In March of 2015, Donald Trump wrote to his more than 4.5 million Twitter followers: “Because of Rodolfo Rosas Moya, who owes me lots of money, Mexico will never again host the Miss Universe Pageant.” This message may hold the key to the disdain Trump has shown toward the Mexican people. The story behind the Tweet is a complicated lawsuit between the Miss Universe Organization, where Trump was the majority stockholder, and several Mexican entrepreneurs. Rodolfo Rosas Moya, the person that was fully identified and attacked in Trump’s Tweet, is an urban development engineer in a prosperous tourist area on Mexico’s Caribbean, known as the Riviera Maya. Rosas, age 60, was part of a group of area investors who were successful in having the Miss Universe Pageant choose Cancún in 2007 as one of the venues for the beauty contest in Mexico. These investors believed the contest would help to project to the world once again the area’s tourism image, which had suffered noticeably as a result of the pounding it had received from Hurricane Wilma the year before. The Miss Universe Organization signed a contract calling for Grupo Promotor MU México to act as host and a contract with Mexican entrepreneur Pedro Rodríguez and with the firm Comercializadora Ronac for guaranteeing sponsorships. Rosas is a Ronac stockholder. The Mexicans agreed to secure sponsorships for the contest from the municipal governments of Mexico City and Cancún, and from the state of Chiapas. They also assumed responsibility for organizing the management of the event, which is viewed by a television audience of more than one billion. The three city and...
