Mexico says it’s not afraid to stand up to Trump
31/05/2019
On May 30, the US president announced tariffs on all imports from Mexico, rising from 5% almost immediately to 25% by October 1. He said he had decided to impose the new tariffs in an attempt to persuade its neighbour to stop people, most of whom come from Central America, from travelling through Mexico and entering the US illegally.
Official figures from the US Border Patrol Agency suggest that its agents detained almost 100,000 people who had no documentation (almost 9,000 of them unaccompanied minors) at the border with Mexico in the month of April 2019 alone.
Mexico’s first response to this came in the form of a letter that Andrés Manuel López Obrador sent immediately to Mr Trump. In it, he wrote that, since he became president of Mexico at the end of 2018, he had based his policy on immigration on the universal right of people to live “free from fear and from misery”.
He said: “That’s why, since taking office, I have been suggesting to you [Mr Trump] that we work together on development and help for Central American countries, that we invest to create employment there and resolve this pitiful issue at its core. People do not leave their homelands on a whim, but out of necessity.”
Mr López Obrador went on to say that the US president was aware that Mexico is “meeting our responsibility to avoid, in all possible ways without violating people’s human rights, [migrants’] passage through our country”.
In perhaps the most directly critical passage of the letter, the Mexican president asked Donald Trump: “How can you convert, from one day to the next, the land of brotherhood for the migrants of the world into a ghetto, a closed space, in which people are stigmatised, mistreated, persecuted, cast out, and in which people who seek, through their efforts and their labour, to live free from misery, see their right to justice eliminated? The Statue of Liberty is not an empty symbol.”
He concluded by asking President Trump to engage in meaningful dialogue about the question of migration. “And please remember,” he said, “that I am not lacking in courage. I am not a coward and I am not faint-hearted.”
He said Mexico’s secretary for external affairs, Marcelo Ebrard, would lead a Mexican delegation that would travel to Washington DC immediately for talks.
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