These days I am in Mexico City attending to both professional and family matters. This journey has helped me to obsessively monitor news in my country and thus gauge its content, tone and shortcomings.
In this journey I have verified that among the many issues that are generated in the USA, the criminal trials linked to former President Donald Trump capture the interest of the Mexican public opinion.
It is revealing that “The Trump Circus” has had stops in New York, Florida, and Washington, despite not benefiting (or harming) the population beyond the borders, —as if news related to migration influences in many cases , the economy or diplomacy—, win the headlines, the likes and the memes.
Nor should it sound strange that the insane spectacle that a former president has proposed to present to world public opinion has millions waiting for any new opinion, if not for Trump’s most recent outburst via his social networks. I find a certain morbid pleasure among my countrymen who, when looking at a tycoon’s problems, forget their own for a moment.
The detailed review of Trump’s legal messes involving (alleged) financial fraud, official theft of classified official documents and a scheme to defraud the United States electoral system, has also allowed many to delve into the ins and outs of domestic politics. from this country.
But despite the efforts of the informants to try to clarify the facts, especially in the case of the intricacies sought by Trump and his team of advisers to allegedly defraud the electoral system, many of my compatriots in Mexico do not fully understand fully what happens, they are accustomed to the fact that on the day of the vote the votes are counted and, unless something extraordinary happens, the winner is proclaimed.
“The state electors?” they wonder with a mixture of sarcasm and genuine perplexity.
—But if the election was held in November, why do congressmen meet in January to declare a winner? — they question me when I try to explain the intricate method whereby some states offer more electoral votes than others.
What is clear to the Mexicans I spoke to is that a president questioned the fairness of the elections before they took place, and then sought various ways to defraud the electoral system by assembling an organized crime-style mafia to perpetuate himself in the can.
“Isn’t that supposed to only happen in the banana-growing countries south of the Rio Grande?” a dear colleague told me, not without a bit of sarcasm.
While Mexicans look at the kicking of a deranged ex-president with amusement, what they fail to see is the possibility of violence in the streets or the deep rift that is opening up in the United States between two visions of the world that had learned to live together but that now seem want to destroy
* Juan Alberto Vázquez is a correspondent for MVS Noticias (Mexico) and author of the book “NXIVM: The sect that seduced power in Mexico” and “The pimps of Tlaxcala”. Twitter @juansinatra
