Mexico’s New Neutrality in the Venezuela Crisis

What is Mexico’s position on the fast-developing events in Venezuela? 

Mexico has declined to recognise Juan Guaidó as interim president of Venezuela, and has adopted a neutral position as regards his battle for power with incumbent President Nicolás Maduro. This stance is unique among the major powers in the Americas.

Other regional heavyweights, including Argentina, Brazil, Canada and Colombia, have followed the U.S. lead in accepting Guaidó’s claim to the post on the basis that the sitting president, Maduro, won re-election last year fraudulently. These countries have echoed Guaidó’s demands – and his blunt language – in calling on the “usurper” Maduro to step down in deference to a transitional government led by Guaidó while Venezuela prepares for free and fair elections. By contrast, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who assumed the Mexican presidency on 1 December 2018 following a landslide election victory last July, and his foreign secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, have made clear that they will “not participate in the de-recognition of the government of a nation with which [Mexico] maintains diplomatic relations”. López Obrador and Maduro are acquainted with one another: the Venezuelan was in Mexico City to meet his counterpart on the day of his inauguration.

Regarding how to resolve the Venezuelan crisis, Mexico has staked out a middle ground between the other major American powers’ insistence that Maduro leave and Russia’s and China’s position, backed by Bolivia, Cuba and Nicaragua, that he should stay. Mexico has also stopped short of the position adopted by several European nations, including France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and the UK, which together issued an ultimatum demanding that Maduro call elections within eight days or else they will recognise Guaidó as interim president. Instead, Mexico has signed a joint statement with Uruguay calling for a negotiated exit from the current standoff so as to avoid “an escalation of violence that could make matters worse”. Both countries have also called for an international conference of countries and multilateral organisations that adopt a neutral position regarding Venezuela, to be held on 7 February in Montevideo. For now it remains uncertain which other countries or UN and international bodies will take part, while the Brazilian foreign minister and many domestic and foreign supporters of Guaidó have already lambasted the initiative. It remains to be seen whether these two countries will get the opportunity to act as mediators in a crisis that has generated stark international divisions and could lead to much greater turmoil in Venezuela, either through messy regime change or through Maduro’s entrenchment in power.

What are the main strands of Mexican public opinion regarding Venezuela? How is public opinion shifting as the crisis unfolds?

Mexican public opinion is fractured roughly in three.

At one end of the ideological spectrum is a camp that regards the Maduro government as a bastion of resistance to undue U.S. interference in Latin America and that sees Mexico’s continued recognition of Maduro as essential to that cause.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, a larger camp composed of President López Obrador’s opponents reads Mexico’s posture toward Venezuela as yet another sign of his ideological affinities with Latin America’s authoritarian left. This camp includes critics who tend to portray the president as an irresponsible populist of the same ilk as the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and fear he will speed the country toward economic disaster, while overrunning its institutions with partisan loyalists. These depictions formed the backbone of a political campaign, waged in large part on social media, that sought to stymie López Obrador’s bid for the presidency. A similar effort now aims to discredit him in office. Images, prominent on social media, of long queues at gas stations provoked by panic buying as a result of petrol shortages, which were provoked by the new administration’s crackdown on oil theft, have helped feed the perception of an economy headed in the wrong direction. Attacks of this nature are a common part of efforts to discredit the democratic left across Latin America, and have been deployed in elections in Argentina, Brazil and Colombia among others since 2015.

In between the two poles lies a sizeable but less strident third camp, including many leading analysts, which welcomes the López Obrador administration’s cautious response, contrasting it favourably to the previous Mexican government’s vocal opposition to Maduro. This camp is home to those who hope that Mexico might emerge as an advocate for nuanced diplomacy between antagonistic parties in the region, and a counter to forces that threaten to pull the region into conflict.

Two months into López Obrador’s presidency, how is Mexico’s new foreign policy taking shape? What are the main continuities and changes from the past?

Mexico’s response to the Venezuelan crisis is by no means improvised. It is the first real test of a foreign policy credo that Ebrard outlined on 9 January. Based on the Estrada doctrine formulated in 1930 by Mexico’s then foreign minister, this doctrine preaches strict non-intervention in other states’ affairs and respect for sovereignty paired with non-violent conflict resolution. For 70 years this doctrine helped keep Mexico on the sidelines of contentious regional disputes, and thus helped insulate the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party from attracting the attention and meddling of outsiders. Even after 2000, when an opposition party candidate won the presidency for the first time since the party’s rise to power in 1930, the Estrada doctrine was generally preserved for more than a decade – with the notable exception of Mexico’s tougher line on human rights abuses in Cuba – and the country remained largely passive on the international stage. The traditional character of Mexican diplomacy nevertheless changed two years ago under former President Enrique Peña Nieto, when his government joined calls for political change in Venezuela, partly as a result of a perceived need to placate the new Trump administration and soften its hostility to trade with and migration from Mexico. 

Despite steering back toward the Estrada doctrine, López Obrador’s government has given it a tweak by insisting that Mexico’s foreign policy should include a “profound commitment to human rights”. But this addition comes with caveats. The president and his team have indicated they will throw no stones so long as Mexico sits in a glass house: in other words, they will not complain about human rights abuses elsewhere until Mexico’s own human rights record, tarnished by enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions by state forces during the “war on drugs”, improves. How this defence of human rights will be weighed up against non-interventionism remains to be seen in practice. This also means that it is hard to predict how the new administration’s foreign policy will deviate from its predecessors’.

How are U.S.-Mexican relations evolving under López Obrador?

López Obrador would like to cultivate greater autonomy in domestic and foreign policy vis-à-vis the U.S. while remaining a good neighbour to everyone. These twin aims are already somewhat in tension when it comes to the U.S. Ebrard and his team are trying hard to soothe Mexico’s northern neighbour, and have attempted to secure U.S. backing for a laudable economic development initiative that would address some of the root causes behind migration through Mexico and into the U.S. They have also curried favour with Washington by continuing to act as a buffer state, absorbing or deporting Central American refugees and migrants and housing those seeking asylum in the U.S. This risks backlash from the Mexican president’s supporters on the left, although López Obrador has said he wants no “beef” with anyone, including Donald Trump.

But this goal is not perfectly aligned with the objectives of a White House that continues to push Mexico to cooperate on its own terms in curtailing migration from Central America, and shows little of the same interest in tackling the economic causes and insecurity that drive emigration. Moreover, none of López Obrador’s above initiatives will keep the U.S. president from pressing hard on his core campaign promise to “build that wall” in one form or another – a plan that the Mexican president has so far avoided condemning, calling it an “internal matter” for the U.S.  However, Trump’s aggressive rhetoric toward Mexico and the humanitarian needs provoked by U.S. policy on asylum claimants staying south of its border while cases are processed are likely to translate into pressing domestic issues for the Mexican government. With Trump in office, relations will inevitably remain volatile, and frictions over issues closer to home than Venezuela will no doubt pose the starkest tests of the López Obrador administration’s new foreign policy.