It Was About Time Mexico Did Something to Stop Being Trump's Favorite Villain Andres Oppenheimer - McClatchyDC
go to original May 13, 2016

El Payaso: Donald Trump Gets a New Nickname from Mexico (wochit News)

Mexicans have silently begun a campaign to debunk presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s bigotry, xenophobia and economic isolationism in an area where he is most vulnerable: in the realm of accurate facts and figures.

To confront Trump’s daily Mexico-bashing, the Mexican government will launch a U.S. public-relations campaign in early June. Meantime, a group of Mexican-American businesspeople is launching a lobbying group named American Mexico Public Affairs Committee, modeled after the pro-Israel AIPAC and other influential Washington lobbying groups. The new group has already started putting out facts and figures on social media.

“The best way to respond to xenophobic, or racist, or uninformed positions is with information, not with adjectives,” Mexican Foreign Minister Claudia Ruiz Massieu told me in a recent interview.

To be sure, Mexico President Enrique Peña Nieto, who has low popularity rates because of his poor handling of corruption and human-rights scandals, is hardly in a position to personally lead the charge against Trump.

If Peña Nieto did that, he would lose badly. Trump would shower the Mexican president with insults, calling him a moron who hasn’t been able to keep drug baron Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman from escaping from prison and who has yet to give a good explanation for his government’s dubious investigation into the 2014 disappearance of 43 students in the state of Guerrero.

Peña Nieto took a shot at Trump on March 8, when he said the U.S. presidential hopeful’s rhetoric is reminiscent of that of Hitler and Mussolini, but the Mexican leader has remained largely silent on the issue for months.

Now, I’m told by diplomatic sources, Peña Nieto has hired the WPP and Burson-Marsteller public-relations firms to design and execute a PR strategy in the U.S. It will include mass advertising and frequent responses to Trump’s attacks from Mexico’s new ambassador to Washington, Carlos Sada.

Read the rest at McClatchyDC

Related: Mexico Fights Back Against 'The Clown' (Politico)

Related: Mexican Twitter’s Counterproposal to Trump: Make Arizona Mexico Again! (Vox)

Related: 'We Have the Moral High ground': Trump Details How to Make Mexico to Pay for Border Wall (RT)

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!