Claudia Sheinbaum Confirms Her Attendance at the APEC Summit in November

ByAlonso Urrutia and Alma E. Muñoz

This article by Alonso Urrutia and Alma E. Muñoz originally appeared in the September 24, 2026 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.

President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo confirmed her attendance at the summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), which will take place in the city of Shenzhen, China, on November 18 and 19. During her press conference, she explained that one of the reasons she decided to attend is that Mexico will organize the next meeting. “There we are going to receive, let’s say, the baton to hold APEC in 2028.”

With Sheinbaum Pardo’s participation, it will be only the second time that Mexico attends the summit since the governments of the Fourth Transformation came to power in 2018. In November 2023, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador attended the meeting held in San Francisco. On that occasion, López Obrador held bilateral meetings with the world’s main leaders.

He met with the President of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, and with the then head of the White House, Joe Biden, who was the one who extended the invitation to attend the summit and to meet, on that occasion, bilaterally. Likewise, he held a meeting with the then Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau.

For this year, according to the program of APEC (an organization of 21 countries, among them China, the United States, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Mexico, Chile, and Peru), the topics to be addressed, announced at the time by the Chinese government under the slogan Building an Asia-Pacific Community to Prosper Together, are expected to include an analysis of protectionist trends in the world and the anti-globalization stances that have permeated some countries.