Significance: President Peña Nieto had endeavoured to keep the meeting on despite facing a tide of domestic criticism from across the political spectrum, but he was given little option but to cancel his attendance after a tweet by President Trump earlier in the day. In a hastily organised televised address on 25 January, Peña Nieto had responded to an executive order issued by Trump calling for the construction of a border wall on the frontier with Mexico by stressing that Mexico would not pay for the wall but expressing his commitment to bilateral negotiations with the US. Yesterday morning Trump tweeted: “If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting”. The comment put Peña Nieto in an untenable position. To have attended the meeting in the face of the ensuing domestic political and public backlash would have contravened one of the cardinal points of the negotiating strategy he spelt out earlier in the week: “no submission”.
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