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Mexico, Peru withdraw ambassadors from Cuba
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-05-03 10:53 Mexico pulled its ambassador from Havana on Sunday
and accused Cuba of interfering in its internal affairs as bitterness over
Mexico's close relations with the United States came to a head.
The dispute began with Mexico's support last month for a censure of Cuba at a
U.N. rights body. Peru, which also criticized the island's rights record,
withdrew its envoy on Sunday after harsh criticism from President Fidel Castro
at a May Day speech in Havana on Saturday.
"Mexico does not and will not tolerate under any circumstance any foreign
government trying to affect our decisions on foreign or domestic policy,"
Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez told a news conference.
Mexico asked Cuba to pull its envoy out of Mexico City within 48 hours, he
said. A spokesman for the Cuban government said Havana had no immediate comment
on the Mexican decision.
Mexico was a traditional ally of Cuba for decades but relations have fallen
to an all time low under President Vicente Fox, who has swung Mexico closer to
Washington since taking power in 2000.
Castro harshly criticized Mexico in his May Day speech for voting against
Cuba, saying Mexico's prestige in the world had "turned into ashes."
He also lashed out at Lima, saying Peru was an example of the "wretchedness
and dependency" left by neo-liberal economic policies. He slammed unpopular
President Alejandro Toledo as a man who "does not and cannot direct anything."
Toledo is struggling with an approval rating of just 8 percent.
A Foreign Ministry statement in Lima said Peru rejected Castro's "offensive"
comments and was downgrading its diplomatic representation to a business attach.
It is the second time Toledo's government has pulled out its envoy.
Mexico's Interior Minister Santiago Creel also said two members of the Cuban
Communist Party's central committee had been "carrying out activities
incompatible with their status" in Mexico.
That term is often used by governments to denote spying but Creel added that
the pair had dabbled in "affairs which should be dealt with by diplomatic
channels in the relevant institutions," suggesting they had become involved in
Mexican politics.
The pair spent several days in Mexico in April and entered the country on
diplomatic passports, he said.
He said Mexico had declared Orlando Silva, a diplomat at the Cuban Embassy,
"persona non grata," meaning he had to leave the country immediately. Mexico did
not say when its ambassador would return to Cuba.
Mexico last week said it would protest officially to Havana over comments the
Cuban foreign ministry made about a corruption scandal that has dented the
presidential ambitions of Mexico City's leftist mayor.
The Fox government was angered by Cuban suggestions that it was using the
scandal to undermine the popular mayor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Relations with Cuba have strained several times since conservative Fox, a
former Coca-Cola executive, ended 71 years of one-party rule in Mexico at
elections four years ago. The previously ruling Institutional Revolutionary
Party, or PRI, was on good terms with Cuba.
Castro gave Fox a red face in 2002 when he released a taped telephone
conversation in which the Mexican president urged him to leave a regional summit
in northern Mexico early so as to avoid friction with U.S. President Bush, also
attending the meeting.
Fox had denied pressuring Castro to leave the event.
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