Mexico has won some time, a short breathing space of one month from the threat issued by President Donald Trump of imposing a 25 per cent tariff on products exported to the US.
After a brief phone call, as the clock ticked towards midnight and the start of Tuesday 3 February, the day the new tariffs were due to come into effect, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo and her team of negotiators achieved a moratorium in exchange for deploying 10,000 troops of the national guard to the northern frontier, to control the smuggling of fentanyl and illegal immigration towards their northern neighbour.
Although president Sheinbaum has persisted in pursuing dialogue and kept a cool head in the face of Trump’s onslaught, last weekend was punctuated by mutual accusations. For its part, the White House accuses the Mexican government of having an unacceptable alliance with the drug trafficking cartels. Sheinbaum denounced this accusation as a lie and accused the US government in turn of not doing enough in their own country to prevent the sale of drugs and the trafficking of weapons to criminal groups.
This subject was not raised in the discussions which led to the temporary suspension of the tariffs policy. Mexico bought some time by agreeing to the deployment of ten thousand of its national guard personnel to the northern frontier, together with an ambiguous underdertaking by the US to control arms trafficking, something which Trump omitted to mention in his social media posts about the agreements reached with president Sheinbaum.
For her part, Sheinbaum omitted to mention that the agreement also refers to controlling illegal migration, instead mentioning only the controls on traffic in fentanyl.
Similar negotiations took place in 2019 during the first Trump administration when, as now, he used the threat of imposing tariffs on imports from Mexico. On that occasion, then president Andrés Manuel López Obrador agreed to send thirty-five thousand marines, soldiers and National Guard staff to the northern frontier.
Sheinbaum stated that these 35,000 security staff are patrolling roads and paths, as part of their duties relating to the security of our country; the ten thousand additional staff which she undertook to mobilize in this latest agreement with Trump will, she said, help to improve Mexico’s security situation.
The threat of tariffs remains, despite the existence of a trade agreement between Mexico, the US and Canada (T-MEC or USMCA as its initials spell in English).
T-MEC came into force on 1 July 2020, replacing the Free Trade Treaty or NAFTA. It was designed to develop economic cooperation between the three countries.
T-MEC eliminates tariffs on the majority of products traded between Mexico, the US and Canada. It does, however, allow for some exceptions such as motor components and some agricultural products such as maize, rice and wheat.
For the Mexican Employers’ Confederation (Coparmex), the imposition of tariffs on Mexican products runs counter to the principles of trilateral cooperation and puts millions of jobs at risk.
The deadline for Mexico to demonstrate to the US that it has made progress on border control is 3 March.
Translated from Spanish by Mike Gatehouse
Main image: from CNNEspañol