January 05, 2007, Ex-Consular Agent Philip J. Maher remembered, A man for all seasons: Consular Agent Philip J. Maher retires after 22 years, By Eva Hunter, Grateful community thanks Colonel Maher, By Sue Reid

Rev. Michael Long officiating

Saturday, January 6, 11am

Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe Panteón (Camino Viejo al Panteón, past Hotel Real de Minas)

Coffee and cake served at St. Paul’s Church

Colonel Phillip Maher passed away on Saturday, December 23, following a long illness. We are reprinting two articles from past issues of Atención that highlight Colonel Maher and his many contributions to the expat community. Readers are invited to send their remembrances to edit@atencionsanmiguel.org by Monday, January 15, for inclusion in a future issue.

A man for all seasons: Consular Agent Philip J. Maher retires after 22 years
By Eva Hunter, Atención archives, Mar 31, 2006

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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US, 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.

“US expatriates have a lot of misconceptions about Mexican law. Really US 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. US 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.

Col Philip Maher remembered

Not true! A US will is valid and enforceable in Mexico. Having a US 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 US, 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 US 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.”

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.

After Dayton, Ohio, 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 Corporation, 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 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.

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.