In case you missed John’s coverage of what’s been going on in Peru this month, the situation is definitely grim. The country’s socialist President, Pedro Castillo, was arrested and removed from office on various charges of corruption after he attempted to dissolve the Peruvian congress by executive order to avoid being impeached. Vice President Dina Boluarte was sworn in as President shortly thereafter. Riots broke out across the country and the courts called in the military in an attempt to restore order. The country is now under a declared state of emergency. Now, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has stirred the pot further by announcing his support for Castillo as the legitimate president and criticized America’s ambassador to Peru for taking a meeting with Boluarte. AMLO is generally on the same page as the United States in most things, so this was a curious development to be sure. (Reuters)

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Friday criticized a state of emergency imposed in Peru to tackle violent protests and slammed the U.S. ambassador to Lima for meeting the South American country’s new leader.

Unrest in Peru erupted after the ousting of leftist President Pedro Castillo, who was arrested last week after trying to dissolve the country’s Congress.

Lopez Obrador, a fellow leftist, has called Castillo the rightful president of Peru, even as he insists his foreign policy is dictated by non-intervention in the affairs of other states.

AMLO is criticizing the Peruvian state of emergency because it grants special powers to the police and allows the military to assist law enforcement in restricting civic freedoms regarding speech and public movement.

The Mexican president went on to criticize Lisa Kenna, our ambassador to Peru, for her meeting with Boluarte. He said that Kenna’s actions were “a display of arrogance” and a failure to “respect how things are done.” He even tossed in some criticism of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, suggesting that he didn’t even know what was going on in Peru and was leaving everything up to the ambassador because “that’s how they’ve always done it, especially in Latin America.”

It’s difficult to sort out exactly what’s going on with the internal machinations of the Peruvian political system at the moment. If we learn that a strongman like Castillo was engaged in corrupt activities intended to enrich himself and his allies, most of us probably won’t be terribly surprised. But it’s worth mentioning that the Peruvian legislature is controlled by a coalition of left-wing opposition parties under Somos’ Peru. Castillo was governing as an independent but was previously with the right-wing Fuerza Popular (“Popular Force”) party. The opposition may have engineered these charges to regain more control of the country.

It’s really none of our business who winds up in control of Peru and it really shouldn’t be Mexico’s business either. Peru held its own elections and its constitution contains provisions for the impeachment and removal of a president if they are found to have violated the law. It’s really not at all unusual for ambassadors to meet with and greet a newly appointed president, so it’s hard to see why Lisa Kenna would be seen as being out of line.

Whatever may be going on in Mexico at the moment, AMLO is sounding quite a bit different these days than he did when Trump was in office and cutting deals with him. And the Mexican president really hasn’t made much progress in reining in the drug cartels in his country or blocking the flow of illegal migrants heading northward. (That’s assuming he ever intended to try in the first place.) As a country that shares a border with the United States and benefits tremendously from our generous trade deals with them, you’d expect to see a bit more of a cooperative nature coming from AMLO. Perhaps Joe Biden should send someone to have a word with him. Then again, considering how things have been going thus far under this administration, that might only make matters worse.