Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
AMLO’s foreign policy has failed because it promotes an authoritarian ideology that most countries in Latin America do not accept. Examples abound, including his new “Latin American anti-inflation plan”, based on rhetorical, simplistic, and ideological ideas about the origin of inflation, as if all countries face the same problem and with the same markets. Therein lies the seed of its eventual failure.
But let’s start at the beginning.
On September 18, 2021, the VI edition of CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) was held in Mexico. AMLO previously announced that Mexico would present to the plenary of that meeting a proposal for all member countries to abandon the OAS, for being “an instrument controlled by the United States”, to found an exclusive organization for Latin American and Caribbean countries. He must have thought: “This is the perfect forum for such a proposal, and I will be recognized as the president leading the region to a new history. I am the new Simon Bolivar.”
As it turns out, in the end, the proposal was not even presented before the plenary of 17 leaders of the region, with the notorious absence of Brazil. The explanation is simple. When Mexican diplomats consulted with their colleagues attending the meeting, they discovered that Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Mexico were the only countries that agreed with the proposal to leave the OAS. The rest of the region made known their opposition to such nonsense. Most of the region uses the OAS to promote and improve its relations with Washington, Ottawa, and the companies of those countries to promote economic development. AMLO’s “heroic” proposal failed.
President Biden called for a Summit of the Americas in June 2022. AMLO called on Latin America to boycott the event because the three dictatorships in the region, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, were not invited. For weeks before the event, Mexico assumed there would be significant support from the region. In the end, Mexico only received support from Bolivia and Honduras. AMLO did not attend but managed to get Biden to personally invite him to the White House as compensation for his tropical thinking. This appeased the Mexican since it seemed that what he wants is preferential treatment.
The White House took his measure.
Mexico promoted a candidacy for the leadership of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) in the person of a probable promoter of the Cuban medical brigades throughout the region. A vote was taken in the OAS plenary, and Mexico lost the vote. It also lost its dignity for the embarrassment it suffered when it learned the result of the vote. In pure 4T style, Mexico claimed there was fraud in the voting and demanded a recount. Of course, the region ignored the Mexican nonsense and its lack of experience in this international organization. Another failure.
By the way, in successive votes in the OAS plenary, Mexico has refused to condemn the Nicaraguan dictatorship. Moreover, Mexico’s silence in the face of the expulsion of prominent citizens of that country is a sign of how ideology prevails over our tradition of defending human rights.
Later, faced with the need to elect a new Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) president, Mexico put forward a strong card and evidently assumed that the region would applaud and support it. When the time came to vote, support for the Mexican candidate did not materialize. Only two countries supported him, and Brazil’s candidacy swept the board with the help of Lula and Argentina. Mexico showed, once again, that AMLO’s figure has no significant traction outside Mexico and that Mexican diplomacy does not know how to operate relations with other countries. AMLO, bitter, denounced the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean for “following” the United States. Another Mexican failure.
In the case of former President Castillo of Peru, AMLO fanatically supported a president who wanted to carry out a coup d’état in his country and, fortunately for Peruvians, failed in his attempt to break the constitutional order of that country. But Mexico wanted to give him asylum, just as it did with another would-be dictator: Evo Morales of Bolivia. AMLO’s Mexico chooses leaders whose supposed ideology coincides with his own and, therefore, panders to their authoritarian aspirations.
A fairly clear pattern begins to emerge about AMLO’s associations with dictatorships and his rejection of regimes that promote dialogue, tolerance, and, above all, alternation and constitutional order. Authoritarian ideology is imposed over the defense of democracy and liberties.
During the most recent visit of the Cuban President to Mexico, AMLO proposed the creation of a Latin American and Caribbean front to radicalize regional actions to confront the United States due to its trade embargo against the Island. The idea is to promote a great anti-imperialist front, binding the entire region together under the leadership of Mexico in another historical epic. Latin America’s response has essentially been that it has much more important national agendas than supporting Cuba. The entire region has consistently voted against the embargo at UN General Assembly sessions, year after year, for decades. And it will continue to do so.
This front has foundered in the face of the indifference of the rest of the region. This new failure reflects AMLO’s reputation in the region: in the face of his proposals lacking solid foundations and his attempts to make everyone revolve around his ideology, the automatic response is to ignore Mexican initiatives.
The most recent Mexican witticism is the proposal to unite all countries on an anti-inflationary front. AMLO said he intends to “promote the exchange of food and other goods with Brazil, Colombia, Cuba (?) and Argentina. Producers, distributors, and food importers will be invited to get good prices, remove tariffs, barriers that prevent from obtaining food at a good cost for the domestic market…”. AMLO’s proposal reveals, more than anything else, that he is thinking like a merchant in a farmers’ market and not like the President of a serious country. It is not a matter of tariffs, and each country faces its own differentiated challenges. The whole world is looking for cheap and sufficient food in times of drought, scarcity of resources, the war in Ukraine, and high oil costs to pay for freight.
For now, this new “Latin American initiative, even with Cuba,” is in doubt as to its feasibility to really help the countries when Brazil and Argentina are discussing a fundamental issue: the possibility of a single currency.
The whole description of the senselessness of AMLO’s foreign policy, except for exporting his populist ideology that pretends to be leftist but instead enlarges an authoritarian governance model, leads Mexico to limit itself to being the stepfather of the dictatorships of the Caribbean Basin. With Mexico’s preferred clients being Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, what could go wrong?
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