Foreign interference with a nation’s elections is seen across the world as an unwelcome intrusion. Accusations of such interference have surfaced in Mexico, with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador demanding President Joe Biden stop funding his opposition through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). He did so through a letter given to journalists according to Reuters. The letter read that “The U.S. government, specifically though USAID, has for some time been financing organizations openly against the legal and legitimate government I represent…This is clearly an interventionist act, contrary to international law and the relations which should prevail between free and sovereign states.”
The letter calls for Mr. Biden to cease this practice and noted with concern an announcement from the State Department about increasing funding to USAID. This is not the first time that the leftist, populist Mexican president has accused the United States of unduly meddling in the internal affairs of his country. Mr. Obrador sent a similar letter detailing similar concerns about USAID funding back in 2021 to no avail. A general election in Mexico is scheduled for July 2024.
The U.S. State Department for its part claims the money is needed due to threats to journalists and free expression in Mexico. Obrador has called the studies on the human rights abuses in Mexico that the State Department has compiled “lies.” It should be noted that the State Department itself confirmably does engage in censorship campaigns as part of a vast state censorship-technological nexus.
Jesús Ramírez Cuevas, a spokesman for Obrador tweeted, (translated) “The president @lopezobrador_ exercised his right to protest against the US government. for the financing that @USAID provides to non-governmental organizations that are ‘openly against a legal, legitimate government, a democratic government.'”
“How are they going to be financing opponents from abroad? That is a violation of our sovereignty, that is interventionism,” Obrador said according to Ramírez Cuevas.
Obrador also has defended the right to free speech in his own country in the past, as Reuters itself noted back in 2021, and condemned a media censorship bill. He also condemned the deplatforming of the 45th President of the United States Donald J. Trump and said “I don’t like anyone to be censored and for them to have their right taken away to send a message on Twitter or on Facebook.”
Mexico is not the only country that the United States stands accused of interfering in domestic politics. In Israel too, the State Department has been accused of providing funds to anti-government organizations and formally and covertly taking sides in the domestic affairs of the country. The State Department in that case issued a demonstrably false statement denying various activities it took with respect to the ongoing protests in Israel over judicial reform. This led Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to declare that “Israel is a sovereign country which makes its decisions by the will of its people and not based on pressures from abroad, including from the best of friends.”