Mexicans seek respect with US vote just days away

MEXICO CITY – A week before U.S. elections, expectations and attention are unusually low in a foreign country that might have more at stake than any other.

Many Mexicans would be glad to see a more neighborly president who hasn’t called Mexicans rapists or threatened to build a wall against them.

In the streets, few can name Democratic candidate Joe Biden, but there’s a general sense that Mexicans are ready to take their chances with someone other than President Donald Trump.

“No Mexican, no human being likes to be called a rapist, a thief, told that you’re not liked,” said Ana Vanessa Cárdenas Zanatta, a political science professor at Monterrey Technological and Anahuac universities in Mexico City. “The least that any human being, and the Mexicans in this bilateral relationship, can hope for is respect.”

Respect can be especially important when roughly three-quarters of a country’s exports go to the U.S. and hundreds of millions of people cross the border in both directions yearly for work, shopping, family visits or vacations.

In a Trump administration marked by unpredictability that has left allies reeling, Mexico has been one country that has been able to carve out a fairly predictable, if sometimes pressured, relationship with Trump. When Mexico was on the brink of defaulting on treaty obligations governing watersharing this month, the Trump administration provided a graceful exit.

Trump so far hasn’t targeted Mexico in his campaign the way he did the first time around. The pandemic and the economic crisis it sparked have overtaken all other issues – on both sides of the border.

Mexico has lost at least 1 million formal jobs during the pandemic, the economy is forecast to shrink 10% this year, violence remains beyond the government’s control, and COVID-19 infections are climbing again.