By Doug Saunders
There are two foreign men whose faces you see constantly on the streets of Mexico’s capital these days – on magazine covers, on posters and billboards, caricatured on T-shirts and, in the case of one of them, hung as pinatas.
That one is Donald Trump. He has achieved a folkloric notoriety in Mexico unprecedented among U.S. presidents, after coming to power by demonizing the entire Mexican people as rapists and traffickers and by threatening to savage Mexico’s fragile economy by shutting down NAFTA and building a border wall. To be associated with Mr. Trump, as Mexico’s centre-left President Enrique Pena Nieto made the mistake of doing in 2016 (when he invited the then-candidate to visit Mexico), is to be scarred.
The other is Ernesto (Che) Guevara. This fall has felt like a mass festival around the 50th anniversary of the death of the Argentine revolutionary who transformed Cuba’s revolution into six decades of crippling authoritarianism. He’s a popular figure throughout Latin America, but Mexicans have really pulled out all the stops, releasing several Che-themed motion pictures and TV specials and encouraging his anniversary to be turned into a nationwide political statement. Among urban Mexicans, Che-style Marxist authoritarianism is the forbidden fruit, the tempting alternative that Mexico, unlike every other country in the region, has never tried.
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