L.A. Gets New Mexican Envoy

On her first day on the job, Martha Irene Lara seemed effervescent.

“This is your home,” she repeatedly told assembled reporters in her initial news conference as Mexico’s consul general in Los Angeles.

Her welcoming style, while at odds with the traditionally stiff demeanor of Mexican officials, is indicative of the changed political reality in Mexico, where a new president eschews the studied formality of his predecessors.

And her being the first woman Mexican consul general in Los Angeles underlines Mexican President Vicente Fox’s vow to reach out to those traditionally marginalized in official Mexico.

Lara, a 57-year-old career diplomat, has taken the helm of an office that is the most important of Mexico’s 47 consular sites in the United States, a diplomatic presence unmatched by any other nation.

The major Mexican consulates, including the one in Los Angeles, have a dual mission: to aid Mexicans abroad, and to promote Mexico and its commercial and cultural interests. More than 1,000 people a day visit the L.A. consulate, an imposing five-story building across the street from MacArthur Park. Most are seeking passports, travel papers and other documents.

Consul generals are also called on to provide Mexico’s viewpoints on often thorny binational issues. Words from a consul may defuse a potential international incident or inflame it.

President Fox, who assumed office in December, broke the seven-decade stranglehold of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI.

“There’s renewed hope; a sense of freshness,” Lara said in an interview Thursday in her still sparsely furnished office, a framed drawing of Abraham Lincoln and Benito Juarez above her desk. “It’s a new beginning.”

Los Angeles, she said, enchants her. “I believe this is one of the most exciting places to live right now, because of its dynamism.”

Lara, who holds the rank of ambassador, is a child of the border, born to a lawyer father in Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso. She is bilingual and has long been involved in U.S.-Mexico issues. Previous consular postings include the border cities of El Paso and Laredo, Texas, and Houston and Seattle.

She served a term as federal senator for the state of Chihuahua during the 1990s, representing the ruling PRI. But observers say Lara played an important role in mediating between the PRI and the ascendant National Action Party, under whose political banner Fox would eventually assume power.

She is the mother of two children, Humberto, 25, a lawyer in Mexico, and Patricia, 22, a university student in Philadelphia. During the interview and subsequent press conference, Lara repeated Mexico’s well-known positions on such contentious issues as immigration and drug trafficking. She voiced the hope that Mexican citizens living in the United States would be able to vote in the next Mexican presidential election, in 2006, after logistics are figured out.

At one point, asked about the plight of illegal immigrants, Lara replied that she did not make such distinctions.

“For us,” she said, “Mexicans are Mexicans.”

Pressed bout the much-discussed possibility of a new guest-worker program between the United States and Mexico, Lara would only say that both sides would approach the issue very cautiously.