Left-wing Mexican President
Claudia Sheinbaum has a proposal to shield her country from Donald Trump’s growing influence over Latin American politics: changing the constitution to bar dual nationals from running for president or governor of any Mexican state.
“A Mexican president is Mexican and does not represent another country,” Sheinbaum said during her morning press conference on August 25. If adopted, her proposal would make Mexico’s presidency qualifications in some respects more restrictive than those of the United States, where a president must be born in the country but there is no explicit ban on dual citizenship.
Sheinbaum’s proposal marks the latest in a suite of changes that her critics deem authoritarian. In May, for example, Sheinbaum gave the National Electoral Institute, Mexico’s highest electoral authority, the power to annul presidential elections deemed to have been influenced by foreign actors.
But Sheinbaum argues the reforms are necessary to stave off the growing influence of the
far right in Latin America
, where now two heads of state — Colombia’s Abelardo de la Espriella and Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa — are also U.S. citizens.
Latin America’s New Right Ushers in Pan-American Trumpism
De la Espriella, the far-right Colombian president who received strong support from Trump during his campaign and took office in June, is a U.S. and Italian citizen and a registered member of the Republican Party. Noboa, who assumed office as Ecuador’s president in 2023 at the age of 35, was born in Miami, Florida, and is the son of one of Ecuador’s richest men. (His father, Álvaro Noboa, also ran unsuccessfully for president five times.)
It’s clear that Latin America has an ascendant right wing under U.S. influence, said Pamela K. Starr, a professor of political science and international relations at the University of Southern California. Morena, the party that Sheinbaum leads, genuinely seems to believe there’s an international far-
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