Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard speaks during a press conference. José Méndez (EFE)
President López Obrador lives convinced that the whole world is watching what he says in the morning.
He sounds like megalomania, but then what happens happens and Andrés Manuel may not be so clueless.
On Wednesday he said that Mexico's relationship with Spain had to be paused, immediately afterwards on both sides of the Atlantic, which is half the planet, the headaches of officials, businessmen, journalists and, of course, diplomats began trying to decipher what he meant. the Mexican president with that statement in the morning.
Among the interpretations that have been made of this saying, there are two that stand out for their relevance.
The gimmicky and the background.
The first, not least obvious because it is less important, is that AMLO urgently needed to change the conversation;
wanted to stop talking – as it has been for weeks – that the accounts do not come out about the way of life of his eldest son in Houston, that the shadow of the conflict of interest flies over his daughter-in-law, that the so-called "house grey” is turning him into Peña Nieto II.
This Friday, as the former PRI president did at the time with the "White House", he already sent his relative to clarify.
Same mistakes, same fate: loss of prestige.
The second interpretation of the pause in the relationship with Spain, however, points to the way López Obrador uses to double down on those who he believes stand between him and the dazzling space that he assumes the country's history has reserved for him.
To say it soon: Andrés Manuel attacks Spain so that Spain pressures its companies so that they renounce their rights and their contracts, especially in energy matters.
So the Mexican president, urged to get out of the media morass of the houses inhabited by his eldest son in Texas, resorts to his usual tactic of hitting the table, provoking an angry response (not without justification) in Spain and Mexico, for with this new scandal not only to change the subject in public opinion, but to make the Spanish companies and authorities give up what he is looking for.
The tactic involves costs, including diplomatic ones.
To deal with these, there is Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, who since 2018 has had to engage in a double diplomacy: the one he builds for himself, and the other, the one he uses to serve as, among other jobs, López Obrador's good police officer.
Ebrard has been forced to display diplomacy even with himself and his team, forced as he is to achieve from intemperate statements against Panama to unexpected appointments of which he never had a presidential advance.
This Secretary of Foreign Affairs, on the one hand, weaves a network of support in Latin America and Europe, and on the other, acts as manager of his boss's blackmail.
In cases like that of Spain, it will be in charge of minimizing the impact, but not necessarily the effectiveness, of the attacks by López Obrador.
The foreign minister will try to calm the nerves of Hispanics, but he will do so not only without disavowing the president, but also by proposing a way out in which AMLO can presume that in the end he was right, and that the others have recognized him as such.
López Obrador has said countless times that the best foreign policy is the domestic one.
Actually, he doesn't care about diplomacy or international relations.
He acts only in order to establish the notion that he will return to Mexicans a sovereignty that he considers was violated by foreign companies in collusion with the bad guys, by sellouts as well as corrupt governments that preceded his.
The damage that arises in Mexico's relations with the world due to López Obrador's rudeness does not matter to him.
Foreign Minister Ebrard cannot claim co-authorship of that, shall we say, strategy.
Neither in the fights with Spain, which have been the tone of the entire six-year term, nor in the vagaries with the United States does the head of Foreign Affairs contribute anything a priori.
In the Spanish case, his role is to appear after the presidential disagreement and try to convince those attacked that it is better to pay attention, that cooperating is prudent in order not to provoke a new attack.
Who knows if Spain will agree to such an undiplomatic offer.
Ebrard lends himself to that role not only because he has a presidential aspiration that prevents him from exercising his own criteria or different from that of López Obrador.
In addition to pure convenience --to seek that the president see at all times how he is the most functional for Morena's project--, the chancellor intends, when the time comes, to claim part of the success of that supposedly nationalist policy.
Which in turn would increase his chances of succession.
Therefore, AMLO's rowdy behavior does not bother him.
But he is able to present himself as that conciliatory actor in the midst of the storm because it is also true that he has dedicated these years to building a renewed solidarity with Latin America.
An example of this impulse is the case of Peru, where the Mexican government has insisted on propping up Pedro Castillo's regime.
López Obrador sends ministers to help with financial and social policy strategies.
A singular interventionism of the president himself who then refuses to pronounce on democratic setbacks in the region saying that he does not interfere in the affairs of other countries.
And in his own name, Ebrard has displayed a remarkable presence in the Latin American courtyard, where from Patagonia to Central America he has become a frequent figure.
In a certain way, he has reinstated in Mexico, more than abroad, the image that this country is called to be the older brother in Latin America.
For this, Marcelo has worked tirelessly, both by leading regional forums at home, and by executing determined interventions, such as when they came to the rescue of Evo Morales, at the dawn of his six-year term.
In this government, MEC is the adult in the room who has put up with his boss as much imposition as he has prescribed.
He patiently cultivates his room for maneuver against Washington or Europe, knowing that outside and inside it is known that in AMLO's cabinet no one has a head as well furnished as he does, no one is as capable of understanding the place that Mexico could occupy in the world... once López Obrador leaves.
The route that Ebrard has proposed is embarrassing proof.
It will continue weaving its network of alliances in Latin America, North America and what it can in Europe.
And in the internal sphere, it will be what it has to be, that is, what the president says: good police officer, manager of favors, caretaker of the backyard of the United States, the same with Trump as with Biden, dispenser of vaccines for Mexicans and Latin Americans. alike, and an example of unconditional discipline.
There are those who see disgrace in that blind and dumb loyalty.
Truth be told, with so much that has happened in these three years, what is really surprising is not that Marcelo stays in his position, but that there is even a cabinet.
The world, in fact, watches with astonishment some of López Obrador's rudeness, and it does so without failing to see that, at least, his chancellor continues to be
the
interlocutor with other countries, sometimes one that delivers the extortion envelope, sometimes one that lavishes from creative initiatives to solidarity.
Marcelo Ebrard in his pure state.
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