The new adventures of Donald Trump
The thorny past of the United States in Latin America is based on any measure that involves the military. After the determination of the increasingly unbalanced US President Donald Trump to send military personnel to the southern border of his country, he has put the Mexican government in a compromising position, since it has received pressure from the Senate and the candidates for the July elections in Mexico, to demand respect for the country.
According to the expert in Mexico of the Atlantic Council study center, Katherine Pereira, Trump's decision imprints a negative tone on the relationship before the Summit of the Americas, and definitely creates tension. The president emeritus of the Inter-American Dialogue study center, Peter Hakim, referring to the Trump threat, emphasizes that this southern border is not only a border with Mexico, but with Latin America.
A week before coinciding with his Mexican counterpart, Enrique Peña Nieto, at the Summit of the Americas in Lima, President Donald Trump has raised the tension with Mexico by tightening up his migratory rhetoric and ordering the deployment of the National Guard at the border.
When Trump learned that a caravan of hundreds of Central American immigrants was traveling through Mexico in the direction of the United States, the president suffered an attack that gave way to the announcement of sending military personnel to the border and ended with an unusually harsh message from Peña Nieto to his US counterpart.
In the words of Peña Nieto in a speech broadcast on video on his Twitter account, the most recent statements of the US president come from a frustration over matters of internal politics, its laws or its Congress. That being the case, the correct thing would be for the president to carry out a reprisal against anyone who has to do with the failures within the US government and leave the Mexicans in peace once and for all. Peña Nieto spoke shortly after Trump riveted the comments he called "violators" to Mexican immigrants when he announced his presidential candidacy in 2015.
He also added that the undocumented were being raped at levels no one has ever seen before. In this way, Trump unleashed words that abysmally hurt the pride of Mexicans during the US election campaign and that are at the root of the difficulties that his relationship with the government of Peña Nieto has gone through.And he did it also when he threatened Mexico with canceling the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) if it did not stop a caravan of immigrants heading to the United States.
Trump boasted of having driven the Mexican government to his will, declaring that they had stopped the caravan because he told them they had to do it. On the same day, he said that within his plans he envisaged entrusting the military to watch the border, an unexpected announcement that led the Mexican government to quickly request explanations from the White House.Between 2,000 and 4,000 members of the National Guard, a reserve corps of the Armed Forces, are those Trump wants to use on the border until the wall that has caused so much wear in the relationship with Mexico is built.
For its part, the Mexican Foreign Ministry suggested that if such sending of the National Guard to the border ends up being a militarization of the border, the bilateral relationship between both countries, which in itself is already badly treated, would be seriously damaged. Likewise, the US law prohibits the military from engaging in public order tasks and the guarantee that the soldiers will not offer to immobilize the immigrants reduced the impact of the announcement.