Mexico's president just compared Donald Trump to Hitler

Pena Nieto: We are not paying for the Trump wall.

(Image credit: RONALDO SCHEMIDT/AFP/Getty Images)

last updated 9 March 2016

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has joined the growing chorus of voices worldwide condemning Republican presidential contender Donald Trump.

Pena Nieto, whose country is at the center of Trump's pledge to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border and to make Mexico pay for it, does not see Mexico succumbing to Trump's demands any time soon, telling the Excelsior newspaper that there is "no scenario" under which Mexico would pay for the wall. This follows a comment from Mexico's finance minister Luis Videgaray, who last week called Trump's wall a "terrible" idea.

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"And there have been episodes in human history, unfortunately, where these expressions of this strident rhetoric have only led to very ominous situations in the history of humanity," the Mexican president added."That's how Mussolini got in, that's how Hitler got in, they took advantage of a situation, a problem perhaps, which humanity was going through at the time, after an economic crisis."And I think what [they] put forward ended up at what we know today from history, in global conflagration. We don't want that happening anywhere in the world," Pena Nieto said. [Reuters]

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Benjamin Shull is an assistant books editor with The Wall Street Journal and a contributor to The Week. Follow him on Twitter.