Don’t look now, but a couple of our Latin American neighbors are not very happy with each other. As you may remember, President Pedro Castillo of Peru was impeached and replaced by Vice President Dino Boluarte. Apparently, the Peruvian Congress had enough of their President’s attacks on the legislature. They impeached and arrested him and that should have been the end of a local matter.
Not so fast. President Andres Lopez-Obrador of Mexico, the self-appointed leader of everything, publicly criticized Peru and that’s when the back and forth began.
The latest in the crisis is that Peru has told the Mexican ambassador to go home. This is the story:
Peru declared Mexico’s ambassador to Lima “persona non grata” and ordered him to leave the country on Tuesday, Peru’s foreign minister announced, in the latest escalation of tensions between the two nations after Peru ousted Pedro Castillo as president.
The abrupt order, a severe measure in the world of diplomacy, gives Mexico’s envoy to the South American country just 72 hours to exit.
The Peruvian government’s decision came hours after Mexico’s top diplomat announced that his country had granted asylum to the family of Castillo, who faces rebellion charges from behind bars after attempting what critics have labeled a coup on Dec. 7.
Peru’s foreign ministry posted on social media that the ejection of Mexican Ambassador Pablo Monroy was due to “repeated statements from the highest authorities of that country regarding the political situation in Peru,” a thinly veiled reference to the support Mexico’s president has offered fellow leftist Castillo since his ouster by an overwhelming vote of lawmakers and his subsequent arrest.
Mexico’s foreign minister took to Twitter on Tuesday night to blast Monroy’s expulsion, deriding it as “unjustified and reprehensible.”
We don’t know if Mr. Monroy is Mexico-bound, but it won’t be long.