Deputy Mauricio Alonso Toledo Gutierrez speaks before the Mexico City legislature. The legislature voted on March 2 to ask the federal government to ban Donald Trump from entering the country.
Legislators in Mexico City are asking the federal government to ban Donald Trump from entering the country, citing the GOP presidential hopeful’s repeated anti-Mexican comments.
The proposal passed unanimously on Wednesday, according to Deputy José Manuel Delgadillo of the conservative National Action Party. He described the document, known as a "point of agreement," as a largely symbolic recommendation to the federal government that the local legislature lacked the ability to enforce.
But he told The WorldPost that Mexico City legislators felt the need to prod President Enrique Peña Nieto to confront Trump, whom they view as a hyper-nationalist who has kindled anti-Mexican resentment by describing Mexicans in broad terms as "rapists" and calling for the construction of a wall across the length of the U.S.-Mexico border.
"What we're saying is that if he wants to build a wall so that Mexicans can't enter his country, then he is not welcome in our country," Delgadillo told WorldPost. "What we need now is for President Peña Nieto to make a strong statement condemning Mr. Trump's anti-Mexican comments."
Deputy Víctor Hugo Romo of the leftwing Revolutionary Democratic Party, which introduced the point of agreement, referred to Trump as “primeval, egocentric and primitive,” before going on to compare Trump to Hitler in public remarks Wednesday, according to MSV Noticias.
“Hitler was very popular,” Romo said. “He generated a lot of sympathy by adopting nationalist politics that vindicated the Germans’ sense of self-worth. [Trump] is practically a copy. I consider Donald Trump a chauvinist, a misogynist who fosters and leans towards toward repression. … He doesn’t respect diversity.”
The Mexico City legislators’ anger echoes comments from two furious former presidents who have sounded off against Trump in recent days. Felipe Calderón called Trump “racist” and said he was “turning the United States into a neighbor that we’re all going to end up rejecting and hating.” Vicente Fox said repeatedly that he was not going to pay for “that fucking wall,” referring to Trump’s proposal to require Mexico to pay for the wall he wants built along the southern U.S. border.
But Peña Nieto, of the Revolutionary Institutional Party, has taken a more cautious approach. He’s largely refrained from publicly criticizing the Republican front-runner, and his chief of staff Francisco Guzmán played down concerns about a Trump presidency on Tuesday -- though he avoided mentioning Trump by name.
“Anyone who becomes president of the United States will have to work with Mexico,” Guzmán said, according to Bloomberg News. “It would be difficult to reverse 20 years of integration.”
