Mexico lawmaker draws line in sand over Trump wall

As Donald Trump prepares to tender his “great” US-Mexico wall, the question is not just who will pay for it but where exactly it should go. According to a Mexican senator, the border line has been in the wrong place for more than a century.

Patricio Martínez, from Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, says 85,000 hectares (210,000 acres) claimed by Arizona and New Mexico rightfully belong to Mexico — and it is time to give them back. 

“If the US is going to build a 9-metre concrete wall, they have to put it on their border, not on our territory. We shouldn’t give the US even a metre of Mexican land, Mr Martínez told the FT.

The US-Mexican border is some 3,200km long, but much of that is river. Only 1,100km is land “and of that, there are about 430km that are in the wrong place”, he said. 

Today’s high-tech frontier is already marked by fences and radar and patrolled by guards. But Mr Trump has promised an “impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall” to keep out those undesirables who are still getting in to the US. A call for tenders to build it is due around March 15, with financial proposals due in early May. So far, some 600 companies have expressed interest in bidding.

Embarrassingly for Mexico’s government, which flatly refuses to fund Mr Trump’s wall, even Mexican companies are salivating at the prospect of building it. Cemex said it would supply a quote if asked, and another firm, Cementos de Chihuahua, has said it could be a supplier.

In the mid-19th century, the border was marked simply by piles of stones. By the 1890s, however, Mexico discovered that those cairns had been destroyed. When it went to replace them, it realised that the line had been marked too far south in some places, said Mr Martínez.

The senator discovered the mistake in the late 1990s as governor of the state of Chihuahua that borders Texas and New Mexico, after seeing a study by a local engineer. He has commissioned another investigation whose findings, he says, confirm the first.

He now intends to file a motion in the Senate demanding rectification “or you’ll have the US invading Mexico again”.

Mexicans feel they have already given the US enough — Texas in 1845, followed by more than half Mexico’s territory in 1848 and another chunk of land in 1853.

Mr Martínez says the claims should not surprise the US: in August 1897, Matías Romero, an envoy of President Porfirio Díaz, wrote to US secretary of state John Sherman about it. But the issue was forgotten during the Mexican Revolution and for most of the 20th century. 

There was no immediate comment from the Department of Homeland Security.