The fifth round of NAFTA talks did not go well.



United States officials have tried in recent weeks to cool tensions over the North American Free Trade Agreement by extending the timetable for renegotiating the pact and asking top officials to sit out the current round of talks in Mexico City.

But as the fifth round of talks concluded in the Mexican capital on Tuesday, tensions were still simmering, with Canada and Mexico telling the United States that it would make little headway with its current approach and Mexico firing its first warning shot with a tough counterproposal.

Robert Lighthizer, the United States trade representative, took aim at his Canadian and Mexican counterparts on Tuesday, saying “thus far, we have seen no evidence that Canada or Mexico are willing to seriously engage on provisions that will lead to a rebalanced agreement. Absent rebalancing, we will not reach a satisfactory result.”

It seems the Trump Administration went into these talks with the impression that they had the leverage, but it's been Mexico that has been the toughest negotiator.

Why is that? Because Mexico has gained very little from NAFTA.



Growth of 2.5 percent a year since 1994 is less than half the developing-world average. It’s pretty much the same as the U.S. and Canada. But even that’s misleading. Because Mexico’s population expands much faster, the economic pie has to be divided among more and more people. So the average Mexican earns less today, relative to U.S. and Canadian peers, than before Nafta.

“The main idea was to promote convergence in wages and standards of living,’’ said Gerardo Esquivel, an economics professor at the Colegio de Mexico. “That has not been achieved.’’ And what meager growth there’s been, says Esquivel, has mostly gone to “the upper part of the distribution.’’



In Mexico, NAFTA doesn't get much blame or credit.

It's really only important to the upper-class and the neoliberal establishment.

Which brings us to Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the front-runner in the 2018 presidential polls.

He wants the NAFTA talks suspended until after the election.

One thing is for sure, if the NAFTA talks are still going on when Obrador takes power, it'll be extremely entertaining.



In a 90-minute interview Tuesday in New York, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the radical outsider who’s the early frontrunner in next year’s election, blasted Trump’s “campaign of hatred” against Mexican immigrants, accused him of violating human rights laws, called his border wall plan a “propaganda” tool and said he couldn’t wait to handle the renegotiation of Nafta himself.

“Pena is too quiet. And Donald Trump speaks very loudly,” Lopez Obrador said. “One doesn’t beg for liberty, one seizes it.”

It could be a foretaste of clashes to come. Mexico and the U.S. have enjoyed a cooperative relationship for decades. Trump has changed the dynamic. He’s gotten Mexicans so mad that, if the polls are right, they’re ready to elect a fiery nationalist of their own, a politician who’s spent years denouncing the way the economy is run in the interests of foreigners -- in some ways, a Mexican anti-Trump.

It's entirely possible that NAFTA could break in late-2018.