Contender sees life after Nafta
Frontrunner in Mexican polls says he will switch focus of the economy
The collapse of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) would not be fatal for Mexico, the leftist presidential favourite said on Tuesday, while keeping his cool under attack from rivals in the last televised debate before the July 1 election.
Asked what he would do if talks failed to renegotiate the deal that underpinned the vast majority of Mexico’s trade, frontrunner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said he would redirect the economy towards the internal market and revive the rural economy.
“I am going to suggest that the treaty remains, but the end of Nafta cannot be fatal for Mexicans. Our country has a lot of natural resources, a lot of wealth,” he said in round-table discussions between the four candidates in the city of Merida.
Drawn-out negotiations called by Donald Trump with Canada and the US to modernise Nafta have reached a deadlock since the US president imposed steel and aluminium tariffs on the trade partners.
With just over two weeks before voters head to the polls, the debate was one of the last chances for the pack of trailing candidates to whittle down the lead of leftist Lopez Obrador.
The four contenders tussled over their visions for changes to Mexico’s healthcare and education systems.
The former Mexico City mayor, in his third bid to reach the presidency, came out unscathed from two prior debates and has widened his double-digit lead in most polls.
He has double the support of Ricardo Anaya, who heads a right-left coalition, according to a nationwide survey published earlier on Tuesday.
Lopez Obrador again pledged to fund big spending projects by ending corruption but was accused by Anaya of handing out contracts without public tenders when he was mayor of Mexico City.
Lopez Obrador denied the accusation and Anaya held up a placard directing viewers to a website for evidence of his assertions. But that website was down and a spokeswoman for Anaya said it was likely the site had suffered a cyberattack.
Attackers use computer networks they control to send such a large number of requests for information from websites that servers that host them can no longer handle the traffic and the sites become unreachable.
“On this website, 185,000 visits were registered within 15 minutes, with the attacks coming mainly from Russia and China,” the spokeswoman said. “It can take hours to prospect the configurations needed for attacking a website, which indicates the attack was planned and co-ordinated with national and international agents.”
Reuters could not independently verify the statement.
Lopez Obrador, 64, has benefited from widespread disenchantment with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party over political corruption, record levels of violence and sluggish economic growth.
Institutional Revolutionary Party candidate Jose Antonio Meade, who is running third in most polls, and independent hopeful Jaime Rodriguez also baited Lopez Obrador. But the grey-haired politician did not bite. In the debate, Lopez Obrador showcased the more relaxed, jovial figure he has cut on the presidential campaign trail, mostly avoiding the kind of outbursts that in the past helped adversaries depict him as a radical menace to stability in the second largest economy in Latin America.
Lopez Obrador has painted himself as more of a pragmatist and says he wants to broker a deal with Trump to stem illegal immigration through jobs and development rather than a border wall.