US and Mexican brass and bosses meet to revive investor confidence
A meeting of US and Mexican government and business leaders on Thursday aims to shore up investor confidence in Mexico and defuse US President Donald Trump’s threats to close their shared border if illegal immigration is not halted.
Part of regular business forum the US-Mexico CEO Dialogue, the talks in Mexico coincide with renewed tensions over trade and the border after two years of uncertainty sparked by Trump’s push to rework the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).
They also give Mexico an opportunity to tackle investor concerns about how President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has run Latin America’s number two economy since taking office in December.
“We want the [US] investors that visit our country to go back home feeling confident about their investments here,” said Moises Kalach, a top executive in the CCE business lobby, which represented Mexico’s private sector at the Nafta talks.
Lopez Obrador and officials including his foreign minister and energy minister, plus US commerce secretary Wilbur Ross and US Chamber of Commerce president Tom Donohue, are to attend the two-day meeting in Merida. Among investors due to attend is Larry Fink, CEO of the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock.
The leftist Lopez Obrador took power vowing to fight entrenched corruption, crime, inequality and poverty, scourges that cost Mexico billions of dollars every year.
He has said he wants to boost both private and public investment, but some of his early decisions, such as cancelling a partially built $13bn Mexico City airport and steps to rein in the autonomy of regulatory bodies, have spooked investors.
Questions remain over the future of trade in the region as the deal to replace Nafta, the USMexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), has yet to be ratified. US Democratic politicians say Mexico must first approve a new labour law to strengthen its trade unions. Kalach said the implications of that legislation, now in the Mexican Congress, would be addressed.
Time would also be given to how Mexico proposes to cope with a migrant surge which has led to Trump threatening to close the border, causing trade hold-ups at the frontier, he said, “so as to lower the pressure on this issue, which is a real issue and an important issue”.
Trump said on Wednesday he would have to mobilise more of the military at the US border with Mexico.
Cutting through the noise on immigration, Mexico wants to ensure that the message goes out that both countries’ private sectors keep working “hand in hand“, said a Mexican official, who asked not to be named.
Mexico is also eager to drum up interest in “strategic projects” in Mexico’s southeast, and to ensure there is a good business climate in the country, he said.
Key among these is the $8bn Pemex refinery on Mexico’s Gulf Coast, which US firms were recently invited to bid on. Others include a rail link across tourist areas of the Yucatan peninsula, the “Mayan Train”.