Andrés Manuel López Obrador will visit South America for the first time since he took office in December 2018. This was announced by the Mexican president, who reported this Wednesday that he plans to go to Peru on December 14 to be able to carry out the summit of the Alianza del Peaceful.
The meeting was scheduled to take place in Mexico last week and was canceled due to the inability of Pedro Castillo, president of Peru, to attend after Congress denied him the trip.
The announcement represents a gesture by López Obrador towards the region, after the dispute over the presidency of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) revealed the cracks between the left-wing Latin American leaders.
"It is very likely that I will travel to Peru on December 14 for the meeting of the Pacific Alliance," López Obrador said in his morning conference from the National Palace.
According to the president, at the moment Gabriel Boric, from Chile;
Gustavo Petro, from Colombia;
Guillermo Lasso, from Ecuador;
and Pedro Castillo himself, to whom they take the summit home after it had to be canceled due to the non-authorization to travel to Mexico.
Originally the political appointment was planned to take place between November 21 and 25 in Mexico City.
But in the face of the Peruvian political dispute, López Obrador asked his counterparts to cancel it, because Mexico is in charge of passing the presidency of the Alliance to Peru during the summit.
The cancellation led Argentine President Alberto Fernández and Brazilian President-elect Lula da Silva to suspend their visits.
While Boric, Petro and Lasso traveled anyway and held some of the meetings they already had scheduled.
During a press conference between López Obrador and Boric, they explained last week that they would try to reschedule the appointment and relocate it to Peru, to facilitate Castillo's attendance.
“They met, Castillo and Boric the day before yesterday, they discussed the issue.
I asked Boric to consult with President Castillo, and they already spoke to me to tell me if I agreed to the meeting taking place on the 14th, and I already answered yes.
Then I'm going out," the Mexican president said on Wednesday.
Foreign policy has not been one of the main axes of the Government of López Obrador.
The president has always maintained that "the best foreign policy is a good domestic policy."
During the first two years of his term, he did not leave the country.
In 2021 he only traveled to the United States.
This year he toured Central America in May and revisited his neighbor to the north in July.
Given the limited agenda of the Mexican outside his country, the visit to Peru means a gesture for the region, which had been under tension after the vote for the IDB presidency, where both Chile, Mexico and Argentina failed to bring a common candidate and lost the election before the envoy of Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian Ilan Goldfajn, supported by the United States.