This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Mexico’s foreign minister has warned that terminating Nafta could bring relations with the US to a breaking point, raising the prospect that bilateral cooperation against drug trafficking and illegal migration could be adversely affected by Donald Trump’s bellicose trade rhetoric.

The threat from the foreign minister, Luis Videgaray, came as Donald Trump once again threatened to tear up the three-country trade treaty between the US, Canada and Mexico ahead of a fourth round of Nafta negotiations.

Mexico and the US work closely on issues such as border security, combatting drug cartels and efforts to stop migrants reaching the US border, but relations between the two neighbors have grown increasingly tense since Trump launched his election campaign on a wave of anti-Mexican sentiment.

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Speaking in a senate hearing on Tuesday, Videgaray stressed that Mexico “wants an agreement” on Nafta – but also warned that Mexican officials were ready to walk away from negotiations or even withdraw entirely from the deal.

“We always have to be ready to get up from the table. This is a logical posture in any negotiation. It’s also a principle of dignity and sovereignty,” Videgaray said. “Mexico is much bigger than Nafta and we have to be ready for any scenario in the negotiations.”



He added that the end of Nafta “won’t be the end of the world”.



Videgaray’s comments departed sharply from Mexico’s previous strategy of trying to avoid antagonizing Trump. Officials have gone out of their way to ignore the US president’s repeated insults and his promisethat Mexico will pay for the construction of a border wall.

Analysts said that Mexico’s apparent patience with Trump’s rhetoric suggested it was trying to keep the treaty at any cost – and for understandable reasons: more than $1m a minute in merchandise crosses the US-Mexico border.

Mexican business also bet big on Nafta, which was enacted in 1994 and turned Mexico into an outward-looking and manufacturing-oriented economy, with 80% of its exports heading to the US market.



Closer economic ties have been mirrored by closer cooperation on law enforcement and migration: traditionally wary of its northern neighbor, Mexico has over the past 15 years allowed much closer US involvement in its efforts to fight criminal groups.

Under pressure from Washington, Mexico launched an aggressive campaign against illegal migrants in 2014, and has detained and deported thousands of people fleeing violence and corruption in Central America.

But Videgaray’s statements in the senate suggested sentiments in Mexico were turning tougher and patience running out with Trump, whose Twitter attacks and Nafta threats have tormented the Mexican economy and sent the peso plunging.

Mexican officials have traditionally kept trade negotiations separate from talks on security issues, but Videgaray appeared to be playing hardball, said Brenda Estefan, former security attaché at the Mexican embassy in Washington.

“Videgaray is stressing now that the entire bilateral relationship is on the table,” she said. “With the whole bilateral relationship on the table, Mexico has more leverage – it makes it more costly for the US to walk away.”



The escalation in rhetoric followed the publication of an interview with Trump in Forbes magazine, in which the US president mused openly of ending Nafta.



“I happen to think Nafta will have to be terminated if we’re going make it good. Otherwise, I believe you can’t negotiate a good deal,” Trump said.



“[The Trans-Pacific Partnership] would have been a large-scale version of Nafta. It would have been a disaster,” he added. “I like bilateral deals.”



Business leaders meeting in Mexico City on Monday at a US Chamber of Commerce gathering warned that US negotiators had introduced several “poison pills” to sabotage the Nafta negotiations, including a sunset clause and the elimination of dispute resolution mechanisms.



Speaking in Mexico City, Thomas Donohue, the president of the US Chamber of Commerce in Mexico, warned that the “existential threat” to Nafta endangered regional security, Reuters reported.

Videgaray also described several deal breakers being brought to the negotiating table, such as “administered trade, restrictions, tariffs, barriers, which perverts the kind of agreement that it is, and this doesn’t suit Mexico”.



“What we cannot lose is that a free trade agreement stops being a free trade agreement,” he said.













