What? Other countries media blames the US for their woes just like ours blames the US for our woes – PB/TK
The Return of Gringophobia – By Andrew Paxman / May 30 2017
When Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto opened gasoline prices to market forces this January, the resulting 20-percent hike—both a step toward the entry of foreign gas stations and a top-up for the treasury’s depleted coffers—prompted weeks of outrage. La Jornada, the country’s leading left-wing daily, reported on the protests one day by splashing its front page with a woman setting fire to Old Glory. The message: The gas hike is the fault of the gringos.
The paper’s take was a deeply oversimplified reading of the situation, but it makes sense in the context of what I call gringophobia, a strain of Mexican nationalism—at times muted, at other times pronounced—that views the United States and its citizens as objects of fear, disdain, and blame for the country’s ills.
Mexico today is ripe for overt gringophobia, and two singular forces are making it so. One is Donald J. Trump. Since his campaign-igniting “murderers and rapists” speech of 2015, Trump has had no rivals as the American whom Mexicans most love to hate. U.S. media often play up the lighter side of this loathing: old folks bashing yellow-headed piñatas, narcos catapulting bales of marijuana over the border wall Trump has promised to extend. In Mexico, the mirth has fizzled. Between Trump’s nomination and inauguration, the peso lost a fifth of its value. Cowing before the president-elect, Ford canceled a planned plant in Mexico. The economy is anemic, and with Trump’s insistence on tearing up (or at least toning down) NAFTA, prospects look uncertain.
Continue to slate.com article: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2017/05/what_the_history_of_mexican_anti_americanism_can_tell_us_about_the_trump.html
