QUILANTAN BECOMING MOST DESPISED BY FELLOW MEXICANS

By Juan Montoya

Local Mexican consul Rodolfo Arenas Quilantan is fast becoming the most despised man in South Texas and northern Mexico if one is to believe the sharp criticisms of his performance in Mexican dailies and news columns.

In the latest outrage reported against this this "Mexican who hates his race" is accused in the local Matamoros news magazine "Vertical" with unilaterally acting to remove a Matamoros resident being kept alive in a Brownsville hospital with life-support systems without even telling his relatives or his doctors he would be transferring him to Mexico.

Quilantan, who has raised the ire of many locals with his imperious style and abrasive relationship with news representatives, is reported to have ordered the removal of the late Jaime Villanueva from Valley Baptist and to have him deported to Matamoros. He is also reported to have asked the City of Matamoros to allow one of their ambulances with the DIF to carry out the deportation unbeknownst to his relatives. Villanueva was a well-known city administrator under a former PRI mayor.

In the past, he has ignored pleadings by local Mexican  officials that he take more effective actions to assure that the massive deportations of Mexicans by U.S. authorities be carried out humanely and within the parameters of treaties between both countries. 

Some have asked him to place banners with the telephone numbers fo the consulate in Brownsville to assist Mexicans who run into problems while in the United States without effect.

In this case, however, Quilantan is said to have personally ordered that Villanueva be transferred to the General Hospital in Matamoros from where he was originally treated for his illness before he was taken to Monterrey, back to Matamoros, and then to Brownsville for treatment. Sending him back to Matamoros amounted to a death sentence, claims writer Vicente Guzman.

"Next day, when Orquieda (his wife) went to (Valley Baptist) to see her husband, she didn't find him there and the doctors couldn't even tell her where he was because they said that no one had told them he would be moved," he wrote.

The woman searched for him at all the Brownsville hospitals without success, but no one had heard of him.

She didn't know that he had arrived at the Matamoros hospital in a dire state and near death. When doctor Sergio Zapata saw him, he ordered that the dying man be admitted immediately because of his critical condition worsened partly by his forced transfer across the river. Friends who knew the dying man quickly alerted his wife to his whereabouts and she rushed to the hospital to see him.

The patient lingered for three more weeks before a series of heart attacks and other complications led to his death August 7. 

That led to a spate of harsh criticism against Quilnatan for having personally having deported the man to Matamoros and one writer went as far as saying that Quilantan had "opened the gates of the cemetery" for him.

"We hope that Mexico's Secretary of Foreign Relations, will take note of this matter and that she "mande a Chiflar su máuser al cabròn Cónsul Fito Quilatan," Guzman wrote.