Is Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Donald Trump’s backpocket? His critics in the United States certainly think so, and they point to AMLO’s refusal to acknowledge Trump’s defeat in the weeks right after the U.S. election. Kurt Hackbarth, co-founder of the independent media project “MexElects,” has a different take, as this excerpt from his analysis published earlier this month in Jacobin explains. AMLO, meanwhile, sent Biden congratulations on his electoral triumph right after the Electoral College made that victory irrefutable.

On November 7, four days after Election Day, the major television networks called the US presidential election for Joe Biden. In response, many countries proceeded to congratulate the former vice president; others did not. Among those who have declined to do so is Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a fact that has incensed the Democratic Party hierarchy and the Washington intelligentsia alike. Representative Sylvia Garcia has insisted that “an extended abrazo from our friends in Mexico is in order”; her colleague Henry Cuellar preferred a more open threat, warning that the “slight” would be “remembered” by Democrats.

For his part, AMLO was unmoved. “We are adhering to our policy of principles, to our legality,” he said at his morning press conference. “And furthermore, we are not a colony. We are a free, independent, and sovereign country.”

With the argument that “the best foreign policy is domestic policy,” AMLO came to power in 2018 seeking to find a way to neutralize American interference in his reform agenda as much as possible. Despite dire warnings to the contrary, he managed to work out a sort of détente with Donald Trump that left him the room for maneuver he was looking for.

AMLO’s decision to hold off on recognizing Biden, moreover, is in line with public opinion: according to a poll by the Mexican newspaper El Financiero, 57 percent of those polled agreed with the presidential decision to wait, and only 25 percent disagreed. In the context of embarrassing losses among Mexican-American communities in Texas last month, the Democrats might want to spend a little less time lecturing their neighbor on its own diplomatic prerogatives and spend a little more listening to people on both sides of the border.

Regardless of what happens with the Cienfuegos affair, Mexico will not be anywhere near free with an asymmetric power playing spy-versus-spy in its territory for foreign benefit. It is high time for the DEA to go, and for the era of American vigilantism south of the border to come to an end.