Pablo Hiriart
Donald Trump’s first cunning attacks as president have been aimed at weakening the United States’ allies. He postponed for a month the measure to close the world’s most potent economic corridor, which is his country’s border with Mexico, and to break (that’s what the tariffs mean) the free trade agreement that allows the sale of goods worth 800 billion dollars a year with its southern neighbor.
It wants to kill that dynamism.
The United States buys 45 percent of its imports from Mexico, China, and Canada (in that order). It will impose taxes that will wreak havoc on Mexico, making those products more expensive for Americans.
The measure has been postponed for 30 days, but the threat remains.
Friends? That treatment is certainly not that of partners or allies but of enemies.
Ukraine had its billions of dollars in aid cut off through the ‘worms’ of USAID, and he made an unforgivably deferential gesture to the dictatorship of the Venezuelan usurper Nicolás Maduro.
Against his allies, against democracies, against free trade, against cultural diversity… The libertarian turned out to be a liberticide.
How well this was measured this weekend by the journalist and writer Michael Lewis (author of Moneyball) in an interview with El Mundo: “Beyond the avalanche of executive orders, it seems to me that Trump still doesn’t know exactly what he wants to do. He doesn’t care about anything except himself. He has no ideology; he only cares about himself. He is not Hitler; he has no plan,” as the Austrian did.
In the case of Mexico, his thing is racism.
Trump has already ignited the fire of xenophobia that took so many years to quell on both sides of the border.
Claudia Sheinbaum handled Trump’s first onslaught well, but Mexico’s vulnerability is not going to go away if it hides under the rug to pretend it doesn’t exist.
The country (government, citizens, and companies) has been taken hostage by Trump because of López Obrador’s cursed legacy. This must be corrected and not paid for with inflation, economic stagnation, and the persecution of Mexicans in the United States.
Of course, the drug traffickers were empowered under López Obrador. The cartels enjoyed privileged treatment, respect, and tolerance from the President of the Republic, unlike citizens who simply thought differently to him about the best path to development.
There is no doubt, but rather an avalanche of evidence, of the armed participation of the drug traffickers in ensuring the victory of Rubén Rocha Moya in Sinaloa.
The tolerance that the previous president had towards the drug cartels, because the narcos “are also people”, served to cover up for the enemies of the country.
Yes, of course, they are people, just as the Serbian perpetrators of genocide, the pro-Nazi groups, the White Guards, and the hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan are also “people”. That does not take away their status as criminal enemies of humanity.
Trump used this as a basis for attacking Mexico.
Trump would have to be asked to provide evidence of the complicity of the drug traffickers and the government. Did someone say fear?
And in the face of the onslaught against Mexico – because Trump’s hatred is directed at Mexicans – AMLO left a country divided, at odds with itself, in the process of demolishing democracy and the rule of law.
Thus, divided, half of the territory was lost, and there was armed intervention by the United States and a punitive expedition. Trump has another military intervention in the ‘not ruled out’ options. And there are Mexicans – polarized as López Obrador left us – who would agree to such an intervention in order to harm the 4T. It’s madness.
Another madness: the government and its party are still determined to crush the rights and guarantees of those who think differently.
In this way, Mexico will continue to be vulnerable to the most powerful man in the world, anti-Mexican, impulsive and unpredictable, and with no commitment to international legality, human rights, or democracy.
He stabbed Venezuelans in the back by sending an emissary to agree with Maduro to please receive the citizens of that South American country and hand over the Americans being held in Caracas.
Maduro’s eyes sparkled with happiness.
The Trump administration’s envoy, Richard Grenell, left happily with five hostages after the agreement with Maduro.
And what about the almost one thousand political prisoners in Venezuelan jails for protesting and opposing the dictator Maduro?
Did he not take any of them? Not even one?
In El Torocón, a maximum security prison 150 kilometers south of Caracas, political prisoners are victims of all kinds of humiliations, even the most degrading.
Not a word from Trump’s envoy, who went to make a deal with the criminal for whose capture he is offering a multi-million dollar reward and who stole the elections: the opposition presented the voting records, Maduro did not.
A Trump executive order stripped 600,000 Venezuelans in the United States of their refugee status, making them illegal immigrants subject to detention and deportation, some in April and others in September.
Back to Maduro. Or to Guantanamo, where 30,000 undocumented foreigners will be imprisoned.
It was a shameful act of recognition and backing for Nicolás Maduro, Iran’s great ally in America.
No peace in the Middle East. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza turned them into a people of eternal refugees in Egypt and Jordan.
Two US allies attacked by Trump in that region, which is a powder keg, where he has a declared enemy that possibly already has the atomic bomb (Iran).
And more terrorism against the United States will be the harvest.
Denmark, a great ally in NATO, is run over by Trump because he wants to take Greenland away from it.
What he does to his ally, friend, and partner, Panama, is a declaration of war.
He has cut off USAID funding to Ukraine, which in three years of Russian invasion has channeled $2.6 billion in humanitarian aid, $5 billion in development aid, and $30 billion in direct assistance to reduce the effects of the invasion.
Putin is happy (although he is careful not to show it too obviously) because the President of the United States is abandoning his allies. Those that he is going to conquer to restore, as he has said, the empire that existed in the days of the Soviet Union.
Xi Jinping will have plenty of ‘new friends’ because the US has stopped helping them.
Trump’s war is against the greatness of the United States, although he doesn’t care or know it because, as Michael Lewis says, he only pays attention to himself.
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