Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto rebuked US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as a threat to his country just hours after painting a positive picture of talks the two held on Wednesday to try to defuse tensions over Trump’s anti-Mexican campaign rhetoric.
Pena Nieto had on Wednesday afternoon hailed as “open and constructive” the impromptu meeting he held with Trump, who later referred to the Mexican leader as his friend and a “wonderful” president.
However, in a late evening television interview, an angry-looking Pena Nieto sought to defend himself against a broad swathe of criticism for his decision to meet with the US real-estate mogul, despite Trump’s repeated verbal attacks on Mexico.
Photo: Reuters
“His policy stances could represent a huge threat to Mexico, and I am not prepared to keep my arms crossed and do nothing,” Pena Nieto said. “That risk, that threat, must be confronted. I told him that is not the way to build a mutually beneficial relationship for both nations.”
Trump’s quick acceptance of an invitation sent on Friday last week took Mexico’s government by surprise, and his visit to Mexico City came just hours ahead of a keynote speech on immigration as he sought to close the gap on US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Trump’s accusations that Mexico sends rapists and drug runners to the US, and his threats to build a border wall and tear up trade deals, have angered the government, but his meeting with Pena Nieto on Wednesday gave him a chance to present himself in a more moderate light.
He spoke of Mexican-Americans in glowing terms and stressed the areas of common interest between the two countries even as he stuck to his message that he would put up the wall.
Pena Nieto earlier this year likened Trump to wartime dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. However, his government said Trump understood its concerns at the meeting, making Pena Nieto’s tense appearance on television the more surprising.
“What we saw was a respectful attitude and discourse from Donald Trump,” Mexican presidential spokesman Eduardo Sanchez said earlier, arguing that progress was made on the issue of trade after prior threats by Trump to tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
“I think there was an advance in general,” Sanchez said.
Still, Trump laid out a series of tough policies to tackle illegal immigration when he delivered his speech in Phoenix, Arizona, on Wednesday night.
He told a cheering crowd that Mexico would pay for the wall “100 percent” and that if he wins the election anyone living illegally in the US would be sent back to their home country and made to apply for re-entry.
That would include millions of Mexicans.
Opposition politicians in Mexico rounded on Pena Nieto for hosting Trump.
“Instead of making him apologize, the government allowed [Trump] to complete the humiliation of the Mexicans,” opposition National Action Party leader Ricardo Anaya said on Twitter.
Some Mexican officials also privately expressed reservations about the meeting, with one former diplomat saying Pena Nieto had done Trump’s campaign a favor.
During a joint news conference after their meeting, Trump said he and Pena Nieto had not discussed his demand that Mexico pay for the border wall.
However, Pena Nieto later contradicted him, saying he had told Trump that Mexico would not foot the bill, and he bristled during his television interview when asked why he had not made that clear at the news conference.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Mexican government official said the two men spoke English during the meeting and that Pena Nieto clearly explained to Trump the offense his comments had caused.
“He is a candidate that offended a lot of Mexicans, so that is the chemistry there was [between them],” the official said.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
RSS