Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is notorious for avoiding meetings with protesters.
It took him an entire year to finally meet with the parents of the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College who went missing in September 2014. Peña Nieto also cancelled talks with leaders of National Coordination of Education Workers, CNTE, which led massive protests last year against government education cuts.
Despite routinely canceling or outright refusing meetings with anti-government protesters from Mexico, he seems willing to meet those from Venezuela.
Peña Nieto met with Venezuelan opposition activist Lilian Tintori on Thursday to discuss ongoing protests taking place in the South American country, Business Insider reports.
“We trust that, via an agreement between all sides, it will be the Venezuelans who re-establish the democratic order,” he said via Twitter late on Thursday after the meeting.
“Peña Nieto is worried about the situation that Venezuelans are living in,” Tintori said in an interview with Mexican media network Grupo Imagen.
The Mexican president’s meeting with Tintori reinforced his country’s pro-interventionist position on Venezuela. For weeks, the Mexican government has backed the Organization of American States, OAS, in its attempt to suspend Venezuela from the regional organization for alleged “human rights abuses.”
During a recent OAS meeting, Mexican Secretary of Foreign Affairs Luis Videgaray Caso expressed “concern” about Venezuela’s political and economic situation. Videgaray, siding with the Canada and the U.S., sponsored calls for regime change against Maduro’s democratically-elected government.
Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez immediately slammed Videgaray’s remarks, saying that he “attacked Venezuela to ingratiate himself with his imperial owners.”
Peña Nieto’s meeting with Tintori also fueled controversy, given that he condemns alleged violence in Venezuela while totally ignoring government aggression taking place in his own country.
Just yesterday, federal police in the Mexican state of Michoacan killed four Indigenous campesinos, entering their homes and shooting them on site, Ruptura Colectiva reports. And last week, a new report showed that violence against journalists in Mexico and impunity for these crimes have reached crisis levels.
People who kill journalists in Mexico get away with murder 99.7 percent of the time, press freedom group Article 19.
So while Peña Nieto claims to support “human rights” in Venezuela, it’s obvious that he refuses to practice what he preaches in his own country.
© teleSUR