One of President Enrique Peña Nieto’s top ministers and closest allies resigned on Wednesday, an apparent casualty of Mr. Peña Nieto’s wildly unpopular meeting last week with Donald J. Trump.
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Luis Videgaray, the finance minister who stepped down on Wednesday, had championed the idea of inviting Mr. Trump to Mexico City over the objections of other ministers, according to several Mexican news media reports, though Mr. Peña Nieto insisted it was his own initiative.
Videgaray resigned a week after Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto met with US presidential candidate Donald Trump in Mexico.
The president’s office announced earlier Wednesday that Pena Nieto would have a message later in the day about a change in his government.
That same contractor had sold a mansion to Pena Nieto’s wife, former soap opera star Angelica Rivera, raising questions of conflicts of interest.
Radio Formula said Finance Ministryspokeswoman Claudia Algorri confirmed that Videgaray, a close confidant of Pena Nieto, offered his resignation and that the president accepted it after almost four years on the job.
Trump commented on the resignation during a forum with U.S. veterans on NBC television when he was asked if the USA could take a chance with him as commander-in-chief.
Although an investigation led by the minister for public administration cleared Videgaray and Pena Nieto of wrongdoing a year ago, critics questioned the probe because it was conducted by someone the president had picked.
Senior diplomats said Videgaray had been instrumental in arranging the Trump visit, in which the government had hoped to impress upon Trump the need to moderate his tone and reconsider his more divisive campaign proposals.
Nieto called on Meade to continue the government’s policy of fiscal responsibility “to contain and stabilise the growth of the public-sector debt as a share of the gross domestic product (GDP)”.
Taking over for Meade at Social Development will be Luis Enrique Miranda, formerly deputy minister at the Ministry of the Interior.
Analysts have seen him as a potential candidate to follow in his footsteps in the national election of 2018, or to become the candidate for Pena Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party in the State of Mexico governor’s election next year.
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The bill Piter is proposing would specifically cancel the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and ceded Texas and California as well as parts of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming to the US if Trump cancels NAFTA. Trump has pledged to build a wall on the US border to keep out migrants from Mexico. Trump told a televised US national security forum Wednesday night that “the people that arranged the trip in Mexico have been forced out of government”. News stories displayed here appear in our category for General and are licensed via a specific agreement between LongIsland.com and The Associated Press, the world’s oldest and largest news organization. For the protection of AP and its licensors, content may not be copied, altered or redistributed in any form. Please see our terms of service for more information.
