QUILANTAN OFF TO LITTLE ROCK, CUE NEW CONSUL IN B'TOWN

By Juan Montoya
Say good bye to the Mexican consul who had a running battle with newsmen, dabbled in poetry, and competed with Mexican artisans of handicrafts at the Brownsville consulate.
The Mexican Secretariat of Foreign Relations (SRE) has annoucned that local consul Rodolfo Quilantan Arenas will be assigned to the Mexican consulate at Little Rock, Arkansas, and he will be replaced by Juan Carlos Cué Vega, a diplomat well known to people here since he served for a stint at the local consulate.

In its press release, the SRE named six ambassadors and 14 consulate changes effective March 1.

Quilantan has had a rough relationship with Valley and Mexican media, culminating in an episode where he rolled up a car window and broke a reporter's tape recorder when he was trying to get an interview on the mounting crisis of deported immigrants on the border.

A favorite of the Mr. Amigo Association, Quilantan reveled in the spotlight all the while coming under criticism for ignoring the plight of Mexican immigrants caught by immigration authorities in the United States.

And while Erasmo Martinez, who was stationed in Laredo, was elevated to the rank of ambassador about six months ago, Quilantan will remain at the consulate level in a smaller consulate in Little Rock.
Disclosures during Austin attorney Marc Rosenthal's trial that certain individuals working in the Mexican consulate's Brownsville office were referring cases to him for a fee fueled calls for the SRE to withdraw consul Quilantan from the border.
Those revelations come on the heels of a federal magistrate decision in the southern U.S. Southern District federal court that the family of Juan Pablo Perez Santillan – the Matamoros man who was gunned down by agents firing from across the Rio Grande – could choose the legal representative they wanted without interference form Quilantán Arenas.
News reports from Matamoros indicated that the family had secured an order from a state judge ordering Quilantán and a Brownsville attorney not to approach the family of the slain man.
Quilantan usually dodged questions relating to the massive deportation of Mexican citizens by U.S. immigration authorities which has flooded Mexican border cities with hundreds of deportees who have no place to  go.
Tamaulipas Senator Manuel Cavazos Lerma forwarded copies of those news stories to Jose Antonio Meade Kuribreña, then-Mexico's Minister of Foreign Relations.
In a letter sent by Cavazos Lerma, the senator includes formal complaints from the Matamoros CANACO (Chamber of Commerce) and FENACO  ( La Federación de Cámaras Nacionales de Comercio, Servicios y Turismo) of Tamaulipas and asks the minister to assist them to resolve a "series of problems" that have arisen in relation to Quilantan.
During a Mr. Amigo Association event with the former mayor of Matamoros, his actions also outraged those ciy's officials.
When then-Matamoros mayor Alfonso Sanchez Garza asked his U.S. hosts to walk into Matamoros from the bridge, Quintalan was said to have refused to join them and told them he wished them luck.
"Mayor Sanchez Garza was livid," said a participant. "Here he was trying to present a good face of his city and country as their host and Quintalan was mocking him and them for going into Matamoros. That's considered almost committing treason to your country."

So as Quilantan says goodbye to these shores, we wish him well in the wilds of Little Rock, although the Mexican nationals there might not be as receptive to his flight of poetry or yoga seminars.