Mexico Looks the Other Way Amid Venezuelan Crisis
Mexico has intervened in neighboring conflicts for national security reasons several times over the last half century.
By Gerardo Arreola (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – After half a year of contradictions, the Mexican government recognized Nicolas Maduro as president of Venezuela, despite the fact that the electoral authority of the South American country has not disclosed the detailed results of the July 28 elections.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Claudia Sheinbaum, during their respective administrations, abandoned their initial demand for transparency in the results, broke from joint efforts for that purpose with Brazil and Colombia, dismissed the severity of the Venezuelan crisis, and yielded to Maduro’s self-proclamation.
At first, the Mexican Foreign Ministry defended the key point that the National Electoral Council (CNE) should release the voting records.
In his press conference on July 30, 2024, Lopez Obrador said: “Let the election be cleared up if necessary, let the votes be counted, just as neither (former presidents Vicente) Fox nor (Felipe) Calderón wanted to do here.”
In this way, he recalled his own struggle in 2006, when the electoral authority declared Calderón the winner, and López Obrador demanded a full recount: “Vote by vote, polling station by polling station.”
That same day, hours later and as president-elect, Sheinbaum essentially echoed Lopez Obrador’s position and also recalled Mexico’s 18-year-old electoral dispute.
“It is always important to make the results transparent,” Sheinbaum told the press. “As we all know, the electoral authority issued a result declaring President Maduro the winner, and it is important, as we argued back in 2006, to make the result transparent. I heard the president today mention 80% of the vote counted; we must also wait for the final tally. So, the first thing is transparency in the result and completing the count.”
At the time, the president-elect referred to a CNE report claiming supposed voting percentages without documentary support.
A joint statement by Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico on August 1, 2024, reaffirmed the need to release voting records and added the demand for “impartial verification.”
In a second communiqué, the three governments further specified that it is the CNE, not the Supreme Court, that is legally authorized to disclose the results.
This was a reaction to Maduro’s maneuver: filing a motion with the Supreme Court to bypass the Council and avoid releasing the voting records.
Lopez Obrador openly shifted his approach on August 15, stating that the Supreme Court’s ruling should be awaited, avoiding any opinions on the crisis, and opposing the intervention of other countries in resolving the conflict.
On August 16, the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States passed a resolution urging Venezuelan authorities to release and verify the results. Mexico was absent. It could have debated, negotiated the draft resolution, voted against it, or abstained but chose to leave the stage in silence.
On August 22, without any detailed results presented, the Supreme Court declared Maduro the winner.
By then, Lopez Obrador had already broken with Colombia and Brazil. Sheinbaum followed her predecessor’s lead on all points: she confirmed the break and justified Mexico’s new position.
On October 15, as president, she recalled that those three countries had called for “transparent results” in Venezuela.
“But from now on, we are going to remain impartial in this matter,” she said. Why did she explicitly decide to break with Lula and Petro and stop calling for the release of the voting records? Sheinbaum did not explain.
On December 23, she went a step further by announcing Mexican representation at Maduro’s inauguration, which she confirmed on January 6, expanding her reasoning slightly: “The stance outlined in the Constitution, with all governments of the world: the self-determination of peoples. So, in the case of Venezuela, a representative will attend the inauguration, and we don’t see why it shouldn’t be this way. It is up to the Venezuelans, not Mexico, to decide.”
Like Lopez Obrador, Sheinbaum systematically omits that one of the constitutional mandates of Mexican foreign policy is the promotion of human rights.
This issue, recently highlighted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, gained weight in recent months due to the extensive repression carried out by Maduro.
The opposition’s response to the entire process has escalated, from publishing their official copies of electoral records to vehemently claiming victory for their candidate Edmundo Gonzalez. The conflict will only deepen Venezuela’s crisis.
By looking the other way, the president and her predecessor have ignored both Mexican diplomatic experience and the steps Maduro took to reach the July elections.
Mexico has intervened in neighboring conflicts for national security reasons. In just over half a century: the break in relations with Somoza (1979), the Franco-Mexican declaration on El Salvador (1981), the Contadora Group for Central America (1983), peace talks for Colombia since the 1990s, and the multilateral efforts of recent years to address the Haitian crisis.
Maduro has discussed and reached agreements on internal matters with the United States (Qatar, 2023) and negotiated with the opposition through third-party mediation (Barbados, 2023), with a long preparatory phase hosted in Mexico City. During this phase, he promised fair elections with guarantees for all, without exclusions, and with international observation—promises he clearly failed to fulfill.
Finally, like Lopez Obrador, Sheinbaum, who has expressed interest in addressing the root causes of migration, will have to reckon with how the electoral crisis and its repressive aftermath fuel the Venezuelan exodus, which has displaced nearly eight million people in recent years. For Mexico, that’s a national security concern.
Published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.