President Trump and Mexican election in July
Mexico will be electing a new President in six months. Voting will occur days or weeks after we know if the 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) survives on-going negotiations between President Trump, Mexico and Canada.
News for President Trump: leave NAFTA, Mr. President, and the entire American Midwest that you carried in November 2016 will lose. In 2016 Mexico ($17 billion) and Canada ($20 billion) bought $37 billion worth of agricultural products from the USA. No NAFTA and Australia, Argentina and Brazil will step in and skim billions into their pockets while your voters in Iowa go bankrupt.
Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and both North and South Dakota might very well plunge in to economic chaos. Mexico’s economy and polity will also be affected because a Trump rejection of NAFTA will help the most extreme leftist in North America, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) win the July Mexican Presidential election. He is even more leftist that Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris.
Mexicans, have twice rejected the former Mayor of Mexico City for the Presidency.
There is a four-letter word for what Lopez Obrador is; JERK. This is an ersatz national candidate who demanded a recount of the 2006 Presidential election and refused to accept the result when 16,000 voting districts were recounted that cemented his one-percent loss to Felipe Calderon. He did not concede; rather, he declared himself President and had his peasant followers shut Mexico City, the capital, down for weeks costing Mexicans millions of dollars in business and taxes. He traveled around the southern part of the country appointing “officials” of his Presidency.
President Trump’s ANTI-NAFTA verbiage and calls for a wall on the Mexican border are two significant Trump views that are helping Lopez Obrador run for President again, this time under the partisan umbrella of a political party he created to push his candidacy — The Morena Party, Morena means dark, like in dark skin. Last time he was the candidate of the official leftist party, the Partido Revolucionario Democratico (PRD).
For this July’s election the leftist PRD has joined forces with the Center Right Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) that won the Presidency with Vicente Fox (2000) and Felipe Calderon (2006). The PRI is running a career bureaucrat.
Considering how violent and corrupt the PRI returned Mexico to with the election in 2012 of President Enrique Pena Nieto, the PRI shouldn’t have any chance of winning a no-run-off election that will be decided by a plurality just as the Fox election of 2000 was won with Fox’s 43 percent.
The drug cartel wars are stacking up bodies throughout Mexico; vigilante groups are forming in towns everywhere organized to protect themselves from cartels and corrupt government agents and agencies. A new American-style justice system is slowly being implemented with trials by jury, etc. but the 500- year-old system that Mexico has labored under is slow to change or modernize.
To confusion in the legal system, corruption at the highest levels, raging drug cartel chaos comes Donald Trump who realistically has no clue where Mexico “is” or how much Mexicans and Mexican NAFTA industries contribute to the USA. He apparently has no idea that something between 6 million and 12 million Americans work in industries that annually export a half-a-trillion-dollars-worth of American goods, services and food products to Canada and Mexico.
Considering that Forbes’ Magazine realistic estimate of Trump’s fortune is around $4 billion, American annual agricultural products sold to Mexico alone are 400 percent more than Trump’s alleged fortune while agricultural exports by the U.S. to Canada is five times that of Trump’s “fortune.”
The kicker here is that while Lopez Obrador is virulently anti-american, anti-free enterprise and anti-american participation in Mexico’s important oil industry, he is aware that the Mexican auto industry has created an economic miracle in central Mexico with thousands upon thousands of manufacturing jobs that never existed before as well as thousands more jobs in factories that feed the entire North American auto industry.
As leftist and as the jerk he is — Lopez Obrador recognizes the pluses of NAFTA. Unfortunately, it is President Donald J. Trump who doesn’t recognize the great idea NAFTA is and how it benefits us all. Any damage he does to it in coming weeks will be reflected by more votes for Lopez Obrador in Mexico. President Lopez Obrador would not be good for U.S. and Mexican relations.
That might not mean much to Trump’s voter base but it sure would to millions of Americans working in trade with Mexico and millions more who live on the border, a border through which a million people-a-day cross legally to spend a-billion-and-a-half-dollars-a-day in the U.S. and Mexico.