COMMENTARY If Mexican and Latin American leaders are stunned by President Trump's thug behavior, maybe it's because they never imagined the U.S. would elect a guy who looks like so many of them.
In 1990, when I was a newly arrived foreign correspondent in Mexico, I was summoned to appear before one of the country's scariest political chieftains, Manuel Bartlett Díaz.
I found out pretty quickly that he hadn’t asked me in to recommend a good local taquería.
Bartlett was a dinosaurio, a top brute, inside the one-party dictatorship that ruled Mexico in those days. He’d engineered massive presidential election fraud a couple years earlier — and now he wanted to warn me away from the buzz my colleagues and I were hearing (which he denied) that he had ties to the drug traffickers who murdered U.S. DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena.
Bartlett sat me down at a long table — the only other guy in the room reminded me of Michael Corleone’s goon in The Godfather II — and spent the next half hour darkly pressuring, intimidating and bullying me.
It confirmed what I’d been told: that Bartlett was a thug, and so was the regime he represented.
So perdóname if I don’t feel all that sorry for Mexico’s politicos right now as they discover that the dinosaurio next door, U.S. President Donald J. Trump, acts like a thug, too.
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If any political class on earth should have been familiar with, and therefore prepared for, the thuggery Trump unleashed this week, it’s Mexico’s.
Instead, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and company are astonished at the onerous 25% tariffs Trump slapped on their products, as well as on Canada's.
I certainly don’t endorse Trump’s senseless tariff crusade — his performative punishment for all the fentanyl and foreigners he accuses Mexico and Canada of ushering into the U.S. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal calls it the “dumbest” thing Trump could do, because it promises to wreak economic and diplomatic destruction in the Americas and beyond.
Latin America is shocked, shocked, to find that a convicted felon who's now a U.S president would stage a drive-by tariff attack for populist gain.
But I also can’t stomach the disingenuous alarm I’m seeing on the faces of so many Mexican and other Latin American leaders these days.
It’s as if they somehow don’t recognize the raw banditry Americans voted into the White House — because they never imagined America would someday elect a leader who’s a lot like so many of them.
Drive-by attack
Spare me the nonsense that Bartlett and his ilk were a 20th- and not a 21st-century Mexican model. Barlett’s party, the PRI, may have finally been voted out of power in 2000 after its 71-year run; but Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, oozed PRI-ista thuggery himself — and, like Trump, apologizes for if not admires Russia’s thug dictator, Vladimir Putin.
Trump, in fact, believes his drive-by tariff attack on Mexico is justified because López Obrador, like any good Bartlett descendant, coddled his country’s omnipotent and homicidal drug cartels. His preposterous hands-off policy was even called “hugs, not bullets.”
That's all the more reason Sheinbaum looks so dumbfounded now, after she stepped up and extradited 29 top Mexican cartel leaders to the U.S. last month to appease Trump. Granted, Mexican presidents have been temporarily placating gringo presidents that way for decades. But Trump turned around and levied the 25% duties even after her goodwill gesture.
Well, Señora Presidenta, as you no doubt witnessed on your climb up Mexico’s ladder, that’s what thugs do — especially those who throw democratic allies like Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelinsky under the bus.
Mexican leaders have had a quarter century since the PRI’s downfall to dismantle the sinister spider’s web of cartel money and the business interests that launder it in cities like Culiacán, the seat of the powerful fentanyl-exporting Sinaloa mafia.
Yet they’ve left it intact.
Now they’re shocked, shocked, to find that a convicted felon who's morphed into a U.S head of state would use that against them for populist gain.
Ditto in Panama, which Trump wants to shake down to grab control of the Panama Canal. The party in power there is home to former President Ricardo Martinelli, Panama's thug of thugs, who in 2023 was sentenced to 10 years in prison for corruption. Last year Martinelli took asylum in the Nicaraguan embassy — thanks to Nicaragua's thug-of-thugs, dictator Daniel Ortega.
I certainly don’t endorse Trump’s brutish Panama Canal extortion, either. But please, Latin American leaders, as Michael Corleone said: don’t insult my intelligence by acting like you’ve never seen the brute before.
