La Jornada – Mexico-US Dialogue on Economic Development Projects

Mexico City. Secretary of State Marcelo Ebrard, Minister of Economy Tatiana Clouther and US Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar held a meeting today with governors from the Southeast with the aim of outlining economic development strategies and projects.

The governors of Campeche, Chiapas, Tabasco, Veracruz, Yucatan and a representative of Quintana Roo, according to information from the Ministry of Foreign Relations, attended the meeting, in which American businessmen also participated.

The dialogue set the goal of making a $25 billion investment between 2022 and 2024 to explode economic growth in southeastern Mexico. To achieve this, an action plan will soon be defined, which will be responsible for the Ministry of Economy.

The meeting brought together the American Chamber of Commerce in Mexico, Amcham, along with a diverse delegation of US companies from the agriculture, environment, service and technology sectors. Specifically, the presidents or senior managers in Mexico of Constellation Brands, Vladimiro de la Mora; G.E., Daniel Pema; Cargill Mexico, Fernando Guarsky; FedEx, Jorge Luis Torres Aguilar; Honeywell, Manuel Macedo; AT&T, Abel Hibert; Cisco Mexico, Mario de la Cruz Sarabia; Inova, Sergio Romero; Amazon, David Miller Gomez Giron; In addition to the vice president and general manager of the American Chamber of Commerce, Anna Lopez Mistry.

The approach taken with these American companies seeks to increase trade and investment to inject more prosperity into the region and the population in the south of the country. Meanwhile, governors provided an overview of their states, as well as the challenges and opportunities for strengthening the region from the hands of our major trading partner and federal executive,” according to a statement from Foreign Relations.

Minister Tatiana Clauther indicated that the goal is for the region to diversify its economy, increase the quality of exports, create more job opportunities and facilitate the population to take advantage of new skills to expand their opportunities.

This will be achieved by designing a regionalization methodology that allows the implementation of the public policies reviewed. Minister Clouther was accompanied by the head of the Global Economic Intelligence Unit, Monica Duhem.

Secretary of State Ebrard announced that these dialogues come on the heels of the impetus drawn from the High Level Economic Dialogue between Mexico and the United States, held last September.

He also expressed that in the new close relationship with the United States, that country has been asked to invest in the South, as in Central America to address the root causes of immigration and insecurity. He stressed that Mexico had already done so and that to date there had been more than 20,000 people working on the Sembrando Vida and in Jóvenes Construjando el Futuro in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.