Sen. Bob Menéndez (D-N.J.) on Thursday accused Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of attempting to blackmail President Biden to include non-democratic regimes in the guest list for the Summit of the Americas.
Menéndez's comments come as López Obrador skipped the U.S.-hosted Summit, and has taken to his daily press conference to criticize Cuban-American senators, particularly Menéndez, for their role in excluding the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua from the hemispheric event.
"I think President López Obrador basically tried to blackmail President Bident into insisting countries that are not democratic, countries like Venezuela, Cuba [President] Daniel Ortega's Nicaragua, that are dictators and despots, should have been invited to the summit," Menéndez told MSNBC's José Díaz Balart.
López Obrador was the highest-profile leader to skip the Summit, ongoing this week in Los Angeles, but he was joined in the snub by the leaders of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
Menéndez told Díaz Balart that Mexico is one of America’s most important bilateral relationships in the world, but said Biden made the right choice to exclude the three countries that have either not signed or openly defy the Inter-American Democratic Charter.
"I applaud President Biden for upholding the standard of the Summit to be a summit of democracies," said Menéndez, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Still, López Obrador singled out Menéndez in his daily press conference Monday, comparing his positions on relations with Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua to those of Republican Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Ted Cruz (Texas).
"Those two gentlemen, I understand them better because they're Republicans. But this gentleman, he's in the Democratic Party," said López Obrador, referring to Menéndez.
López Obrador then remarked that former Presidents Obama and Trump "permitted" all the countries...