Juan Ramón de la Fuente, an invisible diplomacy

MEXICO CITY ( Proceso ).– “Juan Ramón de la Fuente is doing a great job,” President Claudia Sheinbaum responded at her morning press conference on July 16 to a question about rumors of the chancellor’s possible removal, which circulated in the corridors of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE) and reached the diplomatic corps accredited in Mexico.

However, the Mexican Foreign Ministry, which played a central role during Andrés Manuel López Obrador's administration—partly due to the presidential ambitions of its then president, Marcelo Ebrard Casaubon—appears to be a secondary institution under Sheinbaum's administration, under the leadership of the former UNAM rector.

Nine months after taking the reins of the Foreign Ministry, Juan Ramón de la Fuente has maintained a low public profile and has steered clear of relations with the United States. Proof of this is that he has left Roberto Velasco Álvarez, Marcelo Ebrard's former spokesperson, in charge of the North American Unit, the Foreign Ministry division in charge of relations with Washington.

The foreign minister has been excluded from the negotiations for the new "general agreement," which will cover security, migration, and trade, and which Sheinbaum proposed to Trump during a phone call last June. The first meeting regarding this agreement, held in Washington on July 11, was chaired by Ebrard.

In fact, in just under six months, Ebrard has already traveled to Washington 10 times to meet with the Trump administration to negotiate preferential tariffs; he has also held three virtual meetings with the Trump administration, his team told Proceso .

Omar García Harfuch, Secretary of Security and Citizen Protection (SSPC), has made two trips to Washington and became the Trump administration's point of contact on combating criminal groups and fentanyl trafficking.

De la Fuente, in contrast, has traveled to Washington only twice: the first time, on February 27, to accompany Sheinbaum's security cabinet—he took advantage of the occasion to meet with Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State—and the second time, last March, to attend the election of the new Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS).

The chancellor has had five phone calls with Marco Rubio and another remote conversation with Christopher Landau, the Undersecretary of State.

“So discreet that it cannot be seen”

Juan Ramón de la Fuente led Mexico's Mission to the UN for the first five years of Andrés Manuel López Obrador's administration. He returned to Mexico in September 2023 and, months later, joined Sheinbaum's presidential campaign, serving as coordinator of the group of experts that organized the "dialogues for transformation" and designed the then-candidate's government platform.

The appointment of the former rector of UNAM to the Foreign Ministry was celebrated in the diplomatic community, where his talent as a fine negotiator and conciliator, as well as his penchant for multilateralism, were highlighted. However, these virtues were not reflected in the Sheinbaum administration's management of foreign relations; De la Fuente appointed very few members of his own team, appears rarely at public events, and does not hold press conferences.

"He thinks he's practicing discreet diplomacy, but it's so discreet that it's invisible; public, visible diplomacy is nonexistent, but there are no concrete results from discreet diplomacy either: neither in his relationship with the United States, nor in his relationship with Latin America, nor in opening up new areas of opportunity like the European Union, China, or Japan," Eminent Ambassador Martha Bárcena, who represented Mexico in the United States during the previous six-year term, told Proceso .

The Foreign Ministry's silence has forced Sheinbaum to respond, at her morning press conference, to the repeated attacks the Donald Trump administration has launched against Mexico since taking office.

The Foreign Ministry has made few comments on the tariffs announced by Trump against certain sectors of the economy, nor has it condemned the raids his administration launched against migrants, simply expressing its "deep concern" about the operations.

She did not condemn the July 10 raid on a cannabis farm in Camarillo, California, that resulted in the death of Mexican citizen Jaime Alanís García. She remained silent when the magnate allocated $170 billion to border control, including $75 billion to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), making it the security agency with the largest budget in the U.S. administration.

The agency issued no statement when the press revealed that the United States government had canceled the visas of Mexican politicians suspected of irregular activities, including Marina del Pilar Ávila, the governor of Baja California for the Morena party, and did not condemn the collapse of the tomato agreement, which resulted in the imposition of a 17% tariff on that agricultural product.

The Foreign Ministry also failed to act when the Trump administration announced a 5% tax on remittances, a measure that threatened to seriously harm the income of families in Mexico. On that occasion, the Foreign Ministry preferred to delegate diplomatic duties: Juan Ramón de la Fuente met with a commission of Mexican legislators who traveled to Washington to engage in dialogue with their US counterparts.

Asked about this during his appearance at the presidential morning press conference on July 18, De la Fuente asserted that "the role played by the commission was important" and added that its results were "satisfactory" because the tax remained at 1%, although he acknowledged that "we would have liked it to have remained at zero." This interpretation contrasts with that of Sheinbaum, who had condemned any tax on remittances.

On July 11, Jeffrey Lichtman, the lawyer for Ovidio Guzmán López and Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, accused Sheinbaum of being a "publicist" for drug trafficker Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada. That day, Sheinbaum responded to the lawyer; hours later, the Attorney General's Office (FGR) followed suit, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs remained silent until 9:56 p.m., when Pablo Arrocha, legal advisor to the Foreign Ministry, posted on social media to reject Lichtman's accusations.

I categorically reject Jeffrey Lichtman's statements.

We will not fall for provocations or engage in debates with lawyers for confessed and convicted drug traffickers, who are only seeking notoriety. — Pablo Arrocha (@PArrocha25) July 12, 2025

Politicized consulates

Upon taking office, Juan Ramón de la Fuente announced that his administration's priority would be serving the migrant community in the United States—that is, consular activities.

His work got off to a rocky start: shortly after taking the reins of the agency, he created the General Coordination of Consulates and offered the position to his friend Jorge Islas López, who had been UNAM's general counsel during his presidency and whom he had met in New York during Andrés Manuel López Obrador's six-year term. He served as head of Mexico's mission to the UN and Islas as consul general in the megalopolis.

Shortly after his appointment, 16 female employees of the Mexican Foreign Service published a letter accusing Islas of workplace harassment and bullying, forcing the lawyer to announce his resignation.

pic.twitter.com/QGpG0wLgrt — Jorge Islas (@Jorge_IslasLo) October 22, 2024

And the problems continued to mount for the chancellor. At the beginning of the year, protests by consular staff erupted at several U.S. consulates over payment delays. In Sacramento, California, employees even closed the consulate, headed by Christian Tonatiuh González Jiménez, a close associate of De la Fuente, until the government intervened to regularize the payments.

As if that weren't enough, De la Fuente received a consular network comprised of political figures appointed by López Obrador in return for favors, and had to endorse—with a supposed vetting—Sheinbaum's appointments of other politicians. Although most Mexican consulates in the United States continue to be run by career diplomats, some of the main ones are headed by politicians.

Prominent among these are former governor of Chiapas, Rutilio Escandón Cadenas; former PRI governor of Tlaxcala, Marco Antonio Mena Rodríguez; Luis Rodríguez Bucio, former head of the National Guard; Neftali Said Pérez González, former head of the Youth Building the Future program; PRI member Marcos Augusto Bucio Mújica, general secretary of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) during Zoé Robledo's administration; Humberto Hernández Haddad, former undersecretary of tourism; and politicians María Elena Orantes López and Pavel Meléndez Cruz.

Indefinite agenda

Juan Ramón de la Fuente has also failed to promote a clear international agenda regarding the rest of the world. Under Alicia Bárcena Ibarra, at the end of López Obrador's six-year term, the Foreign Ministry had joined South Africa's initiative to sue Israel before the International Court of Justice in The Hague for acts of genocide in Gaza, but after de la Fuente's arrival, the Foreign Ministry stopped taking a position on the Middle East.

Last July, the Foreign Ministry didn't even comment on Iran's withdrawal from its cooperation with the UN Atomic Energy Agency, despite the fact that nuclear disarmament has been a long-standing focus of Mexican diplomacy.

Regarding Latin America, De la Fuente did not follow his predecessors' initiatives to establish Mexico as a regional power through the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), although he did travel to Beijing in May to participate in the CELAC summit with China.

However, the Foreign Ministry maintained the logic of confrontation with the OAS that began during López Obrador's six-year term: in early June, it sent a diplomatic note to the international organization to reject the conclusions of the Electoral Observation Mission (EOM) report on the June 1 judicial election, in which experts pointed out a series of irregularities and recommended that other countries in the region refrain from replicating the election held in Mexico.

In bilateral meetings, the foreign minister met in Mexico City with Laura Sarabia, his Colombian counterpart, with whom he discussed migration issues. He also took advantage of his recent trip to Brazil—where he represented Sheinbaum at the BRICS summit—to meet with Mauro Vieira and Mario Lubetkin, foreign ministers of Brazil and Uruguay, respectively, as well as with his counterparts from India and Thailand.

During that trip, which took place on July 6, De la Fuente took a smiling photo with Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, with whom he "discussed the international agenda," according to the Russian embassy in Mexico.