Talks to renew the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) are languishing because U.S. officials haven't put President Trump's proposals on paper, according to the person representing the interests of the Mexican private sector at the negotiations.

Moisés Kalach told Reforma newspaper on Monday that U.S. negotiators haven't officially presented their Mexican and Canadian counterparts with Trump's ideas.

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"How are we going to with proposals from Mexico if we have no idea of what the United States wants? At the end of the day they were the ones who asked us to come to this [negotiating] table," Kalach said.

Trump made NAFTA renegotiations a central part of his campaign, and as president initiated negotiations on a renewed deal.

Trump has promised to rescind or renegotiate the 25-year-old deal, focusing on reducing the trade deficit with Mexico, estimated by the U.S. Trade Representative to have been around $55 million in 2016.

Kalach singled out that proposal.

"As an example, how do you express in a commercial proposal a measure to reduce the deficit? It's complicated to express in some kind of proposal a mechanism to reduce the deficit," he said.

After three relatively painless rounds of negotiations, U.S. negotiators have increasingly made demands that some officials say would be impossible for Canada and Mexico to accept, Bloomberg reported last week.

Those proposals include changes in rules of origin — setting limits on how much of a car could be assembled outside the U.S.

The tough new proposals have raised fears that American negotiators could purposefully try to scuttle the talks.

But Kalach said several factors could explain why Trump's proposals haven't made it to the negotiating table.

Kalach hypothesized that negotiations started so quickly that the administration simply wasn't ready with the proposals. He also suggested that U.S. negotiators could be having trouble writing concrete proposals from Trump's ideas, or that Congress could be pressuring the White House to safeguard the treaty.

"Sectors other than the White House are intervening so extreme proposals aren't made, but it's important to take into account that all of this is speculation because it's necessary to see concrete proposals," Kalach said.