During her campaign, Hillary Clinton repeatedly urged her fellow citizens to vote for an America that ”builds bridges not walls.”
Many of the signs displayed at the Stand Together rally in Ajijic on Saturday echoed this sentiment that walls only create divisions and serve to obstruct rather than enhance relationships.
That’s not a tenet U.S. President Donald Trump, his close collaborators and his growing band of dutiful Republican foot-soldiers buy into.
On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order to direct federal resources to build a wall along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico intended to halt the flow of immigrants entering the United States illegally.
In a televised interview with NBC later that evening, he repeated his campaign pledge that Mexico will reimburse the United States for the cost of the wall (estimated at around $US20 billion), that will initially be paid for by the U.S. taxpayer.
Trump’s actions set off a chain of events that have brought the bilateral relationship to its lowest ebb for many years.
Embarrassingly, at exactly the same time Trump was signing the order, a team of Mexican officials, led by Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray, was meeting with Trump collaborators, ostensibly to discuss how to move forward on a slew of bilateral issues.
Inevitably, the move kicked up a malestorm in Mexico, where calls came for President Enrique Peña Nieto to scrap his planned meeting with Trump on January 31 in protest. On Wednesday evening, the Mexican president went on national television to insist that Mexico will not pay for the wall but stopped short of calling off his trip to Washington.
The anger at Trump’s treatment of Mexico increased as media commentators and politicians from across the spectrum – as well as an enraged former President Vicente Fox – demanded that Peña Nieto stay at home.
As expected, a statement released from the president’s office Thursday confirmed the trip was off, a decision that was finally decided after a provocative tweet from Trump: “If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting.”
More fuel was added to the fire Thursday after White House spokesman Sean Spicer suggested that Trump might pay for the wall by slapping a 20-percent tax on all imports from Mexico. He said plans are being drawn up to tax imports from countries that have a trade deficit with the United States. The United States’ trade deficit with Mexico is around $US60 billion, a situation Trump has called “one-sided” and a major reason why he wants to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).
Earlier in the week, Peña Nieto had laid out a list of priorities that Mexico would bring to the table in a renegotiation of the trade deal. The “red line” included guarantees that migrants’ rights will be respected and that remittances they send back to family members in Mexico will not be usurped.
Otherwise, Peña Nieto was generally conciliatory, stressing that his approach would be though dialogue, “neither confrontation nor submission.”
But with Trump’s line hardening this week, the Mexican president is finding himself increasingly cornered. With his popularity ratings hovering around a dismal 12 percent after his unpopular move to increase the cost of gasoline, he faces ridicule should he appease Trump and allow him to set the entire bilateral agenda, or equal hostility should massive economic uncertainty result from negotiations in which Mexico refuses to yield to the U.S. president’s wishes.
Some commentators suggest that Peña Nieto should dig in and not acquiesce, since Mexico has plenty of bargaining chips. Among these, says former Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda, are obstructionist policies such as refusing to stop Central Americans from entering the country at its southern border.