In the run-up to Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States, the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has once again sent a message of firmness: “Mexico is no one’s colony, it is no one’s protectorate, Mexico is a free, independent and sovereign country. Let it be heard well, let it be heard far away,” he said this Saturday during an event in Puebla. The magnate will be sworn in as the new American president tomorrow, Monday, and among his most immediate promises is a wave of mass deportations and the imposition of tariffs on Mexico if he does not stop migration and drug trafficking.
Sheimbaum insisted on an argument widely heard these days: the United States would practically come to a standstill without the jobs carried out by migrants, many of them Mexican. “What would New York be without the Mixtecs, without the Mixtecs, that’s why we call it ‘Puebla York’? There they work in services, in construction, they also move the economy there forward. Look, seven out of 10 farmworkers in the United States are farmworkers. “Would Americans hardly have food on the table if it weren’t for Mexican men and women?”
Nearly 40 million U.S. residents are Mexican or of Mexican descent, according to a recent official U.S. Census survey. At the same time, at least five million Mexicans live without papers in the United States, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Sheinbaum also defended his weight in the economy. “They send only 20% of what they earn as remittances, while 80% stays there.”
Since Trump’s victory in the November elections, the Mexican president has been combining messages of firmness in the face of the magnate’s attacks, with concrete actions aimed at deflating tension and even winks of being willing to collaborate and negotiate. Sheinbaum has even spoken that his government has “a plan” to respond to Trump’s foreseeable campaign of attacks, but that they are waiting for the Republican to make the first move.
“We will always defend the people of Mexico, the nation and our homeland. We are a great country, we are a great people and that is why our government will always be close to the people. “We do not lie, we do not steal and we will never betray the people of Mexico,” added the president.
Regarding the possibility that the threat of deportations becomes a reality from day one, he added that “in this new period that arrives tomorrow with President Trump, first we are going to defend the Mexicans there. The consulates already have more lawyers to support them.” He has also mentioned fentanyl, the powerful synthetic drug that is proving a public health crisis in the United States and that is at the center of Trump’s criticism of Mexico, the transit route and production of the drug. The Mexican Government has rolled up its sleeves in recent months, announcing the largest seizures of fentanyl since records began.
