Mexico brags it does not interfere in the affairs of other countries. But Mexican President Andres Lopez Obrador — AMLO as he is know — intimately rubs political and philosophical elbows with dictatorships in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, AMLO offered criticism but pointedly declined to offer help to the embattled Ukrainians. For example, a Mexican Air Force plane was dispatched empty to Romania to evacuate Mexicans fleeting from Ukraine.
AMLO couldn’t even send powdered milk to help Ukrainian children. What a waste of cargo space.
The Mexican President he most admires among his predecessors is non-interventionist Lazaro Cardenas, who served from 1934 until 1940.
But unlike his hero Cardenas, who in 1936 sent rifles and ammunition to the Spaniards fighting against brutal General Francisco Franco in that country’s civil war, AMLO won’t help Ukraine.
As the empty Mexican Air Force plane indicates, AMLO could care less about a nation illegally invaded by a dictator.
AMLO seems to prefer helping the gangster regimes in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. After a recent hurricane hit Cuba, AMLO sent food and medical supplies. But not a cookie now for Ukraine.
When disastrous Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, former Mexican President Vicente Fox sent the Mexican Navy to help and set up kitchens to feed evacuating hurricane victims in Houston.
AMLO sends nothing to Ukraine.
Another defect of the Mexican president in this crisis is that he doesn’t understand the difference between a free press and government propaganda.
AMLO accused Twitter of censorship for its handling of Russian state media at one of his morning news conferences.
Twitter’s dastardly act? It added explanatory labels to tweets by the state-controlled media organizations RT (Russia Today) and Sputnik and reduced the visibility of their tweets. Readers might remember that the U.S. government forced RT to register as a foreign agent.
AMLO said that “labeling” was censorship.
“I wish Twitter would clarify this matter, because it is very serious. (The labels) are like a kind of stamp of approval for the opinion that people have (in opposition to Russia’s invasion of neighbor Ukraine).”
The hypocritical president, halfway through is six-year term, says, “No to censorship, no to authoritarianism … preventing people from expressing themselves and demonstrating is all contrary to freedom. “
Yet he has profusely and almost daily blasted the Mexican press and individual journalists for speaking their mind about his government.
Despite protests outside Russia’s Mexico City embassy demanding a boycott of Russian goods, AMLO says no.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador seems to prefer that dictators run countries. Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and Russia are one and the same to him.
His tap dancing around the invasion of Ukraine is just one more proof that Mexico and all freedom loving people will benefit immensely when AMLO’s presidential term is finished.
Raoul Lowery Contreras is a Marine Corps veteran, political consultant and author of the new book White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPS) & Mexicans. His work has appeared in the New American News Service of the New York Times Syndicate.
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