The head of the Mexican Catholic Church condemned President Trump’s proposed border wall in the harshest words I’ve seen so far. He also blasted any Mexican company willing to help build the wall, and he also threw a strong jab at Mexican government officials for not speaking more forcefully on the matter.
A March 26, 2017 article in a leading Mexico City daily printed the hard-hitting words of Norberto Rivera Carrera, Cardinal and Archbishop of Mexico, condemning President Trump’s wall project as “immoral” and “bigoted.” He said that “Trump’s wall can only nurture discrimination and serve to subjugate millions of people.”
The article in El Universal referred, first, to President Trump allotting 2 billion dollars to build the wall, and, second, to Mexican contractors announcing their interest in bidding for it. Archbishop Rivera condemned the move by Mexican entrepreneurs in no uncertain terms: “It would be immoral for any [Mexican] company intending to invest in the wall of that zealot Trump, but more than anything else, the shareholders and owners ought to be considered traitors of the nation.” These are strong words indeed!
El Universal quoted from an editorial entitled “The Betrayal of the Nation,” printed in a church weekly by the name of Desde la Fe, issued on the same date.
The Cardinal added that the companies justifying their actions as “job producing” was nothing more than bogus; what they want, he stated, is to profit from the “shameful wall.” He lamented businessmen in Mexico who would collaborate in such a bigoted enterprise. “Taking part in a project that affronts human dignity is to shoot yourself in the foot.”
He also lambasted the government’s pussy-footing about it by parroting that the United States may do whatever it wants on its side of the border. But, “it is the usual short-sighted people who cannot see that the wall represents a threat that can only weaken the relations between the two countries and endanger peace.”
Referring to President Trump’s drive to deport undocumented workers from the United States, the church leader considered it “showing off the power to terrorize, by deporting people who have not committed a crime or faulted a regulation, according to law.”
Regarding the wall, he also declared that it “represents a monument to intimidation and silencing, it symbolizes xenophobic hate that seeks to drown out the voices of ill paid and ill-treated workers, of families who lack protection and of people who are violated.”
The idea of a wall represents “a departure from the noblest desires of mankind[; it is a retreat] which has brought much shedding of blood; it is a prelude to the destruction of democratic values and social rights.” He also added, “The wall represents the power of a country that is considered good, [yet endowed] with a manifest destiny to overwhelm a nation that it considers perverted and corrupt: Mexico.”
–Carlos B. Gil
