From Foreign Policy
Mexican foreign policy over the last two decades has been increasingly open and engaged with the region and the world. But if Mexicans pick Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known as AMLO, as their next president in less than two weeks, as the polls seem to indicate they will, then the country’s foreign policy could take a sharp turn to the left — and relations with the United States could fall into new depths.
López Obrador is likely to name as his foreign minister 73-year-old Héctor Vasconcelos, a former diplomat, a classical pianist, and an international relations dinosaur. The son of a famous writer, José Vasconcelos, and a renowned pianist, Esperanza Cruz, the Harvard University-trained political scientist brings a cultured touch to López Obrador’s National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), the populist left-wing party that now dominates the Mexican polls. He has written three books on classical music, served as the director of the International Cervantino Festival, and was the first executive secretary of Mexico’s National Fund for Culture and Arts. In 1985, he received a King of Spain International Journalism Award for a television series on Mexican culture.
He also represents a direct link to Mexico’s revolutionary past. His father — who was born in 1882 and was already in his 60s when Vasconcelos himself was born — was active in the Mexican revolution of 1910 to 1920 and later became Mexico’s secretary of education. By the mid-1940s, when Vasconcelos was born, his father’s household was where aging revolutionaries gathered to talk of the glory days.
For Vasconcelos, with advanced degrees in political science and international relations from the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, it was only a matter of time before one of Mexico’s most famous sons was pulled into public service. He served as Mexico’s consul general in Boston and as ambassador to Denmark, Norway, and Iceland.
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