A celebrated former consul general at Guadalajara’s U.S. Consulate died last month in a diving accident while on vacation in Belize.
Sandra Salmon, who served as consul general from 2003 to 2006, experienced breathing difficulties while diving with friends on May 31. She received medical attention but died at the scene.
Salmon grew up in Geneva, Alabama. She studied a masters degree in modern French literature from Florida State University in 1969. She was fluent in French, Spanish, Portuguese and German, languages she would put to the test in a colorful and challenging career.
Her first posting abroad, in Johannesburg, South Africa from 1976 to 1978, was at the height of world condemnation of the apartheid system. Later, in Hong Kong, Salmon screened waves of refugees from Vietnam seeking asylum in the United States.She was in Guatemala in the midst of the Civil War there, in Germany when the Berlin Wall fell and in Cuba just as the United States signed an agreement to process 20,000 migrants a year instead of 3,000.
Prior to her arrival in Guadalajara, she was consul general in Caracas, Venezuela, during a volatile period under controversial President Hugo Chavez. After a lifetime overseas, Salmon finally returned to the United States in 2006, retiring to Taos, New Mexico with her husband Larry.
Salmon was honored by the State Department for her role in the U.S. intervention in Grenada and evacuations in the Gulf War and Somalia. In 1995 she received the Barbara M. Watson Award for Consular Excellence, the Consular Service’s most prestigious award, for her work in the migration agreement between the United States and Cuba.