MexicoMexicans worry Trump’s rhetoric will poison U.S.-Mexico relations

Donald Trump’s pledge to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border – and make Mexico pay for it – has elicited pointed criticism from two former Mexican presidents, Felipe Calderon and Vicente Fox.

Even if the border wall is never built, leading politicians and academics in Mexico worry that Trump’s comments will lead to harsher U.S. border policy and disrupt the process of growing economic and political ties between the two countries, a process which began two decades ago with the NAFTA agreement.

“There is no winning for Mexico in this situation,” Federico Estévez, political science professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico told the Guardian. “The only win is if Trump loses down the line. But you can be sure that his policy on immigration will be followed at the border.”

The Guardian notes that Trump’s blunt rhetoric has spooked the country’s elites.

“[Trump] talks about the reasons for Mexicans going there: lack of jobs, widespread corruption,” says Rodolfo Soriano Núñez, a sociologist in Mexico City. “It really clouds any possible [bilateral] migration agreement, which is the goal of any Mexican as they need an agreement to keep avoiding a major [program of] social reforms.”

Leading members of Mexico’s political class are starting to fire back. Calderon and Fox said Trump’s tactics in stirring ethnic hatred are similar to Hitler’s, and Fox used a four-letter word to refer to Trump’s proposed wall.

Prime Minister Peña Nieto has been more circumspect. “Building walls is just isolating oneself,” he said. In a speech to the UN general assembly last September, he warned ominously of “populism” — although observers noted that he may have been referring to perennial presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who was leading the polls at the time as Trump do now.

Others are urging Peña Nieto and other Mexican leaders to go on the offensive.

“Against Trump, we cannot stay on the defensive. No one has reviled us like this since [president James] Polk in 1846” – author of the Mexican-American war – “has reviled us like this,” tweeted historian and public intellectual Enrique Krauze.

“Silence is acquiescence,” said Jorge Guajardo, a former Mexican ambassador to China, who argued that the country’s politicians could no longer hope to avoid provoking Trump by staying silent. “Now we are his punching bag. Time to hit back.”

Mexican are puzzled at the apparent popularity of Trump and his attacks, because these attacks come at a time cooperation had increased between the two countries in many areas.

“There wasn’t much more [Mexican officials] could do to please the Americans,” says Estévez, who believes the best Mexico can hope for now is a return to a “more polite nativism.”

“They thought cooperation with the US was enough,” he said. “Then comes Trump.”