For the third time since the media’s designation of Joe Biden as the U.S. President-elect on Nov. 7, a Mexican journalist asked President Andrés Manuel López Obrador this morning when his government would accept a phone call from the Biden team to begin coordinating relations, even if the government would not give congratulations or recognition. The journalist cited reports that the Biden team had requested that such talks begin.
López Obrador treated this continuing pressure as unacceptable bullying. “We have already clarified this matter sufficiently, and there is confusion—or people do not want to understand it,” he replied. My government’s policy, he said, is based on the historic principles of Mexican foreign policy established upon President Benito Juárez’s dictum that “respect for the rights of others means peace,” and expressed in Article 89 of the Mexican Constitution, mandating a foreign policy based on non-intervention and self-determination of peoples.
“We cannot make any kind of recognition of a government that is not yet legally and legitimately constituted….
