The “tradition” of occupying embassies as refuge or exile – begun by PRI governments in the 20th century – is maintained in the fourth transformation. The last to receive this offer was former Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero, who, if this supposed new destination in a diplomatic mission is finalized, will join a long list of ambassadors and consuls from outside the Mexican Foreign Service and appointed over the past seven years for political motivations.
When Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum explained the reasons for the dismissal of Gertz Manero as head of the attorney general’s office, she simply said that she had invited him to occupy an embassy “in a friendly country.” Since then, speculation has swirled that his destination could be Germany, although nothing has been finalized so far. The government has addressed the issue by saying that the destination country must agree before the president sends the formal proposal to the Senate, which has just closed its regular session, or to the Permanent Commission of Congress, also authorized to ratify this type of appointment. So far, there is no indication that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has initiated the process and maintains the mystery over the fate of the former prosecutor. “It takes time until the country to which the project is proposed accepts the credentials, and then it becomes public; this is normal,” Sheinbaum justified.
Gertz’s arrival in an embassy would confirm a line that has characterized Mexico’s foreign policy in recent decades. Former President Felipe Calderón used them to place PAN members such as Francisco Barrio (Canada), Jorge Zermeño and Francisco Ramírez Acuña (Spain), as well as his first lawyer, Eduardo Medina Mora, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Former President Enrique Peña Nieto also appointed prominent members of the PRI, such as Fernando Castro Trenti (Switzerland); Blanca Alcalá (Colombia), Dionisio Pérez-Jácome (Canada), Melquiades Morales (Costa Rica) and Juan José Guerra Abud (Italy).
On average, during each six-year term, at least 20 of the 80 Mexican embassies are occupied by politicians not belonging to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and this has not changed with former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, since currently 24 embassies are occupied not by career diplomats, but by former governors, social leaders, trailblazers de Morena, intellectuals and journalists linked to the regime. Appointments that contravene the spirit of the Foreign Service Act, which establishes that the appointment of ambassadors and consuls general will be made “preferably among career members of the foreign service with the greatest competence, category and seniority in the diplomatic and consular sector”.
The novelty of 4T is that previously members of the same party or former senior officials of the current government were usually appointed, but López Obrador decided to use some embassies to appoint former opposition governors, whom President Sheinbaum kept in office.
These are five former governors who were nominated after their parties ceded power to Morena, which gave rise to the version that their appointment was a reward in exchange for their non-involvement in the elections or for having operated in favor of Morena’s candidates. The PRI then expelled them from its ranks, thus fueling this narrative.
Carlos Joaquín González, former governor of Quintana Roo of the PAN-PRD alliance, was appointed ambassador to Canada in 2022, after the victory of the Morenista Mara Lezama. Quirino Ordaz, former PRI governor of Sinaloa, was appointed ambassador to Spain in 2021, after the triumph of Morenist Rubén Rocha. Omar Fayad, a former member of the PRI who governed Hidalgo, received the Norwegian embassy mission in 2022, also after the electoral success of Morenist Julio Menchaca. Claudia Pavlovich, former PRI governor in Sonora, has occupied the Mexican embassy in Panama since September 2025, at the suggestion of President Sheinbaum; Previously, she was appointed by López Obrador as consul general of Mexico in Barcelona, after ceding the governorship to Morena’s candidate, Alfonso Durazo. Before her, the founder of Morena had tried to place Pedro Salmerón, another faithful of the 4T, there, but Panama did not give its agreement. Carlos Miguel Aysa González, ambassador to the Dominican Republic, was previously interim governor of Campeche, where he replaced current PRI leader and federal deputy Alejandro Moreno. Her nomination was proposed by López Obrador in 2021, after Morenist Layda Sansores won the governorship.
The list of political appointees in embassies also includes activists, former leaders and former candidates of Morena or the PRD. In Argentina, Lilia Eugenia Rossbach Juárez, former deputy of Morena in the Local Congress of Mexico (2021) and in the Constituent Assembly (2016), and widow of José María Pérez Gay, was appointed. In Colombia, the ambassador is Patricia Ruiz Anchondo, former social lawyer in the capital, former head of delegation to Gustavo A Madero, former deputy of the PRD and Morena. In Guatemala, López Obrador placed Romeo Ruiz Armento, a veteran left-wing activist and politician, deputy and candidate for governor of Chiapas, who joined Morena in 2019 and is the partner of Layda Sansores, governor of Campeche.
In Venezuela, the former president placed Leopoldo De Gyves de la Cruz, Oaxaca politician, former deputy and former mayor of Juchitán. He is the son of Leopoldo De Gyves Pineda, founder of the Coalition of Peasant Workers of the Isthmus (COCEI), he is active in Morena and aspires to run for governor in 2021. A year later, the Senate approved his appointment as ambassador.
Likewise, journalists and writers linked to the regime have been sent to diplomatic missions, among them the writer Laura Esquivel, ambassador to Brazil since 2022, who was previously federal representative of Morena between 2015 and 2018. Another case is that of the journalist Martha Zamarripa, who was federal representative of the PRD and today ambassador to Belize, or that of Genaro Lozano, citizen activist, university professor and program host at Televisa, appointed by Sheinbaum as ambassador to the Italian government. Guillermo Zamora Villa, veteran writer and magazine journalist Processhas occupied the Mexican embassy in Nicaragua since 2022. And finally, Isabel Arvide, appointed by former President López Obrador as consul in Istanbul, Turkey.
“There is no cronyism or influence… It is a situation where journalists are diplomats,” López Obrador justified in July 2020, announcing the appointment of Isabel Arvide, whose mandate as consul attracted criticism from the beginning and until October 2024, when she herself announced the end of her administration and published photos of her return to Mexico.
Another appointment that has caused some unease is that of the current ambassador to the Russian Federation, Eduardo Villegas. Writer and philosopher, he was founder of Morena and collaborator of Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller -wife of López Obrador- within the General Coordination of Historical and Cultural Memory of Mexico, created at the beginning of the six-year term. “He is professional, studious, I think he speaks seven languages; his history is linked to our movement. If the opposition says it was bad, it is very likely that it was good,” defended López Obrador in August 2022.
The former president also used the British Embassy to alienate his first cabinet’s Environment Secretary, Josefa González Blanco, whom he had to fire in May 2019 after a scandal in which social media users published that the official had stopped a commercial flight at Mexico City’s airport to be able to board despite her late arrival. Years after her appointment, the ambassador was criticized for using diplomatic headquarters resources to care for the then-president’s son during a personal trip.
In Korea, the ambassador is Carlos Peñafiel Soto, former leader of Morena in Querétaro and commentator in local media. “Guadalupean, economist and businessman”, as he defines himself on his social networks, Peñafiel has worked in international companies and organizations, but began his diplomatic career in 2019, when López Obrador appointed him ambassador to the Dominican Republic. He left for Korea in 2022.
Like other presidents, López Obrador has placed politicians in the embassies of major economic and military powers. Sheinbaum has maintained them until now. In China, he placed Jesús Seade Kuri, who was López Obrador’s representative at the start of the USMCA negotiations at the end of Enrique Peña Nieto’s six-year term and who served as undersecretary for North America at the Foreign Ministry until 2020, with then-Foreign Minister Macelo Ebrard. And in the United States, the former president appointed Esteban Moctezuma Barragán, Secretary of Public Education in his first cabinet, in February 2021. The former member of the PRI was responsible for the Ministry of the Interior during Ernesto Zedillo’s six-year term and was president of the Azteca Foundation, Grupo Salinas.
International organizations and consulates
More recently, President Sheinbaum proposed Alejandro Encinas, another prominent 4T politician, as representative to the Organization of American States (OAS), a position previously reserved for the Mexican Foreign Service. Encinas was interim head of government when López Obrador ran for president in 2006, a PRD and Morena lawmaker, an undersecretary in the Interior Ministry and an aide to Clara Brugada. He also named Hugo López-Gatell, who was undersecretary of Health and responsible for government policy during the Covid-19 pandemic, as Mexico’s representative to the World Health Organization.
In addition to the appointment of ambassadors, there are consuls, mainly in the United States: Rutilio Escandón, former Morenist governor of Chiapas, has been in Miami since December 2024; María Elena Orantes, a Chiapasian Movimiento Ciudadano politician, former PRI member and lawmaker, was appointed to Houston in 2023; Pável Meléndez Cruz, Morenist deputy from Oaxaca, has been consul in Denver since 2022. And, until a month ago, the former governor of Chiapas, Juan Sabines, was consul in Orlando, a position he held since 2015 and in which he was ratified by López Obrador in 2019.
Last June, President Sheinbaum made five similar appointments. Carlos Iriarte Mercado, a longtime member of the Mexican PRI, was sent as consul to Boston; Marco Antonio Mena, former PRI governor of Tlaxcala, San Francisco; General Luis Rodríguez Bucio, former commander of the National Guard, in Dallas; Donají Alba Arroyo, who chaired the Morena Commission for Honesty and Justice between 2020 and 2024, in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Neftali Said Pérez González, head of the Youth to Build the Future program of the Ministry of Labor, in San José, California. It remains to be seen where Gertz Manero will go and when.
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