Mexico City – The action can be in the streets of Los Angeles, but the consequences of immigrants are politics in Mexico at a delicate time, days before Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum is expected to meet President Trump in his highly anticipated encounter face to face.
Sheinbaum has been defensive since the Secretary of National Security, Kristi Noem, in an Oval office event in Trump, accused the Mexican president on Tuesday of “encouraging violent protests.”
While Sheinbaum has assaulted immigration raids from the United States and supported the rights of immigrants to protest, there is no public registry that he has supported violence. A day before Noem's accusation, he said exactly the opposite and asked Mexicans in southern California to act peacefully.
However, Mexican opposition figures have adopted Noem's positions and have searched with enthusiasm to amplify them. Critics have also seized Sheinbaum's comments last month, weeks before Los Angeles protests, asking Mexicans in the United States to “mobilize” against a planned tax in the United States on cash transfers to Mexico.
An opposition senator, Lily Téllez, published a video about X last week accusing Sheinbaum to be emboldened to compatriots in the United States to “violate the law without consequences, as if it were Mexico”, an affirmation that echoed other critics.
The flood of accusations has put Sheinbaum in a delicate position: it is obliged to defend immigrants in the United States, as Mexican leaders have always done, but it cannot be seen as flamming bilateral tensions. Even so, he has started his domestic critics as “antipatriotics.”
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum attends her morning press conference at the National Palace of Mexico City in April.
(Marco Ugarte / Associated Press)
“How do Mexicans dare to say that I promoted violence in the United States? With what objective?” The president asked Friday. “So that there is no good relationship between Mexico and the United States? Or, worse, that the United States does something to Mexico? They are willing to have something bad to the country just to please its hypocrisy or hate.”
The news coverage of the protests has paralyzed Mexico, where the reports have been put on the side of immigrants against the efforts of the United States to stop and deport them. The commentators have largely condemned the actions of the Trump administration, while the waves and social networks are full of accounts and videos mainly comprehensive of immigrants and defenders in the field of southern California.
Sheinbaum, chosen for a period of six years a year ago in a landslide vote, has a public approval index of 70%, the surveys indicated. His Bloc of MORENA GUARDANTE dominates the state legislatures and the Mexican Congress. She has little to fear politically because of the anger of staggering opposition parties.
But, in the era of social networks, the Sheinbaum narrative as agitator has gained ground among some conservative commentators of the United States. They have represented it as a kind of manipulative teacher that dodge the violent resistance of their hanger in Mexico City.
“This woman, the president of Mexico, is talking about leading an uprising in the interior of America,” Charlie Kirk, an extreme right expansion presenter, declared on June 9 in a video published in X, where he has more than 5 million followers. “And he has a lot to work with because he has many sleeping cells here.”
In the comments last week, Sheinbaum has adopted non -violence as a daily mantra, citing the legacies of Mahatma Gandhi, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and Cesar Chavez.
“Any demonstration has to be peaceful,” journalists told Friday. “We are always looking for, diplomatically, the defense of Mexicans outside the country.”
And, although Sheinbaum is a usual in X, where he has 4.3 million followers, he urged people not to “do politics” in the Social Network Forum, where much of the controversies on their supposed role in immigrants' protests has developed.
Help feed the controversy is the proliferation of Mexican flags in Los Angeles protests. Sheinbaum has not backed or criticized the wavy of the flag, but has expressed its dismay for a widely distributed image, of a man -free manager that wielded a Mexican flag while it is located on top of a burned car. She has called the photo a “provocation”, hinting at dark motifs, but has not been able to clarify their suspicions.
A protester is fired with non -lethal weapons by the Eputies of the Sheriff of Los Angeles on Saturday in the center of Los Angeles.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
The image, Sheinbaum, said Friday: “It does not fit the millions of Mexicans who contribute to the economy of the United States and are the best people.”
On their sides against Sheinbaum, his opponents have also summoned calls from the president so that Mexicans in the United States “mobilize” against a completely separate issue: Trump administration plans to impose a 3.5% tax on foreign remittances, part of the mass bill of expenses of the United States Chamber in Congress.
That proposed Levy has complied with the universal conviction in Mexico, where cash transfers support tens of thousands of poor families and are an economic lynchpin of $ 64 billion a year.
In a speech last month in the northeast state of San Luis Potosí, Sheinbaum called American residents of Mexican descent, both immigrants and those born in the United States, to send letters, emails and social media messages to Congress to Congress that urge legislators to vote against the remittance tax.
“If necessary, we are going to mobilize,” said an animated Sheinbaum, raising his right fist, the image remembered his youth days as a leftist student manager.
Sheinbaum never requested street protests, much less violence. But he also did not clarify whether to “mobilize” referred to organizing manifestations, reinforcing diplomatic pressure or some other strategy to help frustrate the remittance tax.
The Sheinbaum clip urging people to “mobilize” has limited through the Internet. It is exposure to those who accuse her of promoting violent protests. Some online versions have been called that Sheinbaum speaks in a very accentuated English.
Since Trump assumed the position, Sheinbaum has won a great acclamation for skillfully handling sensitive bilateral problems, such as dresses and drug trafficking. As immigrants were extended throughout the United States, the Mexican president will return to walk a very fine line with his American counterpart in his first meeting in the Seven Summit group, which began Sunday in Canada.
Sheinbaum confirmed on Saturday that he planned to meet with Trump in the next few days and that he would raise the recent treatment of Mexicans in the United States.
“We are going to defend Mexicans with dignity,” he told a crowd outside of Mexico City.
The Mexican leader has made it clear that she disputes the vision of the administration of immigrants as “invaders” and the protesters of Los Angeles as insurrectionists.
“We do not agree with the treatment of honest Mexicans who work every day for the good of the United States and pay their taxes,” Sheinbaum said Friday. “Eighty percent of their profits remain in the United States, in consumption, in taxes. And they are people integrated into life there.”
And Sheinbaum, who did doctoral studies for four years at the National Lawrence Berkeley laboratory, added: “California would not be what is without Mexicans.”
The Times staff writer, Kate Lunthicum, and the special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed to this report.
