President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador officially nominated his former personal assistant, Eduardo Villegas Megías, as Mexico’s ambassador to Russia. Villegas worked as an assistant to López Obrador when he was head of government of the then Federal District (now Mexico City).
“The President of the Republic, Mr. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is pleased to appoint C. Eduardo Villegas Megías, as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Mexico to the Russian Federation and, concurrently, subject to the receipt of the corresponding blessings, before the Republics of Armenia and Belarus,” states the nomination that was sent to the Permanent Commission of the Senate of the Republic.
The nomination comes even though Villegas Megías has no diplomatic experience.
According to his profile, he studied philosophy, has been a university professor and in the public administration -in addition to having been a personal assistant to the president- he holds the position of Coordinator of Historical and Cultural Memory of Mexico of the Presidency of the Republic, where the wife of the president, Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller, is honorary president of the Advisory Council.
He has been in charge of the National Reading Strategy and the elaboration of the book “History of the Mexican People”, in coordination with the National Institute of Historical Studies of the Revolutions of Mexico.
The official nomination is given while the war between Russia and Ukraine continues; President López Obrador has pointed out that Mexico’s position is one of “non-intervention” in the armed conflict.
Although he has said he is against one country invading another, he also indicated, a few weeks ago, that Mexico will not take economic reprisals against Russia for attacks on Ukraine.
Read: Russia intensifies offensive in eastern Ukraine; more than a thousand soldiers remain in Mariupol
Eduardo Villegas Megías is not the only member of President López Obrador’s inner circle who has been nominated for diplomatic office this year.
In January he proposed two more people, the first, the writer and former federal deputy, Laura Beatriz Esquivel, nominated to be Mexico’s ambassador to Brazil and, the second, the historian Pedro Salmerón, for the Mexican embassy in Panama.
In April, the Senate unanimously ratified Esquivel as ambassador.
While, in the case of Salmerón, in February, after the Foreign Ministry of Panama sent a letter to the government of Mexico and rejected the historian as ambassador to that country – after the accusations of sexual harassment – he “declined” to the position offered by President López Obrador.
From AMLO’s assistants to directors
At least 10 aides to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador have obtained managerial positions and their respective salary increase in various public institutions.
First they accompanied President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on his tours of the states. They followed him like a shadow, always behind him. They collected letters, documents, petitions and gifts that people carried for the president. And they also took care of him: when necessary, they opened space for him so that he could pass among the crowd that always swirls around him. They were from the so-called Presidential Assistantship.
Currently, 10 of those who were members of this corps of civil guards occupy managerial positions in various public institutions, some of them without having previous experience to exercise the new positions they hold.
With their promotion, they doubled, and even tripled, the salary they received in the Assistantship, which was 46,337 gross pesos per month.
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