THE MEXICAN GOVERNMENT has announced that President Enrique Pena Nieto and Donald Trump have agreed to stop making public statements about the US leader’s border wall plan and will seek to resolve differences as part of bilateral talks.
Earlier this week, the White House threatened to tax Mexican imports up to 20% to cover the cost of the wall, with Nieto cancelling a planned Washington in protest.
The two leaders had a “constructive and productive” hour-long phone conversation regarding bilateral relations, Pena Nieto’s office said in a statement.
They agreed to resolve their differences about who will pay for the wall “as part of a comprehensive discussion on all aspects of the bilateral relation,” and “the presidents also agreed for now to no longer speak publicly about this controversial issue.”
The billionaire-president, holding true to his campaign promise, this week ordered US officials to begin to design and construct a wall along the 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometre) US-Mexico border.
‘Don’t build this wall!’
Earlier today, the mayor of Germany’s long-divided capital Berlin, Michael Mueller, advised Donald Trump not to build the border wall.
Berlin’s mayor said his city – which was split by the Berlin Wall during the Cold War from 1961-89 – “cannot look on without comment when a country plans to build a new wall”.
“We Berliners know best how much suffering was caused by the division of an entire continent with barbed wire and concrete,” he said in a statement, referring to Europe’s Iron Curtain division.
In the early 21st century, he said, “we can’t just accept it if our historical experience is disregarded by those to whom we largely owe our freedom, the Americans.”
Pointing to the ongoing division of the Korean peninsula and the island of Cyprus, the Social Democrat urged Trump “not to go down this wrong path of isolation and exclusion”.
Mueller also recalled former US president Ronald Reagan’s famous 1987 challenge to then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall!”, and said in his message to Trump: “Dear Mr President, don’t build this wall!
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