López Obrador reverses course, will attend San Francisco summit

MEXICO CITY (CN) — Less than three weeks after turning down an invitation from President Joe Biden, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Monday that he will attend an upcoming economic summit in San Francisco.

“I rethought it,” he said during his morning press conference, adding that he would not stay for the whole summit. “As a matter of principle, I have to maintain a very good relationship with the United States. It’s good for us.”

In late September, López Obrador announced that he would not attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November, erroneously citing a lack of diplomatic relations with Peru.

The invitation to APEC was one of two invitations from Biden, López Obrador said Monday. The other was to Washington, D.C.

He brought up a lingering grudge related to a snubbed summit invite from 2022 to explain why he chose the San Francisco summit. López Obrador refused to attend the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles in June 2022 because the leaders of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela were not invited. The D.C. meeting was to have follow-up discussion on that summit.

“If you’re going to hold a Summit of the Americas, I don’t agree with the decision to not invite all the countries,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t go to the summit, and that’s why I can’t go to this one.”

Saying the government of Peruvian President Dina Boluarte was installed by a coup, López Obrador explained why he initially did not want to attend the APEC summit.

“It’s not a personal matter with the president who imposed herself, it’s a matter of me not wanting to endorse an injustice with my presence,” he said.

International relations experts criticized the president’s rejection of the invite in September, noting that the APEC summit is a meeting of economies, not nations. They also corrected his apparent misunderstanding about the current state of relations between Mexico and Peru.

The two have not cut ties, but each country has removed its ambassador from the other and diplomatic relations have been bumped down to the level of chargé d’affaires.

López Obrador said that someone insisted that he reconsider the invitation, but he did not say who.

Political analyst Carlos Bravo Regidor said that “it’s hard to tell” who may have pressured him but pointed to the possibility that it was some of Mexico’s most influential businessmen.

Telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim and other businessmen were seen entering the National Palace ahead of last week’s High-Level Security Dialogue with U.S. officials. They were reportedly there to design an agenda on security, migration and investment.

“So it might have been them, businessmen he seems to trust and sees as friendly to his cause, who made him change his mind,” Bravo said.

The pressure also could have come from within López Obrador’s administration, according to political analyst José Antonio Crespo, who said it “surely” came from Foreign Secretary Alicia Bárcena.

The president’s turnaround was the right decision for Mexico’s foreign relations, Crespo said.

“He’s pulled out of many of these international forums for ideological reasons, by which Mexico loses its presence and can’t give its point of view,” he said. “It gets erased from the international map.”

López Obrador also announced a new summit of Central and South American and Caribbean countries to address the issue of migration. He is inviting the leaders of Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Haiti and Cuba to Palenque, Chiapas, on Oct. 22 to discuss the issue.

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