Trump Fallout in Mexico

Just a week after Donald Trump’s last-minute visit to Mexico, Mexican Finance Minister Luis Videgaray announced that he was resigning from Mexican Finance Minister Luis Videgaray has resigned following the visit of Donald Trump last week.

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Mr Trump's visit almost immediately caused public relations problems, when he appeared later that day at a rally in Arizona.

There, he told the crowd Mexico would "100%" pay for a planned border wall, though he told reporters he had not discussed the issue with President Pena Nieto.

The president later insisted he had told Mr Trump that Mexico would not pay.

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The visit was widely criticised by Mexicans both in the national press and on social media.

A spokesperson for the ministry said Mr Videgaray would not take on another public office.

  BBC

Peña Nieto arrived at the press conference as the most unpopular president in modern Mexican history—with his approval rating registering a scant 23 per cent, according to the newspaper Reforma—the product of conflict-of-interest scandals, an underwhelming Mexican economy, and an aloof response to the 2014 attack on 43 teacher trainees. This showing surely didn’t help: Indeed, a poll in Reforma—one of the few print outlets openly critical of Peña Nieto—found 85 per cent thought that the Trump invitation was “an error.” The newspaper on Thursday ran the headline, “Trump uses EPN,” focusing on perceptions that the president, his name abbreviated here, had been played.

  MacLeans

Floodgates against Pena are now open.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto heavily plagiarized the thesis for his law degree, according to an investigation by a local news outlet.

Aristegui Noticias on Sunday published an online report based on an analysis of the embattled president’s thesis by a group of academics, which it said was then corroborated by the news outlet.

It said 29 percent of the thesis was material lifted from other works, including 20 paragraphs copied word-for-word from a book written by former President Miguel de la Madrid without citation or mention in the bibliography.

  WaPo