Jared Kushner is being awarded Mexico's highest honor for saving NAFTA

Mexico announced Tuesday that it will award Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law and White House adviser, the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the country's highest honor for foreigners. Outgoing President Enrique Peña Nieto will give Kushner the medal on Friday, on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, "for his significant contributions to the negotiation of the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)," the Mexican foreign ministry explained. "Kushner played a key role throughout the process," and his "participation was decisive in beginning the process of renegotiating NAFTA, and in preventing the United States' unilateral exit from the treaty."

The announcement, just days before President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is sworn in Dec. 1, was not warmly welcomed in Mexico, where Trump is unpopular. Prominent Mexican intellectual Enrique Krauze tweeted that awarding the Aztec Eagle to Kushner, "the son-in-law of the man who called Mexicans 'killers and rapists,'" is an act of "supreme humiliation and cowardice."

Peña Nieto defended the move during a visit to Sinaloa Tuesday. "It is an attribution of the president and I want to give it to him," he said. "I want to recognize [the person] who has been a great ally of Mexico." Previous recipients of the Order of the Aztec Eagle include Walt Disney, Bill Gates, Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nelson Mandela, and Evita Perón.

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