Quote wrongly attributed to Mexican president recirculates

A viral quote misattributed to Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum has been recirculating on Facebook.

The lengthy post, which has been shared at least 12,000 times, claims President Sheinbaum told Americans “you voted to build a wall” and that “beyond that wall, there are 7 billion people”, any of whom “can switch from iPhones to Samsung or Huawei in less than two days”.

It goes on to list a wide variety of products produced by other countries that consumers could choose to purchase instead of American goods—such as swapping “Levi’s for Zara or Massimo Dutti” or replacing “Ford and Chevrolet with Toyota, KIA, Mazda, Honda, Hyundai, Volvo, Subaru, Renault, or BMW”.

The quote concludes: “And we also know that if these 7 billion consumers stop buying American products, unemployment will rise, and your economy—trapped within its self-imposed wall—will crumble to the point where you'll beg us to tear it down”.

But, as we explained when a similar quote circulated earlier this year, there’s no evidence President Sheinbaum ever said this.

In January, she did make a sarcastic comment in response to then President-elect Trump’s proposal for the Gulf of Mexico to be renamed the Gulf of America, joking she might rename North America “América Mexicana”.

However, we could find no evidence from any credible news outlets, official government releases, or her official social media accounts that she said the quote attributed to her in the Facebook post.

In fact, a very similarly worded post circulated in January 2017 in Spanish, just after President Trump was first elected, and more than seven years before President Sheinbaum became president in Mexico. These posts were attributed to “the rest of the world”, not President Sheinbaum.

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