Mexican president: Trump's language like Hitler's

Nieto promises to be ‘absolutely respectful’ of American political process, but says GOP front-runner hurts US-Mexico ties

MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto compared the language of Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump to that of dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in an interview published Monday, and said it has hurt US-Mexico relations.

Asked about Trump, Pena Nieto complained to the Excelsior newspaper about “these strident expressions that seek to propose very simple solutions” and said that sort of language has led to “very fateful scenes in the history of humanity”

“That’s the way Mussolini arrived and the way Hitler arrived,” Pena Nieto said.

On Sunday, the former Anti-Defamation League director Abe Foxman excoriated Trump for urging his supporters at a weekend rally to raise their right hands and promise to support him, a gambit Foxman said evoked echoes of Hitler salutes from Nazi rallies in the 1930s and ’40s. “As a Jew who survived the Holocaust, to see an audience of thousands of people raising their hands in what looks like the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute is about as offensive, obnoxious and disgusting as anything I thought I would ever witness in the United States of America,” Foxman told The Times of Israel… It is a fascist gesture.”

Abraham Foxman (photo credit: Raphael Ahren/The Times of Israel)

Pena Nieto until now had avoided direct comments on Trump, who has pledged to build a wall along the two countries’ borders. Trump also has said Mexican immigrants bring crime and drugs to the US and are “rapists.”

But as the New York businessman has built a lead in the GOP primary, current and former Mexican officials have begun to publicly express alarm. Former presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon also have alluded to Hitler in describing Trump.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto (R) poses with his Honduran counterpart Juan Orlando Hernandez during at the National Palace in Mexico City on February 26, 2016. (AFP PHOTO/ALFREDO ESTRELLA)

In the interview with Excelsior, Pena Nieto said he would work with whoever eventually wins this year’s US presidential election and to maintain a climate “of mutual respect and joint agreements.”

In another interview published Monday, with the newspaper El Universal, the president said he would be “absolutely respectful” of the US political process, but said,

“It appears to me that (Trump’s comments) hurt the relationship we have sought with the United States.”