Mexico Threatens To End NAFTA Talks If Trump Proposes Tariffs
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Feb 27, 2017
After months of tough talk from the Trump administration on NAFTA and border tariffs on goods imported from Mexico, among other issues, Mexico’s top trade negotiator, Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo, is now ratcheting up his own threats from south of the border. Speaking to Bloomberg over the weekend, Guajardo said that Mexico will walk away from NAFTA if the U.S. insists on slapping duties or quotas on any products from Mexico.
“The moment that they say, ‘We’re going to put a 20 percent tariff on cars,’ I get up from the table,” Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said in an interview. “Bye-bye.”
This doesn’t mean, Guajardo emphasized, that Mexico would be looking to scrap Nafta. But by saying it refuses to even discuss the kind of tariffs President Donald Trump has long trumpeted, the country is ratcheting up the pressure on U.S. negotiators and effectively daring them to pull out of the 23-year-old pact.
Mexican officials have said they expect official talks to start in June. And if they fail? “It wouldn’t be an absolute crisis,” said Guajardo, who headed the Nafta office of the Mexican embassy in the U.S. in the early 90s, when the pact was being written and implemented.
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