On August 16, 2017, the first rounds began to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the trade accord between Mexico, the United States and Canada that has been in force to govern trade relations in North America since January 1, 1994. The impetus to reopen the accord comes in large part from the initiative of the United States, and in particular, stems from the electoral campaign promises of now-President Donald J. Trump, who in attempting to gain political support from the working class of the Midwest, capitalized on economic anxiety around the loss of manufacturing employment and stagnating wages in his campaign discourse. He promised to remove the United States from trade agreements that did not favor U.S. economic positions, or renegotiate such accords on terms that best suited U.S. economic interests, including NAFTA.1 In Mexico, we then find ourselves responding to the overtures from the U.S. in part from a defensive position, drawn into the renegotiation of an accord that has worked well for Mexican growth,2 amid studies that show that NAFTA alone neither contributed to the loss of U.S. global competitiveness, nor for the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs (Bailey and Bosworth 2014, Hicks and Srikant 2015, Goodman 2016).
