Japan, worried about Mexico

The president will have the courtesy of interacting by telephone with his guest, the Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi. The president understands that diplomacy is the science of gestures. Of the good gestures.

Indeed, it will be the President of Ecuador Guillermo Lasso who will call this morning the Japanese official who is visiting Quito.

Two days ago Minister Hayashi visited the Secretary of Economy of Mexico and yesterday Marcelo Ebrard.

It is curious that the statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SER) omits one of the topics that Minister Hayashi discussed not only with Ebrard yesterday morning, but also on Tuesday afternoon with Secretary Raquel Buenrostro : Japan’s concern about legal uncertainty in investments in the energy sector.

Years go by and SRE press releases are timeless, but they respond to the communication needs of the last century.

Mexican officials think of the future as a time of good wishes. For example, Marcelo Ebrard, according to the statement said: “We have a common future (with Japan) and what we want is to broaden it.”

However, the statement also does not include a topic that the Japanese minister discussed with him: the Pacific Alliance.

The maximum approximation of the statement on the subject says: “(…) both foreign ministers exchanged points of view on various regional and global situations, agreeing to continue cooperating in multilateral mechanisms and forums in favor of common interests.”

The reality is different. The Pacific Alliance has been hijacked by political grids and ethnocentric visions. Both traits are unnatural to the Pacific Alliance’s raison d’être.

The Pacific Alliance was born as a kind of vaccine against outdated populisms like Chavismo. This was decided by Chile, Colombia, Peru and Mexico.

However, President López Obrador decided to blow up the foundations of the Pacific Alliance by refusing to celebrate the pre-tempore transfer of the presidency to Peru. Something worse, he had a clear interference in the internal politics of the Peruvian Congress, even saying that one of the laws of its Constitution is anti-democratic.

Finally, the SRE statement omits important elements of the visit of the Japanese Foreign Minister, Mr. Yoshimasa Hayashi. Serious, very serious.

It is serious that in a democracy there is an attempt to hide elements, in this case, of foreign policy. Perhaps Secretary Ebrard does it because of the null interest that the issue arouses in AMLO.

The interesting thing is that Marcelo Ebrard will travel to Japan when he only deals with his presidential candidacy. The technological issue gives him the key to the Mexican youth demography, a segment forgotten by AMLO.

For AMLO, Japan is very far from the National Palace. The concerns of the Japanese Government are not of interest to him.

Issuing a statement to comply with bureaucratic protocol is enough.

Good luck to the Japanese minister in his interaction with the president of Ecuador this morning.

Twitter: @faustopretelin