Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto is making a hash of dealing with Donald Trump, says Jesús
Cantú. His first terrible mistake was to agree to meet him before the US election had even been
decided, treating the Mexico-bashing Republican candidate as if he were a head of state. Having thus
infuriated the public, he blamed it all on then-finance minister Luis Videgaray, a pal of Trump’s
son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who’d acted as go-between. Then he brought Videgaray back as foreign
minister, and dispatched him and the new finance minister to talk to Trump’s team, making it look as
if Mexico was happy to cooperate on trashing the trade deal and building the wall. The pair even
scheduled a trip by Peña Nieto himself. Can’t our leaders realise that Trump isn’t to be appeased like
this? What they see as a sign of goodwill, he sees as weakness. Peña Nieto eventually saw sense and
cancelled the meeting, but the humiliations continue. It’s now rumoured that, in a private phone call,
Trump threatened to send US troops to sort out Mexico’s drug traffickers if our troops didn’t do the
job. Enough. We need leaders with tough negotiating skills to stand up to Trump, not truckle to him.
