Radical Change? New Political Paradigms in and Mexico

Date: Tuesday, 12 February 2019 Speakers and Chair catch up: 12:30-13:00 Meeting: 13:00-14:00 Venue: JGH Lecture Theatre, Chatham House, 10 St James’s Square, SW1Y 4LE,

Speakers Rodrigo Aguilera, Latin America Editor, The Economist Intelligence Unit (2012-17) Cristina Cortes, Chief Executive Officer, Canning House Dr Elena Lazarou, Assistant Professor, Center for International Relations, Getulio Vargas Foundation

Chair Ambassador Andrés Rozental, Senior Adviser, Chatham House; Former Deputy Foreign Minister, Mexico (1988-94); Founding President, Mexican Council on Foreign Relations

Format and Proceedings

12:30 Please arrive at Chatham House by 12:30. Pease ask for Ludivine at reception and I will come down to meet you.

12:30-12:55 Speakers and Chair catch-up in the Duke of York Hall Opportunity for speakers and Chair to discuss format and focus of content over light refreshments.

12:55 Technician to put lapel microphones on the chair and the speakers.

12:59 Walk down to JGH Lecture Theatre. Speakers and Chair take seats on stage. All participants will remain on the stage during the entire session.

13:00 Start of the meeting • Chair to open the meeting, introduce the speakers and announce that the event will be held on the record and will be livestreamed. • Chair will also announce that people can comment via Twitter using #CHevents. • The chair will ask all attendees to put their phones on silent mode. • (Please note that Chatham House staff will be in the room, normally standing at the back or sides of the hall, in order to assist in the event of an emergency or technical difficulty.)

13:02-13:25 Each speaker to address the audience from their seat for approximately 5-6 minutes each.

13:25-13:35 Following the opening remarks, the Chair will begin the discussion with one or two questions, picking up on the themes outlined in the opening remarks.

13:35-14:00 Q&A session: The chair will take a random selection of questions from the audience.

www.chathamhouse.org 2 • The audience are often keen to ask questions and we encourage an interactive atmosphere. • The Chair has prerogative and may put forward comments or questions of their own. • The Chair will ask each audience questioner to give their name and affiliation/organisation (beyond just ‘Chatham House Member’). • The Chair will ask the questioners to wait for the roving microphone to reach them before they start to speak and then speak directly into the roving microphones. • If short on time, the Chair will take questions in groups (normally towards the end). • The Chair will not hesitate to stop people who are speaking for too long. • Chatham House is committed to fostering diversity at its events in order to promote open and wide-ranging discussion, including during Q&A sessions. For the Q&A, Chairs should actively encourage questions from as wide a selection of audience members as possible, in particular bearing in mind equitable balance of gender, age groups and ethnicity/nationality. Please take time to scan the whole room to avoid unintentional bias towards people seated closest to the stage; and, where possible, alternate questions between women and men. If we haven’t had a question from a woman in several rounds and the Chair cannot see any hands raised from women, Chatham House is comfortable, if the Chair is, that the chair makes direct reference to this and explicitly encourages a question from a woman. We leave such direct interventions to the judgement of the Chair.

14:00 The Chair will close the meeting. Please make sure we finish at exactly 2pm. Please hand back the lapel microphone to the technician and make your way out of the hall.

Event Outline

On 1 December 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), at the helm of a new left-wing reformist party, Juntos Haremos Historia, began his six-year term as Mexico's president. A month later, far-right congressman and self-styled political outsider, Jair Bolsonaro, was sworn in as the head of Brazil’s government. Both leaders, who sit at opposite ends of the political spectrum, have promised their electorates epochal change and radical social and economic reform.

Against this backdrop, the panellists will consider what these populist leaders’ victories mean for the direction of travel of Mexico, Brazil and potentially Latin America as a whole. What have AMLO and Bolsonaro prioritized in the first phase of their presidencies and can any parallels be drawn? What structural obstacles do they face in implementing their agendas and how likely are they to succeed? And given the leaders’ divergent political leanings, what is the outlook for Brazil-Mexico bilateral relations, and Latin American supra-national institutions, over the coming years?

Audience

We expect approximately 80-90 people in the audience.

Our audience will mostly comprise of Chatham House Members. Our members encompass a diverse range of backgrounds and professions: policy-makers, academics, business people and the media, as well as students and young people interested in international affairs. We have also invited contacts of the US and Americas Programme.

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Biographies

Speakers’ biographies

Rodrigo Aguilera is a Mexican-born, London-based economist who worked as an international economist for the Economist Intelligence Unit, where he was the lead analyst for Mexico from 2012-17 among other countries including Chile, Peru and Venezuela. Previous to working at the Economist Intelligence Unit, Rodrigo was a Research Assistant in the International Economics department at Chatham House.

Rodrigo holds a BSc in economics from the Universidad de las Américas-Puebla and an MSc in social policy and development from the London School of Economics.

Cristina Cortes is the CEO of Canning House. A political economist (Oxford & LSE) with international commercial experience in government, finance and energy, she has 30 years’ expertise in government relations, strategy, international business development, acquisitions and divestments, joint venture management, and commercial negotiations.

Of Anglo-Brazilian descent, Cristina has lived and worked in Venezuela, , Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil as well as London, Brussels, Aberdeen and Houston.

She joined Canning House in 2015 and took over as CEO in April last year. She is also a Trustee of the London- based Institute of Business Ethics.

Dr Elena Lazarou is a Senior Policy Analyst at the External Policies Unit of the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS), where her research focuses on transatlantic relations, global governance, security and defence. Prior to joining EPRS, she headed the Center for International Relations of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, Brazil where she is also Assistant Professor of International Relations.

She has held post-doctoral research positions at the University of Cambridge and the LSE and various visiting positions in think-tanks and universities in France, Italy, Greece and the US.

Her research has focused on regional integration in Europe and South America, EU–Brazil relations and foreign policy analysis. She has a PhD in International Relations from the University of Cambridge.

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Chairperson’s biography

Andrés Rozental was Mexico's ambassador to the from 1995 to 1997. He was a career diplomat for more than 35 years, having served his country as deputy foreign minister (1988-94), ambassador to Sweden (1983-88), permanent representative of Mexico to the in Geneva (1982-83), as well as in various responsibilities within the Mexican Foreign Ministry and abroad. Since 1994, he holds the lifetime rank of eminent ambassador of Mexico.

Currently, Ambassador Rozental holds non-executive board positions in several multinational corporations in Brazil, the , France, and Mexico and is an independent board member of Ocean Wilson Holdings and Wilson Sons, Brazil.

He is an independent, non-executive Director of HSBC Bank in Mexico and sits on the Audit, Risk Management and Remuneration Committees. He holds advisory positions with Brookfield Asset Management, Toyota (Mexico) APCO Worldwide and AT&T.

He is president of his own consulting firm, Rozental & Asociados, which specializes in advising multinational companies on their corporate strategies in Latin America. He is also active in a number of non-governmental organizations and projects relating to global governance, migration policy, climate change, Latin American politics and the promotion of democracy.

Ambassador Rozental was a senior non-resident fellow at the for seven years and is on the Operating Board of Canada's Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) in Waterloo. Ambassador Rozental was also the founding president of the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations (Comexi).

Ambassador Rozental obtained his professional degree in international relations from the Universidad de las Américas in Mexico, and his Master's in International Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

He is the author of four books on Mexican foreign policy, several chapters in edited volumes on international affairs and numerous articles on a variety of topics. He is a frequent contributor to both Mexican and foreign media.

In Case of Emergency In the unlikely event of a fire or a security incident, Chatham House staff will be on hand to evacuate the lecture hall. Fire exits are located on either side of the stage for speakers and at the rear sides of the hall for audience members.

Chatham House Contact: LUDIVINE REBET, EVENTS ASSISTANT Email: [email protected] Telephone: +44 (0)20 3544 9718 Mobile: +44 (0)74 8095 7885