Mexicans will strike back against Donald Trump

(Photo: Mary Altaffer – AP)

Mexicans have silently begun a campaign to debunk presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s bigotry, xenophobia, and economic isolationism in an area where he is most vulnerable: in the realm of accurate facts and figures.

To confront Trump’s daily Mexico-bashing, the Mexican government will launch a U.S. public-relations campaign in early June. Meantime, a group of Mexican-American businesspeople is launching a lobbying group named American Mexico Public Affairs Committee, modeled after the pro-Israel AIPAC and other influential Washington lobbying groups. The new group has already started putting out facts and figures on social media.

“The best way to respond to xenophobic, or racist, or uninformed positions is with information, not with adjectives, ” Mexican Foreign Minister Claudia Ruiz Massieu told me in a recent interview.

To be sure, Mexico President Enrique Peña Nieto, who has low popularity rates because of his poor handling of corruption and human-rights scandals, is hardly in a position to personally lead the charge against Trump.

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