Trump’s partner in crime?

According to John Ackerman, it wasn’t Vladimir Putin who has made Donald Trump Mexico Public Enemy #1.  It was Enrique Peña Nieto:

Indeed, the foreign government that made the greatest contribution to Donald Trump’s victory was not Russia. It was Mexico.  Vladimir Putin’s alleged covert meddling in the presidential election pales in comparison to Peña Nieto’s overt, public support for Trump. The Mexican leader is expected to cash in on that support on Tuesday, January 31st as he becomes the first Latin American head of state to meet with the new U.S. president in the White House.

Peña Nieto will speak publicly about protecting his people, but his real agenda is to negotiate impunity for his government as his administration winds to an end.

[…]

Trump and Peña Nieto have a great deal in common. The Mexican president already applies mass deportation policies, of the kind Trump promised, against Central Americans trying to cross Mexico towards the United States. Peña Nieto has also already begun construction, with U.S. help, of a high-technology equivalent of a “wall” on Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala.

Like Trump, Peña Nieto has placed the corporate agenda front and center. He began his administration with a blitz of “structural reforms” that privatized the oil and electricity industries, rolled back protections for labor, and attacked public education. Freedom of expression and protest have also come under heavy fire. Marches are systematically repressed, social and political leaders jailed or assassinated, and journalists censored, fired or murdered. Federal security forces have also committed a series of heinous massacres. An extreme equivalent of the America’s Patriot Act, allowing for the permanent use of the military for law enforcement and the generalized suspension of habeas corpus, freedom of assembly, and other fundamental rights, is presently being discussed in the Mexican Congress.

Entire article at The Atlantic.