Mexico’s first stint on the UN Security Council proved to be its last for almost 50 years.

In 1946, at the first meeting of the new United Nations, and it’s then 11 member states, Mexico’s representative, Rafael de la Colina Riquelme, was a leader in objections to the inordinate power given over to the five permanent member states (the neo-colonial United States and Soviet Union, along with declining colonial powers Great Britian and France, together with China… the “big five” of the allies in the just ended Second World War) to veto resolutions. Colina Riquelme argued (correctly, as it turns out) that the veto not only meant that the permanent member states had the power to make decisions about war and peace based on their own, and not international, interests, but that such an arrangement was bound to create blocs centered around the interests of one or the other of those five nations.

Being right… Mexico wasn’t given another seat until 1979, when a split between the two major camps in the Permanent Council (the Soviet Union and China, and the US-GB-France camps) split on whether to admit Cuba or Colombia as the Latin American representative nation, and settled on Mexico.

Which again, objected to the permanent members veto power. However, as a presumed member of the US-GB-France camp, although always (with the exception of the Fox Aministration) non-aligned, Mexico has, along with the members of an informal “Coffee Club” coaliton (formerly known as the “Uniting for Concensus” group), now including 120 of the 193 member states in calling for an end to the veto power granted to those nations (and their sucessor nations… Russia having replaced the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China replacing what is now simply Taiwan).

An argument raised by Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in his recent address to the Security Council while Mexico holds the largely symbolic role as “presiding” over the Security Council for the month.

Although AMLO’s other call… for an international “minimum income” for the 750 million poorest of the poor (paid for by “voluntary” contibutions of 4% of the wealth of the world’s 100 richest individuals and 1000 richest corporations, with every UN member kicking in 0.02 percent of its national wealth) … is one of those, for lack of a better word, unworkable “Christian Idealist” ideas he is prone to throw out there. If covered at all by the foreign press (outside of those poorest of the poor countries, where it’s seen as something that is not only needed, but needed to be said), the reaction has been dismissed as hopelessly naive, or … as with France’s always snarky Charlie Hebdo… with downright racist hostility.

For the French, or at least the snarky racist ones, Mexico’s internal security problem isn’t an international one, with the demand from the wealthy nations for narcotics, and the uncontrolled arms trafficking and money laundering that result are not matters of international security.

That, if anything, shows the problem with the five member “veto”… that because those countries were the strongest and most able to impose their will on the rest of the planet eighty plus years ago, we should still let them control the agenda, and determne what is, and isn’t a global issue.