This morning on NPR’s Morning Edition, Steve Inskeep sat down with Former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda. Jorge has a B.A. from Princeton, and a Ph.D. in Economic History from the University of Paris. He’s also been a professor at several universities, including UC Berkeley. He worked as Foreign minister under Vincente Fox (Phantom, Phantom) so you can get an idea of the kind of guy he is.
On NPR he had some ominous words for a Trump-led United States, and some ridiculous ones too.
You can listen to the full interview here
On Trump and the USA:
Mexico has paid an enormous price for it’s War on Drugs, which I disagree with, but the governments here have pursued. This has been a costly, bloody war for Mexico; it has done it largely because the United States has insisted, but it has done it because these have been friendly administrations on the US side. It doesn’t have to do it!
Steve Inskeep: I think I hear you saying ‘if the Trump administration plays rough with Mexico, one thing Mexico could very well do is let more drugs flow to the United States’
Castaneda: Well, not make as much of an effort as it has the last ten years to stop that flow. There is no good reason for Mexico to pay the enormous price it has paid the last ten years for an administration in the US that is unfriendly and hostile to Mexico
Side note, this is the border with GOOD drug security?
This is a tasty bit right here, on what makes Good Neighbors:
Nice, good neighbors, they don’t build walls, they don’t deport people, and they don’t take jobs away from Mexicans by enticing American companies to relocate to the United States!
How dare those American Companies relocate to America! For shame!
Another plan from Castaneda is on avoiding, or bogging down deportation:
Inskeep: How do you say ‘No’ to deportations? The United States already deports a lot of people back to Mexico, we have the idea that the President-Elect might send more, how do you say No to that?
Castaneda: You can say ‘We will give you a lawyer to go to a hearing’ so that to begin with, it would be very very difficult for that system to deal with so many deportations through hearings, as opposed to simple, so called voluntary repatriation
…
There’s another element that Mexico has, which is to tell the US authorities ‘We will take any Mexicans you want to deport, as long as you can prove he’s Mexican’
Inskeep: You’re saying the busload of deportees arrives at the Mexican border, which is something that happens today, and Mexican authorities just look at these people and say ‘Nope, can’t prove they’re Mexican’?
Castaneda: Would you let 100 of my people in, who I said are American, without any proof of citizenship, without any proof of birth, without anything? Just because they ‘ook’ American and you’re telling me they ‘look’ Mexican? I don’t know what Mexicans look like. I know Mexicans who have papers. Prove to me they’re Mexican!
Papers Please!
He also has some good points to make on NAFTA, or ‘How to prove Donald Trump right’:
We need American investment, we need Japanese investment, we need European investment in order to grow and create jobs in Mexico, so Mexicans don’t go to the United States without papers and create the problems that Donald Trump says we create in the US!
Well it sounds like Donald Trump isn’t the only one saying you create those kind of troubles. You’re saying it!
And of course he ends on a veiled, insinuated threat:
President Trump should try and understand what the US’s overriding interest in Mexico has been for the last hundred-odd years; it’s Mexican stability. The US has enjoyed total peace and comfort on it’s southern border. A lot of countries don’t have that. Count your blessings, because if Mexico becomes unstable, that is a headache for the United States which dwarfs 700 jobs at the Carrier plant in Indianapolis.
Nice southern border you got here. It’d be a real shame if someone…ruined it. Eh?
So what say you? Is this just innuendo and political games? Is he right? Or is he just another liberal who hates Trump?
