Jorge Castañeda, the esteemed Mexican intellectual who served as his country’s secretary of foreign affairs from 2000 to 2003, used a Wednesday appearance in Washington not only to declare that Donald Trump could easily make Mexico pay for a border wall, and to refute recent studies showing a reverse migration from Mexico to the United States. Castañeda also questioned Hillary Clinton’s feelings for Latin America in general and Mexico in particular—striking, given that the former secretary of state has run much of her campaign en Español.
“The problem with Hillary Clinton on Latin America is I have the feeling—and it’s pure feeling, I’ve only been with her a couple of times, I don’t know her well . . . but I know a lot of people who do know her—she doesn’t really like the place,” he at the Hudson Institute in downtown D.C., “And I know she doesn’t really like Mexico.”
“I don’t know if something happened in the honeymoon in Acapulco or whatever—or didn’t happen,” he said, to laughter. “I don’t know. Hard to say. But there’s something there that . . . she’s just not comfortable with . . . She had a very good time once in Cartagena at one of the summits or something, that she liked but that was about the only time she seems to have enjoyed one of the many, many, many trips she made as secretary of state, and as first lady before, and as senator also [to Latin America]. And particularly Mexico.”
While Castañeda was quick to condemn Trump—he said it would be a “disaster” should the Republican win the presidency—his analysis does possibly help explain why Clinton’s attempts to bill herself as the nation’s “abuela” have fallen flat.
