President Andrés Manuel López Obrador will have a final meeting with his Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro, who will attend the inauguration of Claudia Sheinbaum, the next president.
According to sources from the Colombian Presidency, Petro is expected to travel from September 29 to October 1, and during the visit he will meet with López Obrador, one of his main allies in the region.
This will be the third time that Petro visits Mexico, having been there in October of last year at the regional conference on migration, and also in November 2022, when he met for the first time as president with López Obrador and also had a bilateral meeting with Sheinbaum, who was then head of government of Mexico City.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has also confirmed his attendance in Mexico and the inauguration of the new president, so the presidents of the G3, as the Colombian Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo called the triad that is trying to mediate in the Venezuelan crisis, would be in the same place.
The leaders hold similar but nuanced positions on Venezuela and have tried to mediate, especially Petro and Lula, in the crisis that Venezuela has been experiencing since the electoral body announced the questionable victory of President Nicolás Maduro in the elections of July 28.
Neither Colombia nor Brazil have yet recognized Maduro’s victory, but neither have they sided with the standard-bearer of the majority opposition, Edmundo González Urrutia, instead demanding that the electoral records be published and opening avenues for dialogue with both parties.
Claudia Sheinbaum’s inauguration ceremony has sparked controversy over the invitation of Russian President Vladimir Putin, but the Mexican government and the president-elect’s transition team have argued that it is the country’s tradition to invite all governments with which it has diplomatic relations.
López Obrador now argued that it will be up to Juan Ramón de la Fuente, head of Sheinbaum’s transition team and her next foreign minister, to “announce who has confirmed that they will attend.”
But she said that “there will be many heads of state, presidents, prime ministers” given the historic nature of Sheinbaum’s victory, who won on June 2 with a record of almost 36 million votes, nearly 60% of the total, and will be the first female president of Mexico.