It is an interesting time to be in Mexico… interesting from the perspective of a non-Mexican. The Mexicans are a worried lot as the new US president, Donald Trump, has been threatening them right since the run-up to the presidential elections.
The dismay across the world when Trump actually won pales into insignificance compared to the horror with which Mexicans absorbed the news. The Mexican peso crashed on the day he won, and American auto majors and other industrial giants manufacturing out of Mexico shuddered.
And now many have packed up and left, responding to Trump’s threats. Some of them did so within hours of Trump announcing, even before he had taken over as president, that stiff tariffs would be imposed on cars made by General Motors in Mexico. Within hours of this announcement, America’s second largest auto company, Ford Motor, announced the scrapping of its plan to build a $1.6-billion small-car assembly plant in Mexico.
Two weeks later GM announced it would invest at least $1 billion in US factories, create/retain about 7,000 jobs in the US in the coming years, move 450 jobs from GM supplier plants in Mexico back to the US and so on. In addition, GM would add 5,000 jobs to its finance and technology operations.
“We are going to be finished; the people here are in panic. Mexicans haven’t seen this kind of a horror show in ages,” says the very articulate Oscar Santana, my taxi driver, as he ferries me from Benito Juarez airport, through heavy traffic in Mexico City. “Already we’ve suffered as petroleum prices crashed and weakened the peso from 13-14 to 1 dollar to 18-19. And now again petrol prices have gone up!” The peso, he adds morosely was kissing 22 to a US dollar, and “people are saying it will go down to 25. How we will survive, we don’t know”. And then, of course, there is the infamous wall that Trump has threatened to build at the border with Mexico, the likely deportation of thousands of illegal immigrants, the heavy taxes on products imported from Mexico, and so on.
How many world leaders would want to be in the shoes of Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto is an easy question to answer! Last week, his meeting with Trump was cancelled, but on Friday the two did have a phone conversation on bilateral trade. Interestingly, while the statements issued by both sides were similar on how the leadership of both countries would negotiate future trade deals, there was one exception.
While the Americans made no mention of the famous border wall, which has become the subject of many jokes and cartoons across the world, the Mexicans claimed that “the two presidents had agreed not to discuss the wall financing issue publicly”.
“Nice phone call”Following the much-awaited and publicised talk, Trump told the media in his characteristic style that he had a “a nice phone call” with Peña Nieto, and underlined how the US was losing “vast amounts of businesses and jobs” to Mexico. And drugs were flowing in the reverse direction! As Trump questions the usefulness or efficacy of agencies such as Nato and even the UN, the German and French leadership watched in consternation as Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May rushed to the White House to become the first world leader to meet the new American president.
Mexican swarajya movement?Well, backlash from the Mexican side was bound to come, as it has, in something that is akin to our own Swarajya movement and the call given by Gandhiji to boycott videshi goods. Several regions and activist groups in Mexico are calling to boycott US companies such as Walmart, Starbucks and Coca Cola.
One digital image created by a Mexican food activist group, which became the rage on social media, shows a clenched fist done in the red, white and green of Mexico’s flag, decorated with the nation’s emblem, the eagle – with the tag in Spanish that translates as: “Consumers, to the Shout of War; consume products made in country… Use your buying power to punish the companies that favour the politics of the new US government.”
A hashtag that is trending on twitter is #AdiosStarbucks. It is difficult to walk around in Mexico City, or its plush business district, Santa Fe, which houses many American majors, without bumping into someone holding the ubiquitous Starbucks coffee cup. The American major has hundreds of outlets in Mexico.
In a rare press conference, the media-shy Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim welcomed Mexican unity, which had “surprised” him, but said he didn’t agree with the boycott of US goods. Volunteering to negotiate with Trump, who he termed “a great negotiator and not a Terminator”, Slim called upon political parties to unite behind President Nieto, and said the crucial thing was to “negotiate from a position of strength”.
But the reality is that Mexico’s economy is barely a tenth of the US economy. But then, not so long ago, the “naked fakir” managed to bring the world’s greatest empire to its knees and quit India.