CHINA ON OUR DOORSTEP

By Robert P. Bomboy

Donald Trump had hardly been in the White House a week when he set himself up high on the list of history's bullies, among them Ivan the Terrible, Lavrenty P. Beria, and the peroxide blond Draco Malfoy at Hogwarts.

            Transcripts of his obnoxious January 27 phone call to Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, published in the past week, show Trump at his worst, enlarging on the slanders he had launched throughout his election campaign, that Mexicans coming into the United States are "bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists."

            How would you feel if some bully slandered you that way? That's just the way Mexico feels.

            China, which is now driving the world's second biggest economy, has been flexing its muscles around the world. It's been investing bigtime in Latin America, in Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, where the turbulence of nationwide protests is spinning the country upside down.

            Until now, Mexico has resisted China's economic overtures, torpedoing a $3.7 billion Chinese project to run a high-speed bullet train north-south through the middle of the country.

            But the Chinese badly want to pitch their tents in Mexico. They announced last October that they would elevate military ties with Mexico to a new high. By yearend Mexico had sold a Chinese oil company access to two massive deepwater oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico. In February, after President Trump's insults, a Mexican tycoon announced a combination with China to build 40,000 Chinese SUV's annually in Mexico.

            Analysts say all this is intentional: to push the U.S. and Mexico further apart.

            Trump's outbursts had little basis in fact. Several scholarly studies over the years have shown that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States. And experts say the available evidence does not support the idea that undocumented immigrants commit a disproportionate share of crime.

More Mexicans leave the U.S. each year than enter it. In 2014 Mexico stepped up enforcement all along its southern border with Guatemala to halt Central American migrants fleeing gang violence. Its efforts since than have held back and detained 425,000 migrants headed for the U.S.

But the slings and arrows of pernicious rage do hurt. Trump is so reviled in Mexico that children and adults whack his photos with piñata sticks. He's not only personally disliked, but he now embodies more than a century’s worth of historic resentment against the U.S.

           

In 2018, by Mexican law, the moderate Enrique Peña Nieto can't run again for president. The presidency is a one-term deal; there is no such thing as re-election. Right now, a populist much like Donald Trump is a best bet to succeed Peña Nieto.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador's slogan is that he wants to make Mexico great again. In an echo of Trump, he says only he can do it. He despises collaboration with our Drug Enforcement Agency and would re-negotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement in favor of Mexico.

If López Obrador's wins, Donald Trump would be staring across the border at a hard man to deal with. Bullies don't think far enough ahead.

Says one observer: "All of the worst-case scenarios, all of the promises of petulant retaliation, would become instantly plausible."

            And the biggest piñata stick López Obrador could use would be an open door to China.