The handshake that matters in the Mexico–Peru relationship this year did not happen in Mexico City or Lima. It happened in New York, on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly, when Mexico's foreign minister, Roberto Velasco Álvarez, sat down with his Peruvian counterpart, Carlos Espá, on September 23 — the first meeting between the two countries' top diplomats since diplomatic relations were restored on August 7, 2026.
The encounter, held during the 81st session of the General Assembly, is the clearest signal yet that the August agreement has moved beyond a formal communiqué into direct governmental engagement. Velasco was in New York representing Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo. Espá is serving in the government of Peruvian President Keiko Fujimori, whose administration has made rapprochement with Mexico a stated priority.
Yet the meeting also illustrates how much work remains. Senior officials have resumed direct contact, but the practical architecture of the relationship — the status of ambassadors and the operation of fully functioning embassies — appears incomplete. More than three years of diplomatic strain do not unwind in a single communiqué, and both governments are still navigating the political and legal sensitivities that caused the rupture in the first place.
A rupture with deep roots
The break that ended in August did not begin with a single incident. Its origins trace back to December 2022, when Peru's then-president, Pedro Castillo, attempted to dissolve Congress and impose an exceptional governing arrangement. The move failed. Castillo was removed and arrested, and Dina Boluarte assumed the presidency.
The political crisis in Lima quickly became a diplomatic one. Mexico declined to recognise the Boluarte government in the same political terms Peru's government expected, and the two countries began drifting apart. According to reporting on the restoration agreement, Mexico and Peru did not maintain normal ambassadorial relations from early 2023 onward — a slow unravelling that left the relationship without the conventional diplomatic machinery that normally cushions bilateral disputes.
For nearly three years, the two governments managed their differences through statements, consular arrangements and third parties rather than through ambassadors. That arrangement became untenable once the dispute acquired a concrete, personal dimension.
Betssy Chávez and the asylum question at the centre
The immediate trigger for the rupture came in November 2025, when Mexico granted asylum to Betssy Chávez, a former Peruvian prime minister and senior official under Castillo. Chávez had been charged in connection with the political crisis surrounding Castillo's failed attempt to dissolve Congress and rule by decree in December 2022.
For Peru, the asylum grant touched on core questions of judicial sovereignty: a former senior official facing criminal proceedings had been sheltered by a foreign government. For Mexico, the decision followed from a long-standing policy of asylum and from its refusal to accept the legitimacy of the government that replaced Castillo in the terms Lima demanded.
The dispute intensified sharply after the asylum grant, and by November 2025 diplomatic relations had ruptured. What followed was months of mutual distancing, with no normal ambassadorial channel through which to manage the fallout.
The way out proved to be a legal instrument that allowed both sides to move without either formally retreating. Peru subsequently granted Chávez a safe-conduct pass at Mexico's request, under the framework of the 1954 Caracas Convention on Diplomatic Asylum. She then left Lima on a Mexican Air Force aircraft.
That safe-conduct arrangement was central to the normalisation process. Crucially, reporting on the episode stated that the arrangement did not cancel Chávez's sentence or alter Peru's judicial claims. In other words, Peru maintained its legal position against her throughout. The mechanism let each government keep its underlying stance intact while removing the physical presence that had made the standoff unresolvable.
It is a familiar pattern in diplomatic practice: the substance of a dispute is left untouched while the irritant that makes daily relations impossible is moved off the table. Whether that constitutes resolution or merely postponement depends on what happens next.
The August 7 agreement
The restoration itself was announced in a joint statement on August 7, 2026, issued through Mexico's Secretariat of Foreign Affairs and Peru's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The two governments described their relationship in terms of "historic ties of brotherhood, friendship and cooperation," and reaffirmed respect for international law and the principles of the UN Charter.
That language is standard diplomatic fare, but the choice to anchor the restoration in the UN Charter is not incidental. Both governments had spent years disagreeing about the legitimacy of each other's political transitions. Framing the reset around shared commitments to international law allowed them to sidestep, rather than relitigate, those disagreements.
The sequencing behind the deal had been under construction for some time. Sheinbaum's government instructed Foreign Minister Velasco to contact President-elect Keiko Fujimori's incoming team in July, before the agreement was publicly announced. That early outreach suggests Mexico anticipated that a change of government in Lima would create an opening that had not existed under the previous administration.
Fujimori's victory, and her government's willingness to engage, supplied the political条件 — the political conditions — for the reset. Espá, her foreign minister, has identified rapprochement with Mexico as a priority, and the September 23 meeting in New York was the first tangible result of that positioning.
Why it matters
On its face, the Mexico–Peru relationship is not among the world's most consequential bilateral ties. Neither country is a major trading partner of the other in the way that, say, Mexico and the United States are. But the rupture mattered far beyond the bilateral ledger, for three reasons.
First, it was a Latin American dispute that split along ideological lines. Mexico's refusal to recognise the Boluarte government placed it alongside other governments in the region that questioned the legitimacy of Castillo's removal. Peru's position — that its judicial and constitutional processes were being disrespected — was shared by others. A prolonged break between two significant regional states risked hardening those divisions into durable blocs.
Second, the dispute involved asylum, one of the most sensitive areas of international law in the Americas. The region has a long and proud tradition of diplomatic asylum, codified in instruments including the 1954 Caracas Convention. But asylum claims that intersect with criminal prosecutions are precisely where that tradition becomes contested. The Chávez case forced both governments to test the boundaries of the framework under maximum political pressure.
Third, both countries are significant players in hemispheric affairs. Mexico is the second-largest economy in Latin America and a major diplomatic voice. Peru has been a pivot point in regional politics since 2022. Their estrangement deprived the region of a functioning channel at a time when Latin America faces pressures ranging from migration to trade to democratic backsliding.
The restoration, then, is not merely a bilateral convenience. It removes one point of friction from a region that has accumulated several.
Different perspectives on the reset
The August joint statement frames the restoration as a return to normality rooted in shared history. Both governments have emphasised continuity — brotherhood, friendship, cooperation — rather than adjudicating who was right in the dispute that preceded it.
That framing serves both capitals. For Sheinbaum's government, the agreement demonstrates that Mexico's asylum policy can coexist with normal state-to-state relations, without requiring Mexico to abandon the principles it invoked when granting Chávez protection. For Fujimori's government, it demonstrates that Peru can normalise relations without abandoning its judicial claims against a fugitive former official — a politically important distinction domestically.
But the absence of any formal resolution leaves critics room to argue that the underlying dispute has simply been deferred. Peru maintained its legal position against Chávez; the safe-conduct arrangement did not cancel her sentence or alter Peru's claims. Mexico, for its part, has not signalled a change in the policy that led it to grant asylum. The two governments have agreed to disagree, quietly.
There is also the question of what the reset means for the political constituencies that drove the rupture. In Peru, the prosecution of officials associated with Castillo's government remains a live and contested issue. In Mexico, asylum and non-intervention are embedded in the country's foreign policy tradition and carry domestic political weight. Neither government has much room to appear to be conceding on either point.
Unfinished business
The most visible gap is institutional. Nearly seven weeks after the August 7 announcement, the practical rebuilding of the relationship appears incomplete. The status of ambassadors and fully functioning embassies — the ordinary infrastructure of a diplomatic relationship — has not been fully restored, according to the current picture.
That matters more than it might seem. Ambassadorial relations are not ceremonial. They are the mechanism through which governments manage the disputes that inevitably arise: consular cases, migration flows, trade irritants, judicial cooperation. Without resident ambassadors, the relationship runs through foreign ministries and multilateral settings, which is slower and more prone to misunderstanding.
The September 23 meeting in New York, valuable as a signal, took place on the margins of a UN gathering rather than in either capital. That is a normal first step — but it is a first step, not a destination.
Officials have resumed direct contact at the senior level, and the foreign ministers have now met. The next benchmarks to watch are the appointment or reinstatement of ambassadors, the reopening of fully staffed missions, and whether the two governments establish a regular bilateral dialogue that does not depend on the UN calendar.
What happens next
The trajectory from here depends on whether both governments can keep the Chávez case and the broader Castillo-era disputes quarantined from day-to-day relations.
There are reasons for cautious optimism. The mechanism that unlocked the agreement — Peru's safe-conduct arrangement under the Caracas Convention — was designed precisely to allow movement without capitulation. Both governments have already shown they can separate the legal dispute from the diplomatic relationship. And the political alignment between the Sheinbaum and Fujimori administrations, at least on the question of normalisation, appears to be genuine rather than tactical, given Mexico's early outreach to Fujimori's incoming team in July.
There are also reasons for caution. The restoration was announced in a joint statement, not a treaty. It rests on political will in two capitals, and political will can change. Peru's judiciary retains its claims against Chávez, and any future development in that case — a ruling, a sentence, an extradition request — could reintroduce the friction that took three years to clear. In Mexico, asylum decisions remain a matter of executive policy and could become contentious again.
The wider regional context adds another variable. Latin America's diplomatic landscape has been unusually fluid since 2022, with governments of different ideological stripes testing the boundaries of recognition, asylum and non-intervention. A durable Mexico–Peru normalisation would be a small but meaningful data point in favour of the idea that states with genuine political differences can still maintain working relationships.
For now, the relationship is best described as restored on paper and under construction in practice. The rupture that began in November 2025, and that had been building since December 2022, has been formally closed. What remains is the slower, less visible work of rebuilding the institutions that make a diplomatic relationship resilient — ambassadors in residence, embassies fully staffed, and channels that function when the cameras are gone.
The September 23 meeting in New York was a beginning. The measure of the restoration will be what happens in the months that follow, in Mexico City and Lima, when there is no General Assembly to provide the setting.