Real mural on Mexican side of border wall?

In August 2025, the Trump administration announced it would paint the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border black in the hopes the wall would become hotter and thus deter people from climbing it.

In the days following that announcement, people on social media began posting photos of the Mexican side of the wall, such as this Instagram post (archived), claiming that the people on that side painted a mural on the wall instead. That same mural, an eagle and condor over a green background, was shared in another Instagram post (archived) and on Facebook. According to those posts, the eagle and condor symbolize North and South America.

Other popular posts on X (archived), Threads (archived) and Facebook (archived) used photos of an earlier blue mural painted over the wall and claimed that it was in response to the Trump administration painting the other side black.

A mural was indeed painted on the Mexican side of the border wall in Tijuana, Mexico, in the summer of 2025. The mural, titled, “Abrazo Mutuo,” was painted before the Trump administration announced it’d be painting the American side of the wall black.

Mexican artist Libre Gutierrez painted the mural for Friendship Park, a binational park that sits on either side of the border between San Diego, California, and Tijuana.

Both Friendship Park and Gutierrez posted clips to their Instagram accounts of Gutierrez working on the mural throughout July 2025. Friendship Park held an opening ceremony for the mural on July 19. On July 30, Gutierrez posted a photo of the full mural with an explanation of its symbolism in Spanish. According to Instagram’s translation:

“MUTUAL EMBRACE”, monumental mural where we interpret the Latin American prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor (over 2000 years), where it tells us that when they are in shared flight there will be peace and harmony on earth – representing the wisdom and knowledge of both hemispheres – the Condor symbolizing the people of the South and the Royal Eagle the peoples of the North. With a backdrop of a Baja California landscape and native plants of the region throughout the composition, which comes with the great work of the Friendship Park – activity promoted by Dan Watman and his team tirelessly – this year marks its 54th anniversary, themes fitting for the moment where we want to contrast any hate speech of the neighbor with Education, Elegance and Culture, our Mexican and Latin American culture.

Although this mural was only recently painted at the time of the social media posts, the Mexican side of the border at Friendship Park has long played host for art. Google Maps Street View screenshots from October 2021 showed an older wall at the location painted with various murals. Photos of the wall painted with different artistic pieces were on Friendship Park’s website. The San Diego-based Museum of Us preserved sections of the border wall due to their artistic and cultural value when those sections were being replaced by the federal government in spring 2024.

The blue mural included in some of the social posts was painted on the previous version of the wall at Friendship Park, according to a 2019 story from Quadratin, a Mexican news site. That mural could be seen on Google Street View in June 2017, October 2017 and June 2019.