The United States pledged $5.8 billion in aid and investment Tuesday for strengthening government and economic development in Central America, and another $4.8 billion in development aid for southern Mexico.

The U.S aid aims to promote better security conditions and job opportunities as part of a regional plan to allow Central Americans and Mexicans to remain in their countries and not have to emigrate.

The plan was announced in a joint U.S.-Mexican statement released by the State Department and read aloud by Mexican Foreign Relations Secretary Marcelo Ebrard in the Mexican capital.

“In sum I think this is good news, very good news for Mexico,” Ebrard said.

Newly inaugurated President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador waxed poetic about the plan to provide jobs so people won’t have to emigrate.

“I have a dream that I want to see become a reality … that nobody will want to go work in the United States anymore,” Lopez Obrador said at a morning news conference before the announcement.

The combination of public and private investment for the stay-at-home effort doesn’t require congressional approval, unlike Trump’s signature project to stem illegal immigration — a border wall.

The U.S. State Department issued a simultaneous statement saying “The United States is committing $5.8 billion through public and private investment to promote institutional reforms and development in the Northern Triangle,” a term that refers to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

Lopez Obrador’s administration has said it is also interested in agricultural, forestry and tourism projects in southern Mexico, and the U.S. said it will contribute to those efforts.

The U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation “is prepared to invest and mobilize $2 billion in additional funds for projects in southern Mexico that are viable and attract private sector investment,” according to the statement. “This amount is in addition to the $2.8 billion in projects for Mexico through OPIC’s current investment pipeline.”

Ebrard said “The commitments established here signify more than doubling foreign investment in southern Mexico starting in 2019.”

Southern states like Chiapas and Oaxaca are home to many of Mexico’s poorest communities. Lopez Obrador, who took office Dec. 1, has sought to make development in that region a priority, including plans for a “Mayan train” stretching from touristy parts of the Yucatan Peninsula down to Chiapas.

It was unclear if Mexico would give anything in return. A planned announcement about Mexico’s migration policy was postponed until Wednesday.

The United States has reportedly wanted Mexico to allow migrants seeking asylum in the United States to remain in Mexico while their applications are processed.

Ebrard had previously suggested that about $25 billion in U.S. investment would be an appropriate figure for what Mexicans and Central Americans have dubbed “The Alliance for Prosperity” in the region.

ASHTABULA, Ohio—Global colorant provider Chromaflo Technologies has acquired the colorants unit from Central de Colores Plasticos (Cecoplas) of Queretaro, Mexico.

No purchase price was listed in a Nov. 5 news release announcing the deal between Cecoplas and Ashtabula-based Chromaflo. The acquisition was effective Nov. 1.

Chromaflow is acquiring the pigment dispersion business and one manufacturing facility, and Cecoplas will become a Chromaflo product brand name.

In the release, Scott Becker, chromaflo president and CEO, said that the acquisition “is consistent with our efforts in supplying quality colorants and additives for high performance thermoset products in the Americas’ markets and beyond.”

He added that the addition of the Cecoplas business “will provide us an opportunity to serve the Mexican market to a more effective degree.”

The Cecoplas business has sold colorants to plastics manufacturers, compounders and molders for more than 20 years. Its products are used with PVC, polyurethane, polyester and polyolefins for applications in automotive, textiles, shoes and toys.

Chromaflo has been owned since late 2016 by private equity firm American Securities L.L.C. of New York. Chromaflo operates plants North America, Europe, China and Australia, making chemical and pigment dispersions for thermoset plastics and composites and numerous other markets.

Arsenal Capital partners formed Chromaflo in mid-2012 by combining Ashtabula-based Plasticolors Inc. and the Colortrend unit of German firm Evonik Industries A.G. Arsenal then added to Chromaflo in late 2012 by acquiring the Tint-Ayd brand line of colorants from Cleveland-based Elementis Specialties Inc.

In late 2013 Arsenal merged Chromaflo with the colorants business of Scandinavian firm CPS Color B.V. to create a global business with annual sales of more than $400 million.

The United States, Mexico, and Canada reached a tentative agreement to strike a new North American trade deal, and President Donald Trump has given Congress six months to approve the measure. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), would replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Jonesboro, told Talk Business & Politics he doesn’t think the agreement will be decided during the lame duck session of Congress, but it could be considered in the first couple of months after the New Year.

 The agreement has to be approved by legislatures in all three countries. The U.S. does about a $1 trillion worth of business each year with the two countries, and Canada (second) and Mexico (third) are America’s most significant trade partners. NAFTA was created in 1994.

“It’s not a major departure from the previous agreement,” Crawford said.

According to a White House statement and information provided by the U.S. Trade Representative’s office, the new USMCA would:

Require 75% of auto manufacturing content to be produced in North America;
Add rules to incentivize the use of high-wage manufacturing labor in the auto sector;
Eliminate Canada’s “Class 7” program that allows lower priced dairy products in the U.S.;
Keep the NAFTA provision of zero agricultural tariffs between the three countries;
Modernize intellectual property rights, including pharmaceutical and biologic drugs; and
Institute new rules on data transfer across borders.
The agreement, if approved, would be for five years, but Crawford thinks that is a mistake. Crawford said the agreement should be for at least 10 years.

U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue was pleased an agreement had been reached.

“The new USMCA makes important specific changes that are beneficial to our agricultural producers. We have secured greater access to the Mexican and Canadian markets and lowered barriers for many of our products. The deal eliminates Canada’s unfair Class 6 and Class 7 milk pricing schemes, opens additional access to U.S. dairy into Canada, and imposes new disciplines on Canada’s supply management system,” Perdue said. “The agreement also preserves and expands critical access for U.S. poultry and egg producers and addresses Canada’s discriminatory wheat grading process to help U.S. wheat growers along the border become more competitive.”

Republicans will lose control of the U.S. House in January but will remain in control of the U.S. Senate. Crawford thinks there will be broad, bipartisan support for the agreement. There are many provisions that will be popular with constituents throughout the country, and Crawford said it would be a “gross miscalculation” by House Democrats if they try to stop or change the agreement.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, has been critical of the new trilateral trade deal. In interviews over the weekend, Brown has said the new agreement needs to have stronger labor standards and protections against outsourcing.

In an interview with CNN on Sunday, he said, “We can go back to the table with the Mexicans and the Canadians and do stronger labor standards.”

President Trump said he will give Congress an ultimatum on the USMCA deal. He wants legislators to approve the proposal or go back to a pre-NAFTA world. Trump said he was going to cancel NAFTA in its entirety in the near future, which would give Congress six months to approve USMCA or not.

“I will be formally terminating NAFTA shortly,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on his way home from a G20 summit in Argentina.

Brown said the ultimatum is unnecessary. “The President’s threats are not particularly helpful, not surprisingly, but we need stronger labor enforcement standards,” Brown said.

MEXICO CITY 

The man tapped to head Mexico’s finance ministry after Dec. 1 says officials are expected to sign a revamped trade agreement with the United States and Canada at the Group of 20 summit in Argentina this week.

Carlos Urzua said late Monday that “all possibilities” point to a signing in Argentina.

He said the pact would then have to be ratified by the legislatures in all three countries.

Urzua will lead the ministry when Mexican President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador takes office Saturday.

The new deal was once known as the North American Free Trade Agreement, but was renegotiated this year and been renamed the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA.

MEXICO CITY — Mexico in less than two weeks will inaugurate a new president, a leftist and populist elected on promises of restoring national pride and shaking up the status quo and representing a potentially radical shift in Mexican politics. It’s a new era with broad implications for Texas businesses and the economy.

Mexico is by far the state’s biggest trading partner and foreign market, accounting for more than one-third — 37 percent — of Texas exports, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, and his party swept the elections held this summer, gaining a decisive majority in Congress while creating anxiety across the border about whether market reforms put in place by his by his predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto, will unravel and the national government will resume a larger role in the Mexican economy.

The litmus test is likely how López Obrador approaches the overhaul of the country’s energy sector, which was controlled by the state for 75 years. Constitutional changes ended the monopoly of the state-owned oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, and opened oil and fuel markets to foreign investment competition in 2014. Those reforms became controversial when gasoline prices rose sharply, spurring rioting early last year.

López Obrador has signaled that he does not plan to undo Peña Nieto’s energy market reforms, which have attracted billions of dollars in investment into developing new oil fields, building fuel storage and distribution facilities and constructing new pipelines to transport refined petroleum products and natural gas. But his proposals since winning the election, such as building new Pemex refineries to reduce fuel imports, has raised concerns among refiners and oil companies across the border.

As part of fulfilling his pledge to root out corruption, López Obrador has said he plans to review the several auctions in the last three years that awarded 90 blocks, peppered throughout the country and Gulf of Mexico too private operators, raising over $150 billion in commitments for new investment. It’s a veritable who’s who of energy companies, including Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron.

Some of these companies have expressed concern that additional rounds of bidding may not take place under the new administration, even though the reforms made under Pena Nieto envisioned further auctions down the road.

Analysts, however, say the López Obrador may have no choice but to advance the energy reforms and work with foreign companies and investors. Three-quarters of a century of monopoly control left Pemex ossified and inefficient, unable to make the investments needed to modernize the nation’s oil industry, where production has fallen for years, and develop the technical know-how to reverse the trend.

A lack of refining capacity, in part due to failures to maintain the refineries, has required Mexico to import increasing amounts of gasoline in recent years. More than half of the 800,000 barrels of day exported by the United States in 2017 went to Mexico, much of it from Gulf Coast refineries, according to the U.S. Energy Department. López Obrador has pledged to bring an end to fuel imports within three years, but that will require massive investment in upgrading old refineries and building new ones.

“Either you face the music and realize you have no choice other than to move forward with the reform,” said Michelle Michot Foss, an energy fellow at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. “Or, if you are going to roll back and make Pemex great again, you have to be prepared to give the company independence and budget to do it.”

Investors also are watching the power sector, where investment rules that limited foreign companies were lifted in 2014. Three public auctions for new power generation projects have taken place in the last four years, raising a $9 billion in promised investment for new solar and wind power plants. It’s a sector that Mexico’s national power company, the Federal Commission for Electricity, or CFE, has historically dominated.

The path for attracting private investment has involved dismantling CFE’s monopoly position and trying to develop a competitive power market similar to that in Texas. It’s another area where López Obrador has been vague, indicating that he wants CFE to increase power production. but not necessarily at the expense of foreign investment.

More wind and solar projects are needed to meet the country’s growing electricity demand and a national goal of generating 35 percent of power from renewables by 2024 and 50 percent by 2050. That will require billions in foreign investment, said Robert Downing, an attorney with Greenberg Traurig specializing in Latin American energy deals.

“People are looking to see what happens over the next two months in the transition after December,” Downing said. “Some clients have a ‘wait and see’ attitude, while others say, ‘We believe that Mexico is an attractive market for energy investment and we want to proceed’.”

Yucatán business leaders expect 1,000 firms to participate in hour-long black-out

At least 1,000 business in Yucatán are expected to turn off the electricity for an hour on November 13 in protest against the increase in electrical tariffs.

Business leader Juan Manuel Díaz Ponce told a press conference that the hour-long “mega-blackout” has been scheduled despite an announcement that tariffs would drop between 12% and 17% this month and next. The head of the state chapter of the Business Coordinating Council said some businesses have been hit with rate hikes as high as 300%.

He accused the Energy Regulatory Commission of doing nothing to resolve the issue.

Díaz and other business leaders also blamed President Peña Nieto and president-elect López Obrador for a lack of political will to find a solution.

Díaz quoted figures from the Mexican Institute of Finance Executives that showed the tariff increases have had a negative impact on local firms’ finances and investment and caused the loss of more than 7,500 jobs throughout Yucatán.

“We will not stop paying [our power bills], but we are studying other protest measures to fight the high rates,” said Díaz.

One measure will be a complaint before Profeco, the consumer protection agency. He said the collective complaint by some 1,000 businesses will be made once the documentation has been prepared, likely in two weeks.

Next Tuesday’s protest will take place between 7:00pm and 8:00pm.

The event has brought 1,000 Chinese firms to Mexico in the past eight years.

Over the past eight years the China-Mexico trade forum and show has introduced 1,000 Chinese firms to the Mexican market, according to its organizers who are preparing for another edition of the event this week in Mexico City.

The director of the Zhonghua Business Association in Mexico told the newspaper El Financiero that the goal of the forum is to forge new alliances between business people from both countries, along with expansion into the rest of Latin America.

Chinese firms specializing in furniture, appliances, power generation, illumination, consumer goods, textiles, automobiles, construction and heavy machinery have successfully ventured into the Mexican market through local alliances, said Jenny Wang.

The firms “are not looking for end customers but for strategic alliances that enable them to export to Mexico.”

According to the Bank of México, almost US $54 billion in goods were imported from China during the first eight months of the year, a year-on-year increase of 14.8%.

It was the second largest increase since 2010, when it was a whopping 43.9%.

Events such as the trade forum have brought automotive manufacturers including BAIC and JAC, tech companies like Huawei and Lenovo and transportation companies such as Mobike and Didi to Mexico.

The forum will be hosted by the Expo Santa Fe convention center in Mexico City November 6-8, and will be attended by 200 Chinese investors and entrepreneurs.

When is an airport more than airport? When it is a bellwether for a nation’s economic policy.

This week, Mexico held a referendum on the construction of a new major airport at the behest of the country’s incoming president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

López Obrador, known as AMLO, has long complained about the costs and environmental impact of the project, which began several years ago, even as experts and members of his own transition team warned him that voiding plans for the airport would prompt an economic disaster. It would send a message to investors, critics said, that López Obrador was hostile to the private sector, that existing public contracts might not be respected.

Still, López Obrador decided that he would go ahead with the referendum Sunday, a hasty poll that drew only 1 percent of Mexican voters. When those voters rejected plans for the new airport, López Obrador called the decision “democratic, rational and efficient.”

The market disagreed. The peso fell by more than 3 percent. The stock market fell by more than 4 percent. Analysts at JPMorgan Chase cut their 2019 forecast for Mexican growth. Juan Pablo Castañon, director of Mexico’s Business Coordinating Council, said the decision “seriously hurts Mexico’s image in the world” and “sends a message of uncertainty” to potential investors.

Because of completed construction and existing contracts, the cancellation could cost the country $5 billion. It’s unclear what will be done with the existing site — the airport’s foundation is already partially laid.

Global financial markets and the Mexican business community have struggled to predict what kind of economic policy López Obrador would pursue. The 64-year-old has been a longtime fixture on the country’s political left. He has criticized the privatization of the petroleum industry and proposed a wide range of social programs without coherently explaining how they would be funded.

 During his campaign, he spent significant time trying to convince Mexicans that he wasn’t the radical leftist that some of his opponents suggested. He recruited business leaders to join his team, including Alfonso “Poncho” Romo, slated to become his chief of staff.

“Poncho is with me to help convince the businessmen who have been told we’re like Venezuela,” he said at one campaign stop.

But even as he sailed to victory by a wide margin in the July vote, the airport hovered over López Obrador as an early, important test for how he might govern.

In 2014, President Enrique Peña Nieto announced that he would launch plans to replace Mexico City’s aging airport, the busiest in Latin America. The plan was ambitious and expensive: an $8.7 billion project in the wetland in Texcoco, north of the city, whose price tag grew to more than $13 billion. Billionaire investor Carlos Slim came on board. Award-winning British architect Norman Foster did the design. By some measures, it would be the third-largest airport in the world.

Millions, or more, had already been spent on construction by the time Sunday’s referendum was held. Still, López Obrador said he would continue with the referendum, alluding to concerns that it threatens a wilderness area with aquatic birds and could lead to flooding in the area. He suggested an alternative: adding commercial airstrips to an existing military airport north of the city.

That’s the option that voters chose Sunday, even though a fraction of Mexicans came to the polls. Aside from questions of López Obrador’s economic policy — and whether he could be counted on to respect existing contacts — the episode raised doubts about whether Mexico’s next president would attempt to govern through poorly organized referendums.

“AMLO’s use of referendums in Mexico in the name of direct democracy raises concerns over the erosion of existing democratic institutions and of policy predictability,” Fiona Mackie with the Economist Intelligence Unit said in a tweet, referring to the incoming president.

OTTAWA — Mexico’s future foreign minister says he thinks biting U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs slapped on his country and Canada could be lifted once the three continental partners sign a newly negotiated free trade agreement.

But Marcelo Ebrard, who will assume his new post Dec. 1 when the incoming Mexican government takes office, offered few details Monday on the timing of the trade pact’s ratification.

“We believe that it’s not the very best agreement, but we do need to support the advances that have been made,” Ebrard said through an interpreter at a news conference in Ottawa alongside Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland.

“We believe that it’s worth supporting the agreement, looking to the future of all three countries.”

Canada and Mexico have responded to the American tariffs by imposing their own retaliatory levies on U.S. imports. The dispute has failed to disappear even after the three countries reached an agreement-in-principle this month on an updated North American free trade pact, also known as the USMCA.

The trilateral agreement was struck before a deadline imposed by the U.S. Congress. The aim was to get the deal fast-tracked and voted on by Dec. 1, ahead of the incoming government of president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

The outgoing Mexican government negotiated the deal, but officials from Lopez Obrador’s team were inside the room. Ebrard said the Mexican congress is currently looking at elements of the new deal.

Both Ebrard and Freeland were noncommittal Monday on the subject of when they expected the Trump administration to lift the U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum, which have been in place since June.

“I think that the time when that might occur is when the agreement is signed,” Ebrard told reporters.

“What I expect, based on my communications with the current government, is that this maybe can be resolved. With the current agreement-in-principle, I believe that we will adopt a policy that will leave behind tariffs and quotas between ourselves because that goes against the free trade agreement.”

He added he hoped there would be an opportunity to get rid of them as soon as possible.

The Canadian government has insisted the steel and aluminum tariffs are a separate issue from the USMCA — but Trump has acknowledged publicly that the levies helped to expedite the new continental trade deal.

Either way, Freeland offered no timeline Monday as to when she expected the tariffs to be removed.

“I’d love them to be lifted today — there is nothing at all stopping any of us from lifting these tariffs,” Freeland said.

“We think that would be great further evidence of the importance of the North American partnership and that is what we’re communicating very directly to our U.S. partners.”

She repeated the Liberal government’s position that the tariffs, which are based on the premise Canada poses a national security risk to the U.S., are “unjustified and illegal.” Ottawa, she added, is challenging the levies at the World Trade Organization and at North American Free Trade Agreement panels.

Freeland predicted the positive momentum from the USMCA negotiations should lead to the tariff standoff’s resolution.

“It is quite reasonable to think that that positive momentum should bring Canada and the United States to simply say, ‘You know what? It’s time to lift these tariffs that we’ve imposed on each other,’ ” she said.

A Canadian source, who’s close to the ongoing talks to resolve the ongoing tariff standoff, said late last week that Washington is trying to get Ottawa to agree to a quota system in order for the U.S. to remove steel and aluminum duties.

Canada is dead set against agreeing to quotas that would limit its exports , said the source, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss sensitive negotiations.

Freeland and Ebrard’s meeting was one of several in Ottawa on Monday between the Trudeau government and Lopez Obrador’s future cabinet ministers. They also sat down with International Trade Minister Jim Carr and Mexico’s incoming economy minister, Graciela Marquez.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with Mexican officials later in the day.