Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s international agenda in the month of September has been emblematic of his foreign policy across his entire five years in office. The leader of the world’s 14th-largest economy—who has rarely left the country during his term in office—skipped the G-20 Summit in New Delhi as well as the United Nations General Assembly in New York. He also announced he would boycott the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco in November due to a dispute over Peru’s participation.
Instead of those high-profile gatherings, Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO, traveled to Colombia to participate in a conference with Colombian President Gustavo Petro about reforming counternarcotics policy, and to Chile to attend ceremonies commemorating the 50th anniversary of that country’s 1973 coup. Neither trip led to any significant agreements or commitments, and it’s not even clear why AMLO made them. He returned to Mexico in time for the country’s Independence Day celebrations, in which Russian troops participated in the parade, and then spent several days defending their presence.
AMLO’s approach to foreign policy stands in stark contrast to that of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Across several columns in recent months, I’ve given mixed reviews to Lula’s foreign policy agenda, criticizing his focus on the war in Ukraine and de-dollarization as well as his coziness with dictatorships but praising some of his regional efforts, including initiatives aimed at protecting the Amazon. But above all, and independent of outcomes, Lula consistently shows up and makes an effort to find common ground among the various sides. His activities on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly last week included launching a global labor-rights initiative with U.S. President Joe Biden; joining the new Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation, a group of 32 coastal Atlantic countries promoting economic development and environmental protection; and finally sitting down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after months of controversial and tone-deaf statements about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Those meetings came in the same month that Lula worked to strengthen Brazil’s ties with China and Russia—including through his weird offer to protect Russian President Vladimir Putin from arrest should Putin attend next year’s G-20 Summit in Brazil, an offer he quickly retracted in the face of a fierce backlash. That latter sequence underscored how, despite the occasional misstep, Lula goes out of his way to speak with everyone, without boxing himself into any single international grouping.
In contrast, AMLO uses claims of neutrality to simply avoid making difficult decisions and skip attending meetings that put him outside of his comfort zone. Since taking office in December 2018, the Mexican president’s foreign policy has been ineffective, inconsistent and often invisible. He spends weeks ignoring everything beyond Mexico’s borders and then punctuates his brief surges of foreign policy interest with symbolic anti-imperialist rhetoric rather than a strategic vision for achieving concrete policy outcomes.
Since taking office in December 2018, AMLO’s foreign policy has been ineffective, inconsistent and often invisible.
That lack of focus is why the Mexican president has seen many of his foreign policy sorties simply fall to the wayside. His push to reverse Peru’s transition of power and restore its impeached and imprisoned former President Pedro Castillo to office has led to the disintegration of the Pacific Alliance and is the ostensible reason AMLO is refusing to attend the APEC Summit next month. His efforts to use environmental projects to promote economic development in Central America as a way to curb out-migration have gone nowhere. His leadership of CELAC—a grouping comprising all the states of Latin America besides the U.S. and Canada—in 2020 and 2021 culminated in a leaders’ summit that sparked controversy due to the presence of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. AMLO then didn’t even bother to attend the group’s subsequent summit in Argentina, demonstrating how little he cares about the organization when he isn’t the center of attention.
Some of these policy orientations stem from Lopez Obrador’s political roots. He started his political career with the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which governed Mexico for seven decades under de facto one-party rule before multiparty democracy returned in 2000. Much of his domestic agenda is an effort to return to the PRI’s statist economic policies of the 1970s, and he is building his MORENA political movement around the PRI’s model of clientelism and control. Similarly, AMLO’s foreign policy has echoes of the PRI’s approach in the 1960s and 1970s: He works with the U.S. where necessary, while maintaining a number of anti-U.S. coalitions as a counterweight to Mexico’s northern neighbor.
Some of this, however, is also personal preference. Lopez Obrador has averaged fewer than one foreign trip per year while in office, and he didn’t leave the country at all during his first year in office. He has a preference for domestic issues, especially energy policy. He delights in being the center of the decision-making process and does not have the patience for meetings, whether at home or abroad, where he is not the key person at the table.
AMLO’s few foreign policy successes largely came in his first two years in office, when he was able to cut deals with then-U.S. President Donald Trump over immigration enforcement in order to avoid disruptions to the two countries’ trade relationship. AMLO also used pressure on Washington to obtain the freedom of former Defense Minister Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos in late 2020, when he was arrested in the U.S. in connection with taking bribes from one of Mexico’s criminal organizations. But those foreign policy wins were neither memorable nor representative of the policy preferences of Mexico’s general public.
Many analysts view AMLO’s relationship with Biden as weaker than the surprisingly friendly and productive ties he developed with Trump, though in some ways that’s simply due to a lack of attention on the part of Lopez Obrador. Previous Mexican administrations prioritized their relationship with the United States, even as they looked to diversify their foreign policy partnerships. AMLO has done neither.
In the meantime, security cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico has fallen. Lopez Obrador discontinued much of the intelligence-sharing that occurred under his predecessors, and new cooperative frameworks are weaker than those under the now-defunct Merida Initiative, which was never even fully implemented or funded. The U.S. Republican Party is now talking about bombing fentanyl labs located in Mexico and using military operations to unilaterally target Mexican drug-trafficking cartels, with or without Mexico’s permission, setting up potentially difficult relations for the countries next year.
If there is any good news, it is the expectation that Mexico’s next president will put foreign policy on a better track. The two leading candidates—Claudia Sheinbaum, representing Lopez Obrador’s MORENA party, and Xochitl Galvez, representing the unified opposition—are both seen as more moderate and less polarizing than AMLO. While Sheinbaum will have to kowtow the president’s line during the upcoming campaign season, neither is expected to hew to the same policies domestically or internationally as AMLO once in office. Both are likely to try to improve Mexico’s relationship with the U.S. and attend the international meetings that AMLO has chosen to eschew throughout his term. Neither has indicated aspirations to be a global leader, but simply showing up and making an effort would put Mexico back on the map.
James Bosworth is the founder of Hxagon, a firm that does political risk analysis and bespoke research in emerging and frontier markets. He has two decades of experience analyzing politics, economics and security in Latin America and the Caribbean.