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Dr. Victor Trevino, who is now the city of Laredo mayor as well and was formerly the health authority of the city, was selected not just to become the city’s top political leader but because of his tenacity and work to help the region fight against a pandemic. However, his work does not just extend to when the pandemic began to hit the area but decades earlier when he opened his local practice and became a major voice of border public health.
Dr. Victor Trevino was sworn in as Laredo’s 85th mayor on Wednesday, Dec. 28, 2022 at the Laredo City Council Chambers. Trevino was surrounded by family, friends and supporters during the ceremony.
Dr. Victor Trevino spends time greeting guests at his campaign headquarters while waiting for runoff election results on Saturday Dec. 17, 2022.
Dr. Victor Trevino spends time greeting guests at his campaign headquarters while waiting for runoff election results on Saturday Dec. 17, 2022.
Health Authority Dr. Victor Trevino is the first to leave the message to give the media an update after the meeting with the gathered hospital CEOs regarding a pediatric action plan in preperation for an expected wave of pediatric COVID cases at the Laredo Airport, Friday August 27, 2021.
Pictured is Victor Trevino Jr., Nuevo Laredo Mayor-elect Carmen Lilia Canturosas and Dr. Victor Trevino at the vaccine drive held on the Columbia Bridge Sunday.
Mayor Pete Saenz and Health Authority Dr. Victor Trevino gathered at the Laredo Airport with multiple members of the medical professional community to discuss plans on bringing the region out of being medically underserved.
Laredo Health Authority Dr. Victor Trevino
Dr. Victor Trevino, the former Laredo Health Authority and the city’s new mayor, has been chosen as LMT’s 2022 Laredoan of the Year.
Trevino has a local legacy that’s spanned decades which has mostly been brought to the forefront in the past few years. He’s left a lasting impact, helping Laredo be the first city in the United States with a mask mandate as COVID first arrived, bringing unused vaccinations to Nuevo Laredo before they expired and helping to encourage Laredo to have the highest vaccination status in the country.
“I feel that this should be shared with the public because it is not about me but it is about the efforts that everybody has put in,” Trevino said of the honor. “One of the things that I do want to always say is that the efforts of the nursing personnel put in this pandemic — working 12-hour shifts with COVID patients in the ICU — takes a lot of courage. To me, it was an effort that has not been mentioned enough. I see the nurses and the doctors, and regretfully some of them did not survive. This is what really gets me, so this is an effort by them that is often understated. I need to say it more often and praise the efforts of the nurses that were there on the frontlines together with us.”
Laredo was particularly vulnerable to the pandemic. As one of the least diverse cities in the country with an overwhelmingly Hispanic population, the fact that these individuals were more severely impacted by COVID increased the city’s risk tremendously. Also not helping its cause were factors such as bordering another country with people routinely going each way, Laredo having among the largest number of average family members in a household in the U.S. with a disease that spreads rapidly in close quarters and the city’s status as the No. 1 inland port in the United States which routinely brought people from all over the country to the area.
These were some of the biggest reasons Laredo was actually ranked for a while during the pandemic as the hardest hit city in the country by COVID, according to The New York Times. And it wasn’t until vaccinations arrived when things finally started to turn the other way.
“I got Laredo from being the most infected city in the United States, including Nuevo Laredo, to the most vaccinated city in the country including Nuevo Laredo,” Trevino said. “The reason I include Nuevo Laredo is because we are a community, and whatever happens to them happens to us. We shared vaccines that were donated by Texas doctors, and we used them for Nuevo Laredo, and again we continued our local vaccine drives until luckily we got rid of the infections, the deaths, the hospitalizations and the outcomes that were going on.”
When the vaccination rate started to slow down, Laredo — like many cities in Texas and around the country — found itself with too many vaccines and not enough willing to take them. This brought a major issue: vaccines were expiring despite being unused while many around the world were desperately awaiting theirs.
Among the locations that were well behind in vaccinations as compared to the U.S. was Mexico, and Laredoans saw this first hand as Nuevo Laredo was still clamoring for protection that wasn’t coming. However, Trevino helped organize vaccinations for Nuevo Laredoans who could come to an international bridge and get the needed vaccine. This would not only help Laredo’s sister city but also further protect itself due to the close proximity of the areas.
“He did a great job in distributing out the vaccines out in a binational effort working with Nuevo Laredo, the state of Nuevo Leon and of course (Customs & Border Protection). They all did a fabulous job, and Laredo actually became a model for many of the other areas in doing this binational efforts,” Rep. Henry Cuellar said. “He did it in a right way, as he did it with vaccines that were about to expire. Instead of them expiring, he made sure to send them over because he understood the dynamics and that those viruses do not stop in the middle of the Rio Grande. He did a great job and I always thanked him for that as the federal government paid for them, we produced them but we don’t distribute it to the arms like he did.”
Nuevo Laredo mayor Carmen Lilia Canturosas also praised Trevino’s vaccination efforts and provided him awards for his efforts to bring medical resources. Trevino also eventually crossed into Nuevo Laredo to oversee vaccination efforts, as well as crossing via the Colombia Bridge to work with Nuevo Leon Gov. Samuel Garcia in efforts to provide vaccines to people traveling from Monterrey and other parts of Nuevo Leon.
“We coined the term regional immunity because we are a region, and whatever happens over there also affects over here,” Trevino said. “We had a poster on the wall that said ‘pandemic without borders,’ and we have to think of regional immunity.”
Prior to vaccinations, people didn’t have many forms of protection against COVID. Governments around the world mostly preached measures such as distance between others, washing hands and staying home as ways to avoid infection. However, the prevention measure most synonymous with COVID were the wearing of face masks.
Trevino’s efforts during the pandemic were instrumental in saving lives, as he vigorously fought and implored the importance of face masks even before large medical organizations made it mandatory.
Interestingly enough, it was Laredo — thanks to Trevino and the rest of the city’s medical and government leaders — that helped enact the first mask mandate in the country. The city even tried to dish out potential $1,000 fines to those who were in violation — a measure they fought to enforce until the state would not allow them or any other city to dole out punishment against any individuals not wearing masks.
“When we learned about the pandemic and that it began to hit the United States, in Laredo we had very limited hospital service. We have one big hospital and one small hospital with a population of over 250,000, and we knew that we were not going to be able to handle this,” Trevino said. “We had no vaccines and no way of treating COVID, so as the health medical director of the health department and as the health authority, I was the first in the nation to instill mask usage because that is the only thing we had — even before the CDC said it would be absolutely necessary, as the CDC at the time only said that for people who were high-risk and debilitated. But here in Laredo, we knew that we were so medically underserved that we had nothing else.”
Face masks later became a lightning rod for criticism for many reasons. Some felt they were uncomfortable, others stated they resulted in negative effects and more claimed they were simply either ineffective or unnecessary.
At the time of Laredo’s mandate, however, many of these factors hadn’t really been discussed. In fact, among the most popular complaints from locals at the time was simply wanting the local government to provide them to the people for free. As the mandate was initially for face coverings of all kinds, the city stated that bandanas, scarves or a piece of cloth could also be used.
Trevino said he recognized the immense criticism and backlash received during the pandemic because some people did not want to use masks. But in the end, he thinks that it did help save many lives.
Trevino’s journey to become a prominent local and international figure during the pandemic did not just start in March 2020 when the pandemic first started. There were over three decades of local public service and more that defined his leadership to become a top figure in the fight against COVID. In fact, his service in trying to bring new projects to the area began as early as 2000.
“At the beginning of the 2000s, we had a project called Ciudad Salud, and this was a project that we were going to have with Mexico in regards to binational medicine. It was going to be handled through telemedicine,” Trevino said. “There were a lot of American citizens living in Guadalajara and other places that wanted to have access to doctors and the standard of care that we do here, and this would enable us to standardize the treatment over there so we could standardize the way we did medicine on both parts.”
According to Trevino, this was not intended to depreciate the efforts of Mexican doctors — as he states many offer excellent care — but rather to have the same approaches for all in both countries. Currently the program is still ongoing in various Mexican cities such as Aguascalientes, but continued efforts to expand the program stopped because of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that heavily disrupted international relations. By the time things got to normal, the program was not as considered once again as it was back in the early 2000s.
“When Ricky Perry was governor, I also got to go and discuss about border issues as border medicine is quite different than in other places as we are unique,” Trevino said. “Our people are unique and how we live here is totally different than in other places, so border medicine was an issue that was being discussed.”
Trevino was born and raised in Laredo and considers himself a product of the local public schools. Even his college years featured studied at Laredo College, formerly known as Laredo Junior College, before transferring to Texas A&M-Kingsville. Trevino eventually received his medical degree from Torreon, Coahuila, Mexico.
After his studies, the new mayor then received specialty training as a physician in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he worked in various emergency rooms and was the chief of staff for the Louisiana State Penitentiary hospitals. After serving some time there, Trevino decided to come back to Laredo and saw that there was a need in the city for public health and began practicing medicine in Laredo in 1985.
“I was born and raised like a block away from the health department, as I used to play in those grounds. So when I came back, I saw that the health department was already built and a lot of people needed medical attention and clinics, so I immediately registered to work for them,” Trevino said. “It was a public servant type of employment because sometimes they had funds and sometimes they had no funds, so sometimes I worked for free. But it was OK, as my goal was to serve the people.”
During his time with the health department, Trevino helped create several clinics that still remain in operation, such as maternity clinics, medical clinics and other medical entities that were created mainly based on grants. Trevino continues working on these types of projects 36 years later.
It was during this time that Trevino also established his own medical practice and became the city’s health authority. As the health authority, he was under contract. He said that depending on the budget, sometimes he was paid and sometimes he wasn’t for serving in the position. However, he states that he worked in the spot regardless because it was the right thing to do to serve the community.
During his tenure, Trevino was also the chief of state and chief of family medicine for the Laredo Medical Center and Doctor’s Hospital. He also had several patients in the 80s at a local psychiatric hospital, Rio Grande Charter, that no longer exists.
Trevino retired from the health department in 2022, giving way for Dr. Maurice Click to take the spot.
Trevino will continue his work as medical physician at his private practice, even though now he also represents more than 270,000 Laredoans as the city’s mayor. However, he states that he has already set time apart to make sure his practice continues to be well taken care of by bringing his son in from out of state, who is also a medical doctor, to help run the practice. This will allow him more time to tackle the issues the city faces. He lists water, public health and the economy as his top concerns as he begins his four-year tenure.
jorge.vela@lmtonline.com
Jorge A. Vela is a native Laredoan who studied at Laredo College and Texas State earning a bachelor’s degree in mass communication. After a stint of working for several publications, other local media outlets and managing his own tutoring business for years, Vela decided to get back into journalism by working as a general assignments reporter for the Laredo Morning Times. He loves spending time with la familia, soccer, cooking and jamming out
