Donald Trump has told Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto that the United States has the right to build a border wall to halt illegal immigration, but the Republican presidential candidate did not bring up his demand that Mexico pay for it.
In an unexpected trip to a country which he has frequently vilified for illegal immigration and drug smuggling, Trump held talks with the Mexican leader at his residence for about an hour on Wednesday.
"We did discuss the wall, we didn't discuss payment of the wall, that will be at a later date, this was a very preliminary meeting. It was an excellent meeting," Trump said.
In campaign rallies for the November 8 election, the New York billionaire businessman frequently tells approving crowds that Mexico must pay for his planned wall.
Mexican opposition politicians heavily criticised Pena Nieto for hosting Trump, who has accused Mexico of sending criminals and rapists across the border and cheating the US on trade.
Trump is trailing Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in opinion polls. The New Yorker's aides hoped the trip would make him look presidential and show he is willing to deal head on with a thorny issue like relations with Mexico. But his omission of asking Mexico to pay for the wall was notable.
Trump's call for Mexico to fund the wall is often the central moment of his campaign rallies. He asks the crowd who will pay for the wall, and supporters shout back, "Mexico!"
Pena Nieto said the many millions of Mexicans in the United States deserve respect, but offered only a mild rebuke of Trump for his rhetoric. "The Mexican people has felt aggrieved by comments that have been made, but I was sure his interest in building a relationship is genuine."
Pena Nieto has been enmeshed in his own controversies, including over whether he plagiarised some of his 1991 undergraduate law thesis.
Trump's visit to Mexico City took place hours before he was due to deliver a highly anticipated speech in the US border state of Arizona on how he would tackle illegal immigration if he wins the election.
He has been pilloried in Mexico since he launched his White House campaign last year. He has pledged to renegotiate or scrap the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement trade deal between the United States, Mexico and Canada.
Clinton, a former secretary of state, said Trump could not paper over his previous harsh language against Mexico, which helped him defeat 16 rivals for the Republican presidential nomination.
"It certainly takes more than trying to make up for more than a year of insults and insinuations by dropping in on our neighbors for a few hours and then flying home again," she told a convention of the American Legion military veterans' group in Cincinnati.
TRUMP TRIP SPARKS BLOWBACK
Before it even took place, Donald Trump's visit to Mexico was a public relations disaster for Pena Nieto as politicians and diplomats condemned him for inviting a man who has united Mexican like few others in shared disdain.
Since launching his White House bid in June last year, Trump has vowed to seal off the country behind a border wall he says Mexico will pay for, tarred its migrants as rapists and drug pushers and threatened to expel millions of them, as well as saying he will revise or tear up a trade deal with Mexico if he wins office.
Mexican cabinet ministers have called Trump ignorant and racist, and Pena Nieto earlier this year likened Trump's tilt for the top job to the rise of Adolf Hitler, so the sudden invitation to the real estate mogul was a hard sell to the public.
"Mr Trump may have been invited but he knows he's not welcome," presidential hopeful Margarita Zavala, wife of former president Felipe Calderon and one of the favorites to succeed Pena Nieto at the next election in 2018, said on Twitter. "Mexicans have dignity and we reject his hate speech."
A few dozen people gathered beneath a soaring monument to Mexican Independence in central Mexico City on Wednesday to protest the Trump's visit, some holding placards emblazoned with captions such as "You are not Wall-come" and "Trump and Pena out".
"Trump has badmouthed Mexicans, it's appalling that the president has invited him," said Abril Marquez, a 23-year-old law student holding a sign saying "Trump, you're not welcome!"
'UNWORTHY' OF GOVERNMENT
Andres Rozental, a former deputy Mexican foreign minister responsible for North America, said he was at a loss to explain the Trump visit, describing it as a "big mistake" by the government.
"Unless (Trump) comes out and makes a public statement disavowing all the things that he's said, which I doubt very much that he will do, I don't think there's really anything that Pena Nieto can get out of this," he said.
Miguel Barbosa, Senate leader of the leftist opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution, who worked with Pena Nieto to push through landmark economic reforms earlier in his term, said the president was allowing himself to be used by Trump.
"You don't understand," Barbosa said, directing a tweet at Pena Nieto, "the presence of (Trump) in Mexico at your invitation is behavior unworthy of the Mexican government."
Even the man Pena Nieto picked a year ago to be his ambassador to the United States did not hold back.
"Nobody in the last 50 years has put Mexican-US relations in such danger as Trump," Miguel Basanez, an old friend of Pena Nieto who was replaced in April as ambassador after seven months in the job, said on Twitter. "I find the invitation deeply regrettable."
Trump has helped stir the bad blood with comments on Twitter during his campaign. Even as he prepared for his quick visit he was in a Twitter spat with a prominent critic south of the border, Vicente Fox, another former Mexican president.
