We’re not his piñata: Mexico’s top presidential candidates find common ground, taking swings at Trump

Mexico’s top presidential candidates launched their campaigns Sunday, both vowing to take a harder line against Donald Trump, with the leftist front-runner saying his country is done being the US president’s “piñata.”

Just as candidates were putting the finishing touches on their opening campaign speeches for Mexico’s July 1 elections, Trump gatecrashed the kick-off party via Twitter, accusing the country of doing “very little” to stop illegal migration and drugs, and renewing his threat to axe the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).

The veteran leftist leading in the polls, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and his conservative rival, Ricardo Anaya, both hit back at the Republican president, whose anti-Mexican diatribes and insistence that Mexico pay for his planned border wall have made him supremely unpopular here.

“Neither Mexico nor its people will be the piñata of any foreign government,” Lopez Obrador told a cheering crowd in Ciudad Juarez, on the US border.

The former Mexico City mayor repeated his long-standing criticism of Trump’s idea of a border wall.

“Let this be heard near and far: neither security issues nor social problems can be resolved with walls,” he said, condemning Trump’s “mistaken foreign policy” and “contemptuous attitude toward Mexicans.”