RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Juan González Román, director of Hemispheric Affairs at the U.S. National Security Council (NSC), warned that Mexico should be cautious with vaccines coming from China and Russia, as both nations could do so at the cost of certain “conditions” and “political interests.”
“There is a big difference here. One is vaccine diplomacy in exchange for political goods, while for us (the United States) the motivation is the welfare of the Mexican people,” President Biden’s advisor on Latin America-related issues told Milenio newspaper. “When we give vaccines to Mexico and when we engage in much closer cooperation, we will not do it with conditions,” he said.
The Colombian-born official, who previously worked for Barack Obama’s administration, emphasized that after meeting immunization goals in its population, the U.S. has its sights set on its most important and closest trading partners.
“We are obviously focused on recovering the United States, but we are also focused on the entire world and with an emphasis on Latin America obviously, given our national interests,” Gonzalez added.
“We are betting that the future between the United States and Mexico is going to be one of very close collaboration. That is the relationship we seek with Mexico: one of mutual interest. Not one where we want to intimidate, threaten or get our own benefit at the expense of Mexico or the Mexican people,” he said.
Read: Analysis – China Enters Argentina as Good Samaritan but Could Become a Trojan Horse
To date, the governments of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have allocated more vaccines to Mexico than has its northern neighbor. Mexico has negotiated 24 million vaccines with Russia and 35 million with China, while the US has only sent a first shipment of 2.5 million. However, for Gonzales, these shipments of vaccines from Russia and China could hide behind “geopolitical calculations” and “specific interests”.
For their part, Russian and Chinese diplomats criticized on Tuesday the Western policy regarding vaccines against the coronavirus and defended themselves against those who accuse them of “opportunism”, stressing that they only want to “save lives”.
Western countries “are trying to portray Russia and China as opportunists in what has been called vaccine diplomacy. And it’s not true,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who was on an official visit to China, said Tuesday.
Vaccine policy should be “guided by criteria of humanity, by the interest in saving lives and not by geopolitical issues or trade issues to leave competitors behind,” he added, quoted by Russian press agencies.
“Rather than saying that China wants to carry out a kind of vaccine diplomacy, it would be better to say that China carries out humanitarian action,” his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi stressed.
“Our intention, from the beginning, has been for as many people as possible to receive a vaccine as soon as possible,” he insisted.
Mexican President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also made a statement on the matter: “I read the US government’s report”, he assured in his usual morning press conference. “That there were nations that made relations with the delivery of vaccines, they called it the diplomacy of vaccines, yesterday there was a statement in that sense that we had to put a little salt to the vaccines that came from other countries to Mexico… yes, from Russia.”
“We share bread and salt with everyone, and there must be in this case of the vaccines and the health of the people, universal fraternity must prevail over hegemonies, the most important thing is the people, we have to maintain good relations with all countries, with all governments of the world, and when it is about vaccines to protect the people, we have to communicate with everyone and seek universal fraternity, so fortunately we have managed to get the support of the government of Russia, the government of China, of India and of the USA”, he concluded.
Source: Infobae