There is “no scenario” in which Mexico will pay for Donald Trump’s wall, says the country’s president.
Enrique Peña Nieto’s remarks, published Monday in the Excelsior newspaper, make him the latest Mexican official to condemn the wall that the Republican presidential candidate has proposed building along the U.S.-Mexico border as part of his immigration plan.
Peña Nieto told Excelsior that Trump’s brand of politicking and his “strident expressions” tended to pose “very easy, simple solutions to problems that, of course, are not so easily solved.” He also said Trump has abused and misdirected people’s economic frustrations––just as Hitler and Mussolini had done.
“There have been episodes in human history, unfortunately, where these expressions of this strident rhetoric have only led to very ominous situations in the history of humanity.” Peña Nieto said. “That’s how Mussolini got in, that's how Hitler got in, they took advantage of a situation, a problem perhaps, which humanity was going through at the time, after an economic crisis.”
Peña Nieto is the highest ranking Mexican official to call out Trump. Although former Mexican presidents have been even more scathing, like Felipe Calderón, Peña Nieto’s predecessor, who said the Mexican people won’t “pay any single cent for such a stupid wall!” The president before Calderón, Vicente Fox, said simply: “I’m not going to pay for that fucking wall.”