There’s a Long Tradition of Anti-Americanism in Mexican Politics, and It’s Making a Comeback Andrew Paxman - Slate
go to original May 30, 2017

La Jornada, Mexico’s leading left-wing daily, has long made anti-Americanism an article of faith - and a selling point - as shown in its front page from Jan. 13 (La Jornada)

When Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto opened gasoline prices to market forces this January, the resulting 20-percent hike - both a step toward the entry of foreign gas stations and a top-up for the treasury’s depleted coffers - prompted weeks of outrage. La Jornada, the country’s leading left-wing daily, reported on the protests one day by splashing its front page with a woman setting fire to Old Glory. The message: The gas hike is the fault of the gringos.

The paper’s take was a deeply oversimplified reading of the situation, but it makes sense in the context of what I call gringophobia, a strain of Mexican nationalism - at times muted, at other times pronounced - that views the United States and its citizens as objects of fear, disdain, and blame for the country’s ills.

Mexico today is ripe for overt gringophobia, and two singular forces are making it so. One is Donald J. Trump. Since his campaign-igniting “murderers and rapists” speech of 2015, Trump has had no rivals as the American whom Mexicans most love to hate. U.S. media often play up the lighter side of this loathing: old folks bashing yellow-headed piñatas, narcos catapulting bales of marijuana over the border wall Trump has promised to extend. In Mexico, the mirth has fizzled. Between Trump’s nomination and inauguration, the peso lost a fifth of its value. Cowing before the president-elect, Ford canceled a planned plant in Mexico. The economy is anemic, and with Trump’s insistence on tearing up (or at least toning down) NAFTA, prospects look uncertain.

The other force is Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a former mayor of Mexico City and a nationalist-populist stalwart of the left, tagged by the late academic George Grayson as a Mexican messiah. Known to disciples, detractors, and neutrals alike by his initials, AMLO, López Obrador made his first bid for president in 2006 and lost by less than 1 percentage point. Part of his allure owed to his opposition to U.S. influence. The Iraq war had made George W. Bush deeply unpopular to Mexicans, for whom foreign invasions, understandably, are a no-no. On the campaign trail, the then–52-year old AMLO boasted he spoke no English and had never set foot in the USA.

In 2012, his second-place finish was more distant, thanks chiefly to massive support for Peña Nieto from the TV behemoth Televisa, but it did not help that he no longer had an internationally toxic U.S. president to make noises about. In 2018, Mexicans will vote again, and for most of the past year López Obrador has been polling as the front-runner. Political observers tend to agree that the greatest beneficiary of Trump’s election, by far, is AMLO.

Read the rest at Slate

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!