Texas business leaders are hopeful about future of U.S. trade relations with Mexico following the Mexican presidential election.
Mark Jones, political science professor at Rice University and chair of the school’s Latin American Studies program, predicts Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, will be a very different president than his predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto.
“Enrique Peña Nieto — his general goal was to not make waves with President Trump in the United States so that investment would continue. AMLO is a leftist and a populist and is likely to be far more combative with Trump,” Jones said.
And that concerns some Texas businesses who worry about the re-negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.
But Jeff Mosley, president and CEO of the Texas Association of Business, is optimistic about the future relationship between the Trump and theLópez Obrador administrations.
“Well, it could very well be that because both President Trump and President-elect [Lopez] Obrador draw from a populist vote base that they’ll have some very common interests and be more able to sit down and agree on the fundamentals of a NAFTA 2.0,” Mosley said.
But trade experts do not expect that to happen until well after López Obrador is sworn into office this December.