Mexican Diplomat Says US’s Push to Arm Ukraine Has Failed Epically in Latin American
Jose Nino
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On February 15, 2023, Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said to the Financial Times that Latin American countries are not hopping on the Western bandwagon to send weapons to Ukraine.
“I don’t think that sending weapons to prolong the conflict has support in Latin America,” the foreign minister observed. “Neither does it seem very intelligent because the costs are going to be very high for the European Union, for Russia and to some degree for everyone else . . . the inclination I see in Latin America . . . is to try to seek or imagine how there could be a political solution to this conflict,” the Financial Times quoted Ebrard as stating.
“The region is returning to its non-aligned stance,” added former Colombian foreign minister Maria Angela Holguin. “These countries also feel that China and Russia might offer them useful support in future, for example in the event of a distancing from the United States, so they don’t want to get into a confrontation with them,” the ex-Colombian diplomat said to the Financial Times.
Countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia have already publicly rejected the idea of arming Ukraine. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador critiqued the German government’s decision to equip Ukraine with tanks.
According to Russian-state media outlet TASS, Commander of the US Southern Command, General Laura Richardson, previously said that Cuban, Nicaragua, and six other Latin American countries have Russian weapons and the US is doing everything possible to replace “these weapons with American ones if these states want to transfer them to Ukraine.”
The US is increasingly finding that its universalist vision is creating diplomatic blowback as more countries question the validity of its geopolitical moves and ornery universalist foreign policy. America does need to focus more on Western Hemispheric affairs and mend relations with these countries in a proactive manner. The last thing it should be doing is getting into geopolitical squabbles thousands of miles away, when there are already many problems in our backyard such as mass migration, drug trafficking, and transnational crime.
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