If you want, don’t go. But the T-MEC must be respected

It has been almost 30 years since Mexico, the United States and Canada signed the North American Free Trade Agreement.

That decision positioned our country as one of the main suppliers of merchandise and raw materials to the largest market in the world and changed its fortunes for the better.

That decision to join the north through free trade was so successful that those so-called leftist groups, who criticized the government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari so much for taking that neoliberal step, the first thing they did when they came to power, in the person of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was to endorse the pact in the figure of the T-MEC.

It is not necessary for President López Obrador to go up to his podium in the morning to say that neoliberalism is not so bad when one of the basic foundations of his regime is the North American Free Trade Agreement.

What this 4T cannot do is play with the destiny of the Mexican economy due to the great amount of mental and ideological confusion that this government has. Those dogmatic clouds of the President allow completely free the importation of corn to make tortillas, but they want to close the energy market.

In the United States, alerts are already on about the erratic behavior of the López Obrador government and the inconsistencies between what it agreed to in the T-MEC and the barriers that it puts up every day for US companies.

The reality is that the attendance, or not, of López Obrador at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, next month, is something that the White House really does not care about.

They know the fear generated by the president of Mexico being exposed to his peers, and the world, in international forums and understand that his thinking stuck at some point in the middle of the last century brings him closer to the Soviet Latin Americanism of the last century than to pragmatism of the 21st century.

In any case, López Obrador is missing out. What US companies cannot lose, whether in the mining, energy or any other sector, is the status of local company that the trade agreement gives them.

The discrimination to which companies in the extractive and electrical sectors have been subjected clearly violates the T-MEC and it is becoming increasingly clear that Washington’s patience is running out.

It is not a good sign to see that the United States ambassador, Ken Salazar, has to go two or three times a week to the National Palace to remind Mexico of its legal obligations in the North American pact.

If the 4T had come to power by cutting off that free trade relationship with the United States and Canada, considering that it went against their nationalist postulates, we would surely be several steps lower than we already are, but the world would have known what to expect with this regime.

But playing with the rules that the López Obrador government itself signed to accommodate everything to the convenience of its political discourse is not acceptable to anyone.

Three decades of the agreement

the signature

That decision positioned Mexico as one of the main suppliers of merchandise and raw materials to the largest market in the world and changed its fortunes for the better.

ratification

Upon his arrival in government, AMLO ratified the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, today T-MEC, with which he recognized the importance of this tool.

contradictions

Andrés Manuel López Obrador has taken various measures since his arrival in government that go against the agreements made by previous governments.

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