Mexican finance minister Luis Videgaray is stepping down, a spokeswoman at the ministry said on Wednesday, days after a visit to the country by Donald Trump and shortly before the government was due to present a 2017 budget with cuts needed to restore confidence after a surge in debt.
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Algorri gave no reason for the resignation, but it comes in the wake of the Republican presidential candidate’s meeting with Pena Nieto in the Mexican capital last week. Pena Nieto said he had accepted Videgaray’s resignation and replaced him with Social Development Minister Jose Antonio Meade, a former foreign minister who held the finance job between 2011-2012.
He acknowledged Mexicans’ “enormous indignation” over Trump’s presence in the country and repeated that he told him in person Mexico would in no way pay for the proposed border wall.
Trump insists Mexico will foot the bill for the structure, while Peña Nieto vows his nation would never pay for it instead.
Carlos Marin, editorial director general of the Grupo Milenio media outlet, put it this way when he interviewed Pena Nieto this week: “This miserable man vomited in your house”.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, also invited to visit by Pena Nieto, said this week that she won’t be going to Mexico before Election Day.
– Cooler US-Mexico ties?
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her Republican opponent Donald Trump answered questions on national security and foreign policy September 7 during a “commander-in-chief forum” on NBC News.
Videgaray “was the architect” of Trump’s visit, because he was the adviser that Pena Nieto had “the most reliance on, and was closest to”, said columnist and political analyst Raymundo Riva Palacio.
That didn’t happen – Trump’s presidential and diplomatic approach disintegrated after he returned to USA soil, and Peña Nieto was roundly criticized for failing to call Trump out on his inflammatory rhetoric toward the country to his face.
Trump has cast his visit to Mexico as a statesmanlike effort to reach out to a country he had alienated.
Pena Nieto has defended his decision to meet Trump as necessary to open dialogue with someone who could possibly become his counterpart in the United States after the November election.
His former boss, Miguel Angel Osorio Chong, who led the interior ministry during the jailbreak and eventual recapture of drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, received a boost to his hopes of becoming the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party’s 2018 presidential candidate after avoiding the chop. Pena Nieto added there would be no new taxes or tax hikes.
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This post was syndicated from The Guardian NigeriaThe Guardian Nigeria.
