Mexican president asks Trump for calmer tone
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, in a statement directed at President Trump, called on the U.S. president Thursday to negotiate with Mexico in a constructive spirit, saying the challenges between the two neighbors “never justify threatening or disrespectful attitudes between our countries.”
“If your recent statements are the result of frustration due to domestic policy issues, to your laws or to your Congress, it is to them that you should turn to, not to Mexicans,” he said in a fiveminute video statement issued on Twitter. “We’re not going to permit that negative rhetoric to define our actions. We’re only going to work in the best interest of the Mexicans.”
The video was Peña Nieto’s first public response to Trump since the U.S. president kicked off a week-long barrage of tweets and statements blasting U.S. immigration laws, the Mexican government, Democrats, NAFTA and Honduran asylum-seekers.
It also came one day after Trump ordered the secretary of Defense to deploy National Guard troops on the U.S.-Mexican border to beef up security.
In ordering the deployment, Trump warned that conditions on the borders were at a “point of crisis” and that “lawlessness” on the southern border is “fundamentally incompatible with the safety, security and sovereignty of the American people.”
He added that his administration “has no choice but to act.”
In West Virginia, Trump again hit the immigration topic Thursday, saying, “We have to have strong borders,” and vowed that troops would remain at the border “until we can have a wall.”
In his tweets in recent days, the president has threatened to end the North American Free Trade Agreement and blamed Democrats, Mexico and Central American countries for allowing migrants and drugs to flow into the U.S.
The Mexican leader took a measured tone in his remarks, listing the ways his country has worked with the U.S., including with Trump, to “modernize” NAFTA and stop transnational criminal gangs and other things.
“The bilateral relationship entails enormous opportunities that should benefit both nations,” Peña Nieto said. “It is an intense and dynamic relationship, which understandably also poses challenges. Nevertheless, these will never justify threatening or disrespectful attitudes between our countries.
“Paraphrasing the words of a great president of the United States of America: We will have no fear to negotiate, but we will never negotiate out of fear,” Peña Nieto said, quoting President Kennedy.
Trump said Thursday that a borderbound caravan of about 1,000 migrants fleeing violence in Central America had broken up inside Mexico.
The president has been tweeting about the caravan since Sunday after the Fox News program Fox & Friends and others reported a group of more than 1,000 migrants was traveling to the U.S. border, and Mexican authorities were doing little to stop them.
Under pressure from both countries, the migrants, who were traveling as a group as protection against criminals, will disband in Mexico City.