“To be a candidate for governor, why would you hold another country’s nationality? In other words, you are Mexican, period.”
Mexico’s federal government has sent a constitutional reform initiative to Congress that seeks to bar people with dual nationality from running for presidency of the Republic or state governorships. The measure would not affect dual nationality for ordinary Mexican citizens, including the millions of Mexican Americans entitled to citizenship in both countries.
“The issue is whether you want to be president or governor,” President Claudia Sheinbaum said during her morning news conference last week. “In that case, I believe it must be clear that you should have only one nationality, which is Mexican.”
The initiative sent by the federal executive seeks to modify articles 82, 116 and 122 of the Mexican Constitution. The goal is to ensure that holders of three senior positions in the executive branch have only Mexican nationality and put Mexico’s national interests first:
- Presidency of the Republic.
- State governorships.
- Head of government of Mexico City.
The proposed amendment to Article 82 says presidential candidates must be Mexican citizens by birth, have a Mexican father or mother, hold no other nationality and, if they do, renounce it before requesting registration as a candidate. It also requires presidential candidates to have lived in Mexico for at least 20 years.
The same nationality requirement would apply to candidates for state governor and head of the government of Mexico City.
“Why would you have dual nationality if you represent the people of Mexico?” asked Sheinbaum. “To be a candidate for governor, why would you hold another country’s nationality? In other words, you are Mexican, period.”
To justify the move, Sheinbaum held up the case of ex-Tamaulipas governor Francisco García Cabeza de Vaca (PAN), a dual national who was born in the US and is wanted in Mexico on a raft of criminal charges, including organised crime, money laundering and tax evasion. Immediately after his gubernatorial term limit expired and his political immunity ended in late 2022, Cabeza de Vaca (which translates as “cow’s head” in English) fled to the US.
As Insight Crime reports, “Cabeza de Vaca [had] maintained good standing with US officials, meeting with powerful senators in the state of Texas and working on bi-national security initiatives with Customs and Border Protection (CBP).”
Immediately following Cabeza de Vaca’s flight to the US, Mexico solicited his extradition, which was duly rejected by US authorities, as tends to happen with almost all of Mexico’s extradition applications to the US. [1] Cabeza de Vaca, who is considered a fugitive from justice in Mexico, has even suggested he might run for Mexican president in 2030.
While Sheinbaum has used Cabeza de Vaca’s case as the underlying pretext for the proposed constitutional reform, the move should also be understood in the broader context of what is happening across Latin America. Whether through electoral meddling or vote rigging (Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Honduras…) or direct military intervention (Venezuela), the Trump administration is determined to install vassal states in all of the region’s resource-rich countries.
As we have been warning since early 2023, two years before Trump 2.0, this Monroe Doctrine “redux” is primarily about resource plunder. Same as it ever was. It is also about “boxing out” (in the words of former SOUTHCOM commander Laura Richardson) China and Russia from the region’s strategic resources.
For the moment, the US’s direct economic management of its new Venezuelan protectorate offers the most glaring example of this process in action…
Having heads of government with dual US citizenship is a handy way of guaranteeing their loyalty — though Latin America’s comprador class have generally proven to be more than reliable toadies over the years.
Dual nationality is already a common occurrence among the current crop of Latin American heads of state and government. As far as I’m aware, five have dual or even triple citizenship:
- Argentina’s Javier Milei (Argentine + Italian), though one suspects that the self-described “most Zionist president in the world” will became an Israeli citizen at some point in the future, after converting to Judaism.
- Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa (Ecuadorian + US), who could even run for US president, given he was born in Miami.
- Bolivia’s Rodrigo Paz (Bolivian + Spanish). He is not the first Bolivian president to hold Spanish citizenship.
- Guatemala’s César Bernardo Arévalo de León (Guatemalan + Ecuadorian)
- Colombia’s Abelardo de la Espriella, who has three nationalities (Colombian, Italian and US).
So, out of Latin America and the Caribbean’s 33 heads of state, over one seventh hold dual nationality while one-sixteenth hold dual US citizenship. This, as far as I’m aware, is the first time in modern history that two current heads of state in the region have US citizenship.
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Nick Corbishley 