Other countries that took part include China, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Brazil. Conspicuously absent was any country from NATO, including Mexico’s USMCA trade partners, the US and Canada.
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Oksana Dramaretska, Ukraine´s ambassador to Mexico, posted a tweet (featured below) on Saturday (Sept 16) lambasting Mexico’s government for allowing a Russian military contingent to participate in Mexico’s Independence Day parade. In it, she wrote:
The military-civilian parade in Mexico, sullied by the participation of a Russian regiment. The boots and hands of war criminals are stained with blood.
She then asked Mexico´s President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador, or AMLO as he is popularly known:
How coherent is this, Mr. Lopéz Obrador, with your policy of neutrality and condemnation of aggression against my country?
Another Undiplomatic Diplomat
Dramaretska’s comments were widely endorsed and echoed by Mexico’s corporate media outlets and opposition parties. Yet this is not the first time that a contingent of an occupying foreign army has participated in Mexico’s Independence Day parade. In 2014, when Enrique Peña Nieto was president, a US regiment took part in the parade. At the time, the US armed forces were occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, were (and still are) bombarding Syria and, together with NATO, had just laid waste to Libya. As Hilary Clinton put it, “we came, we saw, he [Gaddafi] died.” Yet not a whimper of protest in the Mexican media.
Also widely ignored, including by the aptly named Dramaretska, is the fact that it is traditional practice for Mexican governments, not just this one, to send out invites to its Independence Day parade to all national governments with whom Mexico has diplomatic ties. It is up to each government whether it chooses to accept. As Cesar Gutiérrez Priego, a lawyer specialised in criminal, military and national security law, said in response to Dramaretska’s tweet, “surely you are aware that our country extends an invitation to all of the countries with whom it maintains diplomatic relations.”
This is not the first time that Dramaretska’s embassy has caused offence in Mexico. In the first few days of the Ukraine conflict, a Mexican journalist pointed out in a tweet exchange with the embassy that Kiev was censoring the media, to which the embassy responded:
… [You] continue to defend Russian propaganda without ever having visited Ukraine. So we have a question for you, Mr. Journalist: do you get paid in rubles or in tamales?
Tamales are a traditional Mexican dish consisting of corn husks or plantain leaves stuffed with tasty fillings such as meats, cheeses, chiles or vegetables. While delicious and devoured by most Mexicans today, they were traditionally seen as food for the lower, often indigenous classes. As such, the tweet had both classist and racist connotations and was hastily deleted by the embassy. But before then, it was preserved for posterity on Tweetstamp and quickly went viral…
Read the full article on Naked Capitalism
Nick Corbishley 