Mexico is a founding and active member of various hemispheric fora that support regional political and economic cooperation within Latin America. Mexico is, for example, a founding member of the OAS and the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (Rio Treaty). But although Mexico is an active participant in many regional organizations, it maintains an independent view and often dissents from decisions taken by the international forum. Its record within the OAS consistently shows an independent Mexican policy: Mexico dissented from the United States-sponsored 1954 Caracas Resolution, which was directed at the leftist government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala; it systematically opposed the United States-led imposition by the OAS of economic sanctions against Cuba during the 1960s; and it opposed United States interventions in the Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada (1983), Panama (1990), and Haiti (1994).
Through most of the 1980s, Mexico was among the leaders of an intra-Latin American cooperation effort that excluded the United States. As a member of the Contadora Group established in 1983 with Colombia, Panama, and Venezuela, Mexico advocated a negotiated settlement of the Central American conflict and called for the withdrawal of foreign influence--including that of the United States and the Soviet Union--from the region. Mexico was also a founding member of the Cartagena Group (1984), an informal Latin American forum established to deal collectively with issues concerning foreign debt. Along with Venezuela, Mexico established the San José Accords, a cooperative effort to supply Central American nations, Barbados, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica with oil on concessionary terms. Currently, Mexico is an active participant in the Group of Eight (derived from the Contadora Group), which includes Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela; and in the Group of Three, along with Colombia and Venezuela.
Mexico has always been a staunch supporter of international cooperation through multilateral institutions. Mexico maintains diplomatic relations with 176 countries. Mexico also is a founding member of the United Nations and participates as an active member in more than seventy other international fora, including the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT; now the World Trade Organization--WTO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, NAFTA, and the Rio Group. In addition, the Mexican government was among the leading members of the Inter-American System that drafted the Treaty of Tlatelolco, which prohibits Latin American countries from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Data as of June 1996