Cars, energy and T-MEC, there is no more time

As always, the Mexican president dusted off an old ideological argument to begin his meeting with his North American counterparts and demanded from the president of the United States what he described as abandonment and disdain for Latin America.

Joe Biden’s response did revolve around the tens of billions of dollars the United States has spent in the region, but the highlight was that white-gloved slap full of diplomacy and a direct message.

Biden told Andrés Manuel López Obrador that he congratulates him for supporting and building democratic institutions in the hemisphere. Thus, softly, he told the president that he seeks to disappear the electoral institutions and keep control of the voting.

Meanwhile, the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, will have the opportunity today to have the bilateral meeting with López Obrador and, subject to seeing what speech the Mexican president takes out of the drawer, the Canadian Prime Minister has already announced that one of his priorities is to speak respect for trade agreements on energy.

The joint communiqués of a summit of the three North American leaders like the one yesterday, and the bilateral ones that conclude today, are usually loaded with that diplomatic language that shows good will in the advancement of their respective agendas. No more.

What is clear is that once this long-awaited Biden-López-Trudeau summit has passed, what follows is that the pending issues begin to be unlocked.

And it may be as soon as this week that there is finally a public announcement about the resolution of the dispute panel that Mexico and Canada requested under the USMCA on the rules of origin of the automotive industry imposed by the United States.

It is very probable that the ruling will be against the nationalist vision of the US government and that the other two North American partners will score a victory, which will generate strong reactions in the United States that will require immediate political responses.

So it is not difficult to anticipate that a final resolution will already be precipitated after the consultations on the complaints of the United States and Canada for the violations of the Mexican government to the T-MEC rules on energy matters.

Since July of last year, these consultations were requested and along the way, Mexico changed its negotiating team, which later lost the questions and gained time… until today.

The summit is over and what follows is for the Mexican government to say whether or not it is going to respect what the Mexican Constitution itself and the T-MEC say or if it initiates a dispute settlement panel that Mexico is clearly going to lose.

The time to listen to ideological harangues and joked references to Roosevelt and Benito Juárez is over at yesterday’s North American summit. Today it is time to manage a trilateral relationship that has rules and one of the most dynamic commercial relationships in the world.

And just as the resolution of the automotive panel is not going to please the United States, the López Obrador regime has to respect the energy rules of the trilateral agreement, even if it does not like it.

ecampos@eleconomista.mx