Mexico’s President Skips U.N. General Assembly And All Other Foreign Travel.
As leaders from around the world spent Monday at the United Nations Climate Action Summit pledging to ban coal and cut carbon emissions, Mexico’s president was at his weekday news conference showing off a new app that tells consumers where the cheapest gas in the country can be found.
And it’s not just Monday’s events in New York. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is skipping the annual United Nations General Assembly altogether.
In fact, since taking office last December, López Obrador hasn’t left Mexico, not once. He didn’t attend the Group of 20 summit of world leaders in Osaka, Japan, this past June. And he has met only with foreign dignitaries who travel to Mexico, greatly limiting his international exposure.
“For him not to travel leaves us missing a lot of international opportunities,” says Rafael Fernández de Castro, the director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Fernández was a foreign policy adviser to former President Felipe Calderón.
