The leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has described as “logical” the Government’s refusal to attend the inauguration of the new Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, after she vetoed the King at the ceremony. It is the first time that Feijóo supports Pedro Sánchez in many months, although he did so after reproaching him for an alleged double standard: “It is unacceptable that for the Government there are more reasons to withdraw an ambassador for a comment about the president’s wife than due to the lack of respect for the head of state,” he said. He was referring to the withdrawal of the Spanish ambassador in Buenos Aires after the Argentine president, Javier Milei, called Begoña Gómez “corrupt” at a Vox rally in Madrid last May. That was the first of the three successive diplomatic crises – with the Governments of Argentina, Venezuela and Mexico – that have exploded in the Executive in recent months, and that occur when there are just a few weeks left for all those involved to face each other in the Ibero-American summit in Cuenca (Ecuador).
Diplomatic relations have a catalog of measures to express the discomfort of one State with another: the “verbal note” (a written text, but without a signature), the summons to the ambassador of the other country, the “call for consultations” of the ambassador own and, finally, its withdrawal. The next step would be the breaking of relations and, in the end, the declaration of war.
This arsenal of reactions is applied gradually and proportionally. Diplomatic escalation consists of climbing those steps with increasingly harsher measures, depending on the reaction of the other. Spain went from calling its ambassador in Argentina for consultations – which implies her temporary withdrawal – to removing her permanently – she will no longer be able to return and a replacement will have to be named in due course – after Milei dedicated a new volley of insults ( ”cowardly”, “totalitarian”, “arrogant”) to Sánchez.
However, diplomatic sources emphasize that this panoply of measures is not a penal code in which each infraction corresponds to a sanction, since its purpose is not primarily punitive. It is rather a matter of dissuading or stopping those who are the object of them. In the case of Argentina, it is not only that Milei’s insults to Sánchez’s wife were, according to Foreign Affairs, an attack on Spanish institutions – the Presidency of the Government – by a foreign leader on Spanish soil. The objective was that Milei, who has championed the “cultural battle against left-handed [como llama a los izquierdistas]”, ceased his attacks against Sánchez. The sources consulted admit that, although Milei is unpredictable, the diplomatic pressure seems to have had an effect: the Argentine president has not insulted Sánchez again, not even when he shared another rally with the leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, in Buenos Aires at beginning of the month.
What you have to avoid is “shooting yourself in the foot,” warns a veteran ambassador. Sometimes, a sanction can harm the person who adopts it more than the one who receives it. For this reason, he adds, “we must carefully measure the consequences and act with a cool head.” An example: the country with which Spain has the worst relations is Russia: it not only applies the sanctions agreed upon by the EU, but also trains and provides weapons to the Army with which Russia fights, the Ukrainian one. However, Foreign Affairs has not recalled its ambassador in Moscow. He considers it more useful to keep it there, even if his room for maneuver is almost zero. Nor did reciprocity apply when Morocco, Algeria or Israel called their ambassadors in Madrid for consultations.
Of the three Latin American countries with which it has open crises—Argentina, Mexico and Venezuela—Spain has only withdrawn its ambassador from the first; Apparently the least serious case, since he could normalize relations at any time, just by asking for approval for his new representative in Buenos Aires.
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Mexico: a crash that was tried to be avoided
More complicated is the clash with Mexico, which Sánchez has tried to avoid by all means. As he himself has stressed, the Mexican government is a progressive like the Spanish one and the new president, the first woman to occupy the head of state in the history of the country. Spain hoped to turn the page on its disagreement with the still president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who in 2019 sent a letter to Felipe VI demanding that he apologize for the excesses of Spanish colonization. The King was silent in response and López Obrador took it as a personal offense. The conflict has now been resurrected with violence, with the veto of the Spanish monarch in the inauguration of his successor.
Sánchez was not aware of the invitation for him and not the King to attend the ceremony and, for more than a month, he tried to get Mexico to change the recipient of the invitation until, last Tuesday, EL PAÍS revealed that Felipe VI had been excluded. Foreign Affairs informed the Mexican Foreign Ministry that Spain would not be represented at the inauguration. It was not just a “lack of respect” to the King, as Feijóo said, but a twisting of the Spanish constitutional framework, in which any foreign policy decision, including the response to López Obrador’s letter, corresponds to the Government and not the head. of the State. Diplomatic sources trust that this is the last episode of an artificial dispute about what happened 500 years ago, but the still Mexican Foreign Minister, Alicia Bárcena, has conditioned its end to there being a “ceremony of redress” for the indigenous peoples of which Spain, for now, does not want to hear about.
Venezuela: diplomatic balancing act
These historicist debates may seem like fireworks compared to the drama that Venezuela is currently experiencing. Spanish diplomacy balances so as not to recognize the victory of Nicolás Maduro in the elections of July 28 or that of Edmundo González Urrutia, who has been granted asylum in Spain since September 8. Last Thursday, Spain took a step further by joining a statement promoted by the United States and Argentina that affirms that the opposition candidate “obtained the majority of the votes, according to publicly available electoral records.” It still does not recognize him as president-elect, but almost.
If repression does not force it to do so sooner, Spain will have to abandon its ambiguity on January 10, when the new presidential term begins. Not recognizing Maduro from that date will mean, regardless of the sanctions that the EU may agree, that the ambassador in Caracas cannot be replaced, since that would imply asking the Chavista regime for its approval.
The bilateral relationship has been complicated by the arrest of two Spaniards whom Maduro accuses of a plot to overthrow him. Diplomatic sources suspect that Caracas has taken them hostage to pressure Spain.
The crises in Argentina, Mexico and Venezuela are not only foreign policy issues, but have become throwing weapons in the internal political battle. In Latin America, the former colonizing power plays the role of an external enemy with which to distract attention from domestic problems. In Spain, it serves the different political forces to establish a position against the Government. The right —PP and Vox— asks for less firmness with Milei and more with Maduro; while the space on the left of the PSOE justifies the snub to the King and will be at the inauguration of the Mexican president.
Despite political quarrels, the ties between the respective societies show no signs of weakening. Spain continues to be the second foreign investor, after the United States, in Mexico and Argentina; and the Spanish oil company Repsol, one of the best clients of Venezuelan crude oil. Almost 800,000 Spaniards live in the three Latin American countries; and in Spain, almost a million Venezuelans, Argentines and Mexicans.
Felipe VI and Pedro Sánchez will attend in a month and a half the Ibero-American summit that will be held from November 12 to 15 in Cuenca (Ecuador), to which Javier Milei, Claudia Sheinbaum and Nicolás Maduro are also invited. It is unlikely that all presidents will attend, but all governments will be represented. Despite the existing diplomatic crises, it has been unanimously decided that the next meeting, in 2026, will be precisely in Spain. “We are a family and relatives are not chosen, you get along or you tolerate each other,” reflects a veteran ambassador.
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