Getty Letter from Mexico Trump Backs Mexico into a Corner At some point, Mexicans may just decide to turn their backs on the United States.

John M. Ackerman is professor at the Institute for Legal Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), editor-in-chief of The Mexican Law Review and a columnist at both Proceso magazine and La Jornada newspaper. Contact: www.johnackerman.blogspot.com Twitter: @JohnMAckerman.

MEXICO CITY—On Barack Obama’s first visit to Mexico as president in 2009, thousands of people spontaneously swarmed onto Mexico City’s grand Reforma Avenue to see whether they could get a peek at the 44th president of the United States as he passed by. Despite a long history of conflict between the two countries, the Mexican people were highly optimistic about the future of binational relations and believed in Obama’s message of hope and renovation.

In contrast, after the events of this past week, it will be difficult for Donald Trump to ever set foot on Mexican soil. Mexicans are a proud and dignified people and do not take well to being humiliated in public. Indeed, in response to the constant insults and lack of respect coming out of the new U.S. administration, Mexican citizen groups already have started to plan boycotts of Citibank, Walmart and other U.S. corporations. The newspapers and TV shows are full of biting commentary about Trump’s intolerant and aggressive behavior. At a rally a couple of weeks ago, one of the protesters even burned an American flag, something entirely unprecedented for more than a century in Mexico.


Trump is apparently confident that Mexico's weak and highly questioned president, Enrique Peña Nieto, will eventually cave into his demands. As I have argued elsewhere, Peña Nieto was instrumental in making Trump’s victory possible and generally shares the same pro-corporate worldview. Trump’s real Latin American double is not Hugo Chávez or Evo Morales, as some misguided commentators have suggested, but Peña Nieto.

Peña Nieto's first actions since Trump´s election have been conciliatory—some might say servile. At the beginning of January, he appointed Luis Videgaray, an economist with no diplomatic experience but with ties to Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, as Mexico's new secretary of foreign relations. And the day before Trump´s inauguration, Peña Nieto sent over Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán to the United States as a demonstration of his willingness to collaborate with the new administration.

But Trump has underestimated the response of the Mexican people. Even before Jan. 20, Mexico was already a tinderbox. The drastic reduction of international oil prices along with the collapse in the value of the Mexican peso—50 percent since Peña Nieto took power in 2012—has led to a serious fiscal crisis along with a jump in inflation. The government has responded with the highly questionable strategy of squeezing consumers through new taxes on gasoline and hiking the prices on public utilities, such as electricity.

This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. On Jan. 1, the day the new gas and electricity prices came into effect, tens of thousands of angry citizens took to the streets throughout the country. Since then there have been marches and protests almost every day. Just about every city, small, medium or large, has participated in the mobilizations and the protests have quickly morphed from being about gas and electricity prices to a broader set of demands.

Mexicans blame Peña Nieto’s privatizing oil reforms for the weakness of Mexican oil production and thereby the increase in oil prices. Corruption scandals have drawn close to the president’s inner circle, including former governors Humberto Moreira and Javier Duarte, fueling further outrage. Recent polls place his approval rating at 12 percent, the lowest for any Mexican president in modern history. Mexicans are demanding a full overhaul of the entire political system.

This is the context that explains Peña Nieto’s surprising cancellation of next Tuesday's meeting with Trump in the White House. In other circumstances, Peña Nieto would have been willing to subject himself to Trump's abuse and even explore different options for Mexico making a contribution to the border wall. After all, in his frequent meetings with Obama, Peña Nieto never uttered a forceful word or gave any sign of standing up to Washington. Only after Trump and his team embarrassed him and threatened to slap tariffs on Mexican goods has he shown any hint of a backbone.

The two leaders spoke again on Friday, and issued face-saving statements on the need to “work together to stop drug cartels, drug trafficking and illegal guns and arms sales” while agreeing to disagree on who would pay for Trump’s wall. “Both presidents have instructed their teams to continue the dialogue to strengthen this important strategic and economic relationship in a constructive way,” the White House readout said.

But it’s other politicians, such as left-wing presidential hopeful Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who have best expressed the feeling on the streets. López Obrador has called on Peña Nieto to formally bring charges against Trump to the United Nations for human rights violations and has announced a tour to the United States to construct a binational “citizen front” against xenophobia.

The greatest beneficiary of Peña Nieto’s humiliation will indeed be the left—and not just in Mexico. In the midst of the Twitter exchange between Peña Nieto and Trump, in which the U.S. president wrote, “Mexico has taken advantage of the U.S. for long enough. Massive trade deficits & little help on the very weak border must change, NOW!”, Bolivian President Evo Morales reached out to the Mexican people: “I make a call to our Mexican brothers to look more to the south; to build unity together on the basis of our Latin American and Caribbean identity.” As of noon on Friday, Morales’ tweet has been retweeted 10 times more than any other tweet in the Bolivian president’s entire timeline.

Many have noted that the Mexican economy relies heavily on exports to the United States Some 16 percent of U.S. exports go to Mexico, while 80 percent of Mexico’s go to the United States. So it would seem Peña Nieto has little recourse but to accede to Trump’s demands.

Consider, however, that the Mexican economy is the 15th largest in the world, with an annual GDP of $1 trillion, and is the second-largest market for U.S. goods. And Mexico has the means to retaliate for any Trump punishments. Dean Baker, for instance, an economist at the D.C.-based think tank Center for Economic and Policy Research, has proposed that Mexico simply refuse to enforce U.S. patents and copyrights on its soil, for instance in the area of pharmaceuticals or technology. Expensive drugs and software could immediately be provided at bargain-basement prices—generating incredible savings for Mexicans and significantly cutting into the profits of major U.S. corporations.

That, of course, would probably mean leaving the North America Free Trade Agreement, the trade pact that Trump has vowed to renegotiate. Even stalwart neoliberal supporters of NAFTA among Mexico’s political class have begun to argue that it wouldn’t be so bad to simply walk away from it. Last Tuesday, Mexico’s economy minister Ildefonso Guajardo made this threat official, telling a television interviewer: “If we go for something that is less than what we have, well, then there is no sense in staying.”

Trump’s attitude has led to a transformation of Mexico’s medium and long term economic calculations. Although a withdrawal from NAFTA would create short-term pain, it would also create the opportunity for Mexico to finally delink itself from its excessive dependency on the U.S. economy and consolidate its alliances with other Latin American countries as well as with Europe and Asia. Ironically, Trump’s attack on Mexico may be just what Mexicans need to wake up and smell the coffee.