NAFTA collapse could push Mexico over the edge

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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.

The more Trumpismo bares its teeth, the more Gueverismo attracts Mexican voters away from conventional politics or economics. And as NAFTA negotiations stagger and careen amid Mr. Trump's threats, the risk looms that Mexican voters will be pushed far off the edge.

Mexico's Che-flavoured alternative is the larger-than-life figure of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the far-left populist who currently leads the polls for the July, 2018, national election. His many followers (mainly among urban and younger Mexicans) see him as a Mexican Che Guevara – an image he has embraced, going so far as to name one of his sons, Ernesto, after the revolutionary.

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