Land disputeMexico Senate considering bill which would take back land from U.S. if Trump is elected

Published 7 September 2016

Mexico’s Senate is considering a bill to revoke Mexico’s bilateral treaties with the United States, including the 1848 agreement which transferred half the country’s territory to the United States. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed to bring a two-year war between the two countries – a war which Mexico lost — to an end. As part of the treaty, Mexico gave the United States a vast swath of territory, which is now New Mexico, California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado. The proposal contains a clause which stipulates that the bill will go into effect only if Donald Trump is elected president – and if he insists on Mexico paying for the border wall he pledged to build along the U.S.-Mexico border, and goes ahead with unilateral changes to NAFTA.

The tribune of the Mexican Senate // Source: commons.wikimedia.org

The Mexican Senate will consider a proposal to revoke Mexico’s treaties with the United States, including the 1848 agreement which transferred half the country’s territory to the United States. The proposal contains a clause which stipulates that the bill will go into effect only if Donald Trump is elected president – and if he insists on Mexico paying for the border wall he pledged to build along the U.S.-Mexico border, and goes ahead with unilateral changes to NAFTA.

Armando Ríos Piter, a left-leaning Mexican senator, on Tuesday formally proposed the bill. The language of the proposal refers to Trump inflicting expropriations or economic losses on Mexico to make it pay for the wall.

#Propuesta: Presentaré iniciativa para proteger patrimonio de mexicanos en el exterior. #PRIdebería estar a favor. pic.twitter.com/YMfX9Qqb7k

— Armando Ríos Piter (@RiosPiterJaguar) September 2, 2016

The Financial Times reports that Rios Piter, an opposition senator for the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), said he was putting forth the proposal in order to protect Mexicans, and highlight the risks of targeting them economically.

“In cases where the property/assets of (our) fellow citizens or companies are affected by a foreign government, as Donald Trump has threatened, the Mexican government should proportionally expropriate assets and properties of foreigners from that country on our territory,” the senator’s proposal says.

The total amount of money transferred to Mexico from abroad — most of which comes from the United States – is worth about $25 billion last year, according to the central bank. The bilateral trade between the United States and Mexico is worth about half a trillion dollars a year.

Rios Piter said his goal is to counter threats by Trump to target Mexicans in the United States and to emphasize that economic benefits to both nations are at stake. His proposal also aims to protect Mexico against another threat by Trump: unilateral changes to the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

The proposed bill would make it illegal for Mexico to use official funds to pay for the building of a border wall. If Trump tried to seize the $25 billion in annual remittances from the United States to Mexico to pay for the wall, the bill proposes to empower Mexico to retaliate in kind by confiscating or impounding the same amount of money, probably by imposing a tax on flows heading from Mexico to the United States.

Moreover, the bill proposes that if Trump unilaterally scraps the 1994 NAFTA, Mexico would then review each of the seventy-five bilateral treaties between the two countries to determine whether they were in Mexico’s national interests.

One treaty is the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which was signed to bring a two-year war between the two countries – a war which Mexico lost — to an end. As part of the treaty, Mexico gave the United States a vast swath of territory, which is now New Mexico, California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado.

Rios Piter proposes to scrap the treaty if Trump is elected president. 

“At a time like this, it’s vital for us to understand why this relationship benefits both. We’re neighbors, we’re friends, we’re partners,” he said. “He’s putting that at risk.”

“This is the first step towards establishing a public policy about how Mexico should react in the face of a threat,” Ríos Piter told the Financial Times.

“This [bill] is simply to protect a successful 22-year-old relationship [NAFTA] that has helped both nations. We want to defend that from a position that seeks to destroy it. We have to put it in black and white.”

The FT notes that the initiative is the idea of Agustín Barrios Gómez, a former leftwing legislator who now heads the Mexico Image Foundation, an organization set up to improve the country’s image abroad.

 “We don’t want this [the proposed legislation],” Barrios Gómez said of the proposal. “But ripping up NAFTA and wrecking a carefully forged relationship that goes far beyond trade to security would be ‘mutually assured destruction’.”

“The president [Enrique Peña] no longer represents Mexicans … The only convincing response to precise threats is to stipulate by law what happens” if Trump wins the election and pushes ahead with his plans, Barrios Gómez told FT.

Luis Videgaray, Mexico’s finance minister who supported the Trump visit as a way of reassuring financial markets, has come around to supporting the proposed legislation. A day after Trump’s visit, he told a TV show that legislation “isn’t a bad idea … it could be a good idea to take this type of precautions.”