shooting club.

"I've rescued any number of teenaged girls who got themselves into difficult situations. They came to Mexico with delusions about what it would be like to live on a hacienda. Some guy cons the girl into coming home with him, but there are three brothers there to wait on, too, and it's a ranchito, not a hacienda. She ends up getting pregnant and wants to go home. Usually it's the girl's mother, back in the States, who contacts me and asks me to get her daughter out of the situation.

"The hardest thing to see was pregnant teenaged girls in jail. In one case, a girl of 17 was riding in a car that was stopped by the federales. There was marijuana in the trunk. If she had been a year younger, she'd have been tried as a juvenile. But she didn't luck out that way. The system here says, 'prove to us you are innocent.' She couldn't, so she was sentenced to five years in a Mexican jail. She got pregnant in jail. Eventually she was returned to the U.S., but it was a sad situation.

"Muriel has always been a full partner in this enterprise. She visited people in jail. Jail life is very, very hard in Mexico and in most underprivileged countries. Prisoners are barely kept alive; given a minimum amount of food, and certainly none of the things that we might think of as necessities. Muriel collected extra food, shampoo, toilet paper, blankets, toothbrushes, clothes. Now prisoners are given uniforms to wear, but earlier they had no clothes but what they wore into prison.

"A little while ago, the Embassy in Mexico City sent Muriel a silk flower bouquet with a note that said, 'Thanks for loaning us Phil for 20 years!' But she was part of everything. After awhile we worked out a system where Muriel worked as a screener. She answered the phone at home and told people to come into the office during office hours. Often it was people calling me at nine p.m. on Sunday night saying they'd lost their passports. What was I supposed to do for them at nine p.m. on a Sunday night? 

In this job you have to learn to say 'Um-hum. Um-hum, really? How did that happen?'

"I've only been threatened by one person, but he threatened me three different times. First he was going to kill me, then he was going to blow up my house, then he was going to rape Muriel. We kept some extra people with us during those times.

"U.S. expatriates have a lot of misconceptions about Mexican law. Really U.S. law and Mexican law are alike. If you rob a bank or commit murder, it's a felony. If you buy a car or get married, it's a contract. What's different in Mexico is the process. U.S. citizens have the protection of Mexican law and its constitution. And Mexico and the United States have signed international compacts to uphold each other's laws and contracts: The Hague Convention, for example.

"Oh, there are a lot of 'cocktail lawyers' out there who will tell you otherwise. You hear people saying the craziest things, for example that you must have a Mexican will if you own property here or your property could be taken away. Not true! A U.S. will is valid and enforceable in Mexico. Having a U.S. will does not necessarily slow down the process of probate, as many people are told by entities who simply do not know international law. And sometimes two separate wills can get in the way of each other.

"People are told that contracts written in English here are not valid. Not true! Property can be bought and sold, and if the contract specifies that the deal is made according to the laws of a specific state in the U.S., then the contract dispute can be heard in that state and Mexico will uphold the decision.

"There are seemingly legitimate people in this town making money by playing on people's fears, or just by giving out bad advice. I was told about one outfit that erroneously convinced a married couple that the property they were buying could only be in one party's name. They put it in the wife's name. Guess what happened when they got divorced?

"There have been a lot of changes in San Miguel over the 36 years I've been here. More people. The lines have gotten longer at the consular agency office. But it has meant more fees. Our office has been one of the few that is entirely self-supporting.

"We have approximately the same mix of population as any other city this size: about the same amount of retirees, working people, those just scraping by, and ne'er-do-wells. You hear a lot of different figures about the number of U.S. expatriates living here, but it's actually between four and five thousand residents. I've enjoyed being of service to them. 

I advised the Embassy in September 2003 that I wanted to retire. I told them I would stay on, though, until they found a replacement. That process dragged on-a bit of 'dawdling' on their parts, I think. Finally, in February, I told them that I had back problems and just couldn't do the job anymore. The new consular agent for San Miguel de Allende has now been nominated and is awaiting State Department clearance. He may be on by April.

"Muriel has been teaching me to play bridge. I've been reading a lot, and there are still left-over consular agency situations to clear up. The Embassy in Mexico City still calls from time to time for advice. It will be at least April until I can fully say goodbye to this job. Then I guess I can relax, but the problem is, I don't know what constitutes relaxation.

"I don't think I will start a fourth career."

Grateful community thanks Colonel Maher
By Sue Reid


Friends and residents of San Miguel de Allende wish to pay tribute to a man who has devoted his retirement life to the citizens of Mexico and the Americans he represented. Col. Phillip Maher was our consular agent in San Miguel for over 20 years, and we all owe him a great deal of appreciation for his tireless work and professional ability to serve his country and the expats of this city.

Maher was born in 1922 in New York City. He was a pre-med student at Queens College in New York at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He became an aviation cadet in the Army Air Corps. In 1942 he was sent to Hawaii after finishing his flight training. He went to Saipan and on to Iwo Jima, where he stayed until the end of World War II.

In August 1945, a week after returning home, he married his childhood sweetheart, Muriel. They were stationed at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, for six years, and this is where their children, Kathy and Tom, were born. Colonel Maher was in the Air Force for the next 22 years. He worked in research and development and engaged in such projects as developing ejection seats for aircraft and the first flight suits for astronauts. He also did work on captured U-2 rockets that eventually led to space flight.

Maher spent the following 13 years in Washington, DC, managing research and development programs. He was detailed to work with the CIA on the U2 spy plane. 

After 22 years, he retired from the Air Force and joined the ARO Corporation as president of their subsidiaries in Buffalo, New York and Los Angeles. When he retired from the ARO, he and his wife traveled in Mexico to find a place they wanted to live. In 1970, while staying in nearby Querétaro, they drove to San Miguel de Allende to spend the night. A chance encounter with the since-deceased Guy Scheele led them to fall in love with the city and community, and they moved here permanently. For the next 15 years Phil played golf, hunted with friends and taught English to children. One of those young children was Paula Ramírez, who later in life would be his secretary.

During that time Phil was president of the Biblioteca Pública for more than two terms, co-founder of the San Miguel Educational Foundation and instrumental in the start of the newspaper Atención. Years later, he became one of the founders of Hospital de la Fe.

In 1983, after a number of disturbing monetary devaluations, the Consul General from Guadalajara called a town meeting of the Americans living in San Miguel.

The Consul General persuaded Phil to become an unpaid consular representative to the community and to keep him informed of developments.

On July 4, 1985, Phil was commissioned to be the first consular agent in San Miguel with responsibility for the states of Guanajuato and Michoacán. He thus became the tenth consular agent in all of Mexico-there were only 29 throughout the world. Currently there are 50 consular agents who serve Americans abroad.

The services provided by a consular agency are what one would normally expect: passport applications, birth registration, deaths and estate notary services, among others. We all know, though, how many other duties Phil performed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There was a time when he would personally take their passports to the Americans when they arrived, but as the city grew so did his responsibilities. 

To quote his wife, Muriel, "What has made what sounds like a rather routine job into a fascinating and rewarding experience has been the unexpected." Phil has dealt with murders, wanted fugitives located and apprehended in the area, psychotics who have had to be sent to facilities in the United States, the homeless and destitute, medical emergencies, locating and rescuing kidnapped children and runaway adolescents, as well as a plethora of pregnant teenaged girls wanting to return home. He has visited, at least three times a year, as many as 29 American citizens in nine different jails throughout the area, one of whom became pregnant in jail and gave birth to a baby girl. 

There are so many stories about Maher's kindness and complete calmness in often stressful situations, and his devotion to his duties, that the people of San Miguel de Allende would be amazed what these more than 20 years have involved. He has often been the only person to tell loved ones of deaths, protect the deceased's property until the next of kin could arrive and be of comfort to the survivors. 

With his wonderful wife and life partner at his side, we have indeed been a fortunate community to have this man represent our lives in Mexico. His daughter, Kathy, is a professor of nutrition at Cornell University, and his son Tom is a professional photographer. Their grandson, Jeffrey Rasmussen, is a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington in Seattle.

The importance of minor parties
By John Barham


Of the approximately 18 political parties in Mexico, there are 6 certified parties that are recognized nationally, owing to their success in winning at least 2 percent of the national vote in the 2003 midterm elections and, consequently, having representation in Congress.

The nationally recognized parties are 1) PAN, or National Action Party; 2) PRI, or Institutional Revolutionary Party; 3) PRD, or Democratic Revolutionary Party; 4) PT, or Labor Party; 5) PVEM, or Green Ecological Party of Mexico; and 6) Convergencia, or Convergence Party.

In earlier columns I traced the history and development of the PAN, PRI and PRD. However, to understand Mexican politics in 2006, it is requisite to have some knowledge of the three nationally recognized minor parties and the important role they might play in the July 2 voting.

The PT (Labor Party)

The Labor Party dates from 1990. In the elections of 1991, it garnered only about 270,000 votes. By 1994, however, it drew nearly 1,000,000 votes. Since 1994, the PT has regularly elected deputies to Congress and, in the midterm elections of 2003, it won one seat in the Senate.

Lately, the PT has been a force in municipal elections throughout Mexico, and in alliance with other parties, it has managed to share power through several coalition state governments.

Since 1994, the PT has adhered basically to the same political platform, which has called for limitations on presidential power, more autonomy for the states, better wages for farmers and workers and the right of workers to bargain collectively and to strike. Environmentally, it has stressed the need for ecologically sensitive legislation and has come out strongly against nuclear-generated electricity. Additionally, the PT has favored increased support of elementary, secondary and higher education; total equality between men and women and increased efforts to recognize the rights of all indigenous groups. As a social democratic party, it has called for more controls on large industrial conglomerates and the type of speculative capitalism that the PT associates with the loss of jobs and the massive closing of companies.

Hoping to gain influence, and possibly cabinet seats, in the government of a new president and finding the platform of the PRD ideologically acceptable, the PT has thrown its support for 2006 to the presidential candidacy of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The PVEM (Green Ecological Party of Mexico)

The PVEM traces its origin to the late 1970s and the 1980s, when the efforts of residents of colonias around Mexico City to achieve green space and playgrounds for children led them to organize into what would eventually become the National Ecological Alliance.

From this group would emerge two politically oriented groups, the Partido Verde Mexicano and the Partido Ecologista de Mexico, which by 1991 merged and formed the PVEM.

The PVEM has articulated principles that integrate the concept of stewardship of the earth with equal rights and opportunities in health, housing, education, employment and recreation. Its view of justice is based on the abstract notion of understanding the place of human beings in the scope of the total environment, stressing that economic development must be compatible with nature and its preservation. Rather than relying on means of production that would spoil the environment, the PVEM stresses that governmental efforts should be undertaken to develop technologies that would elevate the human condition while maintaining balance within the natural environment and promoting a democratic culture.

In the presidential election of 2000, the PVEM joined with the PAN in the Alliance for Change; however, shortly after Vicente Fox began his presidency and when the party received no cabinet posts, the alliance fell apart. Subsequently, owing to charges of fraud and electoral irregularities, the party's support has declined.

Also negatively affecting the PVEM is its control by a single family. In 1991, when it was first registered as a political party, an academic and former civil servant, Jorge González Torres, became its first president. He was later followed as president of the party by his son, Jorge Emilio González Martínez, who is also a member of the Senate. A 2003 court ruling found that the PVEM had run afoul of the constitution, inasmuch as the González family had consistently picked all party functionaries and had also chosen those who would run for office under the banner of the PVEM.

For 2006, the PVEM has allied itself with the PRI, which recent polls show lagging in voter support. If the polls are accurate, it is possible that the PVEM will be even more disappointed in its showing this year than it was in 2000.

Convergencia (Convergence)

Originally called Convergencia por la Democracia, or Convergence for Democracy, the party was begun in 1977 and was officially registered in 1999. It fielded candidates for office in the election of 2000, during which it supported the presidential candidacy of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas.

In the midterm elections of 2000, Convergence gained 2.3 percent of the vote, which translated into five seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Party members also govern 28 municipalities throughout Mexico.

Describing itself as a social democratic party, Convergence advocates the restraint of capitalism in favor of small business, workers and consumers. It also has come out in support of measures to preserve the environment and to provide a strong cradle-to-grave system of social security.

Like the PT, Convergence is supporting the presidential candidacy of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, finding his stands on increased aid for the poor, the elderly and the disabled, and his disdain for economic globalization, to be compatible with the principles expressed in the party's platform.

Importance of Minor Parties in 2006

In 2006, Mexico finds itself at a historical turning point. Owing to political stalemate, key issues relating to labor, trade, immigration, the loss of jobs and the lack of economic growth have not been adequately dealt with. In large part, the failure to meet these compelling challenges of the early 21st century has been due to a lack of general agreement among the major parties as to what the goals of government should be.

In such a setting, the minor parties could very well play a decisive role by 1) determining the outcome in a closely contested election and 2) providing the equilibrium that could impart stability to the political process through responsible stands on the issues. Such balance is essential if the nation is to capitalize on its opportunity to create a truly democratic society in post-PRI Mexico.



John Barham, who has been visiting San Miguel de Allende for more than 18 years, has served as an associate professor of history, dean and provost in colleges and universities in Alabama, Texas, Saudi Arabia and New York. He is presently superintendent of the University of Missouri Forest and is eagerly anticipating retirement in San Miguel in the very near future.