At the tail end of her visit to lakeside last week, U.S. Consul General Tanya C. Anderson made time to squeeze in an exclusive interview with the Guadalajara Reporter.
In a cordial 30-minute chat we asked her to delve deeper in several topics mentioned in her introductory speech to the audience gathered at the Lake Chapala Society.
There seem to have been more state department initiatives aimed at women in developing countries, including Mexico. Is educating women something that has been promoted more visibly since Hilary Clinton was named Secretary of State? Also, the last two consuls in Guadalajara have been women. Is this a coincidence or part of a trend?
Yes and yes. I can honestly say that under former Secretary Clinton’s era we did have an increased focus of resources and initiatives and programs on empowerment of women, human rights in general and LGBT rights, as well throughout the world.
I was at the Department of State at the time when she was there as secretary and we had enormous focus on women. It was a particular interest of hers. And it dovetailed very much so with all of the human rights programming we were as already doing, putting more emphasis on what women were doing in civil society to increase their full participation in the economic and political realms of their societies. The initiative we have here, the Full Participation Fund, is outstanding in helping women become more active politically in leadership positions. We are very proud of it.
In terms of women in leadership positions as the department of state we actually have an internal organization called Executive Women at State. We try hard to nurture and mentor up and coming women leaders inside of the department to increase the parity in numbers and see that more get promoted to the senior ranks. One of the things we realized is that new officers require close mentoring to assure their success from the very beginning to get them on the career path to reach their professional goals. It was a real Boys Club when I started. I was one of only two females in my first post of 350 officers. The interesting thing is that the Department of State has changed a lot over the years and become a lot more family friendly. We now promote telework so that both men and women can work from home a couple of days a week to handle family situations.
You mentioned how important it is for U.S. citizens to register with the consulate? What are the benefits?
Unfortunately we do see deaths of American citizens here and it really helps to be able to contact next of kin as quickly as possible. If we can’t find family right away it causes delays in giving them the sad news and problems in handling related matters. And it is most important in cases of emergency. When Hurricane Patricia hit, we sent teams out to find Americans in the area of Puerto Vallarta, knocking door to door to see if they were all right. It would have been very helpful if they had been registered. We were getting a lot of calls from concerned relatives. Also, everyone on the list receives all our notifications, so they don’t have to rely on other sources to get important information.
How do you think the Consulate can better meet the demand for services and improve dealings with Americans?
Move! We have exceeded capacity in the building we’ve occupied for about 50 years. We need room to grow in order to improve services, employee satisfaction, security and handle coyotes (intermediaries) who lurk outside where there’s no set back. We have a top ten list of choices for a location. I hope we’ll break ground before I leave. It will take about three years to build.