MEXICO CITY--Mexican and U.S. brewers have reinvented U.S. President Donald Trump as a gun-slinging mariachi folk musician to promote a new beer celebrating cross-border cooperation.
The label of the new Amigous Cerveza craft beer, showing a frowning Trump in a sombrero, his trousers held up with a swastika belt buckle, mocks his divisive campaign rhetoric against Mexico and his pledge to build a border wall.
The rear label declares that the 71-year-old New Yorker belongs "in a mad house, not the White House."
"We knew that a Trump label was going to be controversial, but it's been selling extremely fast," said Luis Enrique de la Reguera, chief executive of brewery Casa Cervecera Cru Cru.
Launched in May, the beer that misspells "amigo" to poke fun at a bad American pronunciation of the Spanish word for friend, surprised its creators. The original batch of 1,200 bottles and 400 liters on tap sold out in the very first week.
A kind of New England Indian Pale with a dash of mango, the beer was dreamt up by Cru Cru, Mexican partner Error de Diciembre and Epic Brewing of the United States shortly before Trump's election victory on Nov. 8.
Trump sparked dismay in Mexico by saying the country was sending rapists and drug runners across the border, and angered business groups by threatening to tear up a joint trade deal.
