After the 2016 election, former Mexican president Vincente Fox posted a video with a sign reading “Mexico will not pay for the f—– wall.” Last October, Fox said “Donald, you suck so much at this job” and compared the president to a “worn-out baseball glove gripping a turd.” After the recent Florida high-school shooting Fox ramped up the rhetoric on HBO’s “Real Time” with Bill Maher.
“When you speak out of the White House this aggressive, violent language, when you discriminate, when you’re a racist, that’s what you get,” said Fox. “We need harmony, we need love, we need happy communities, and those concepts don’t come out of his mouth.”
And so on. While he talks trash on Trump and the USA, the former Mexican boss has been pretty quiet about violence inflicted by Mexico’s ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional. As it happens, this year marks a milestone for perhaps the worst example.
October 2, 2018 will mark 50 years since Mexican troops opened fire on “hundreds of student demonstrators, calling for greater democracy.” The Tlateloco Square massacre, on the eve of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, claimed more than 300 victims and the PRI regime has been covering it up ever since.
“The army surrounded the square and fired from every angle on thousands of youths,” Claudia Sierra Campuzano’s History of Mexico: An Analytical Approach explained decades later, “leaving hundreds of dead and wounded, thousands of arrests.” As the author told the New York Times, the regime followed with “the persecution and imprisonment of student leaders.”
The Mexican government approved Campuzano’s book but in 2003 the Public Education Ministry yanked History of Mexico from shelves and classrooms. Campuzano told the Times it was “like the Spanish Inquisition,” and “a crack in the facade of democracy in this country.”
Mexican president Vincente Fox, supposedly a brave reformer, offered little if any protest. In 2001, Fox ordered creation of a “special prosecutor for crimes of the past” but nothing of substance came to light.
In 2014, Mexican student teachers commandeered busses to attend demonstrations commemorating the Tlatelolco massacre. Mexican police attacked the students, killing six and dragging off 43 others. The PRI government claimed they had been taken by a drug gang and incinerated in a garbage dump.
Six months after the murder-kidnapping, Vincente Fox appeared on Univision and said “it’s about time” the parents give up their demands on the Mexican government. “Now they need to accept reality,” Fox said, and “the country has to keep advancing.” Miriam Trujillo, cousin of missing student Jonas Trujillo, said Fox’s comments were “repulsive.” If that seems a stretch, imagine if Fox told the parents of the Florida shooting to get over their sorrow and move on.
In similar style, Vincente Fox calls the president of the United States a racist while ignoring racism in his own country. Mexico’s ruling class is overwhelming composed of descendants from the Iberian Peninsula of Europe, and current president Enrique Peña Nieto is whiter than Fidel Castro or Desi Arnaz. Non-white Mexicans face blatant discrimination, such as ads seeking “no one dark,” but the racism runs much deeper.
Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos, minister of education from 1921-24, believed the mix of Indian and European peoples was La Raza Cósmica that transcends all other races.
“I never understood exactly what the ‘cosmic race’ implied,” the late Mexican-American Communist Bert Corona told Memoirs of Chicano History author Mario Garcia. “In my opinion, however, it was close to the kind of German racial superiority theory supported by Hitler. In fact, Vasconcelos himself became a fascist. Many Chicanos considered Vasconcelos and his views of the ‘cosmic race’ as an inspiration. But I recall Vasconcelos as a fascist.”
According to Corona, militant irredentist Reies Tijerina “had a definite race theory” and “the concept certainly seems to imply that we as Latinos, Mexicanos or Chicanos are superior to everyone else.” As Corona explained, “I couldn’t accept all this. We’re not a superior race.”
The cosmic race theory informs groups such as the National Council of La Raza and MEChA, the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanix de Aztlán. The notion that the razaists are superior also underlies Mexico’s sense of entitlement to the U.S. economy.
Mexicans in the USA will send home nearly $30 billion this year, as Victor Davis Hanson calculates. If the official number of 11 million illegals wired that sum, it would work out to $2,700 per person per year, and a household of five would average about $1,100 per month sent to Mexico. That would be impossible without the subsidies of the American taxpayer, so Hanson wonders “whether the U.S. could tax that sum to build the wall or at least declare that proof of remittances disqualifies one for public support.”
“Mexico will not pay for the f—— wall,” proclaims Vincente Fox. If President Trump tweeted that Fox should STFU, that would be understandable. On the other hand, it would be better for the president to ignore Vincente Fox. This gutless PRI mouthpiece deserves not the slightest attention from anybody – unless he starts talking about deadly government violence in Mexico. Students and journalists, mark your calendar for October 2.
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