Mexico To End Trade With US? The Latest Trump-NAFTA Update

Mexico could completely pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement if renegotiation efforts don’t prove beneficial, Reuters reported Tuesday. The news came on the heels of newly sworn-in President Donald Trump’s veiled threat to pull out of the long-running trade pact more commonly known as NAFTA.

Minister Ildefonso Guajardo’s comment Monday came a day after Trump said he planned to meet with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto in efforts to rework NAFTA, which has linked the three nations’ economies since 1994.

"We're going to start some negotiations having to do with NAFTA," Trump said, according to CNN.

The Republican, who vowed on the campaign trail and in his inaugural address last week to bring jobs back to America and to get tougher on trade with countries like Mexico and China, reiterated that the renegotiations were a central part of his successful bid for the White House.

"Anybody ever hear of NAFTA?" Trump said. "I ran a campaign somewhat based on NAFTA. But we're going to start renegotiating on NAFTA, on immigration, on security at the border."

Reports Monday indicated Trump had plans to sign an executive order that would kick-start a renegotiation of NAFTA, NBC News reported, but as of yet, he had not done so.

Nieto said Monday that Mexico, which stands as Latin America’s second-largest economy, wanted to keep tariff-free trading intact. Trump was expected to meet with Nieto Jan. 31.

Canada, in turn, was looking for Trump to be solely focused on Mexico and its strategy, which “seems to be to get out of the way,” Bloomberg suggested.

In office now for only a handful of days, Trump has remained aggressive on his campaign promises to rework trade deals. He signed an executive order Monday that pulled the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a deal that former President Barack Obama put together to focus the economy on Asia and other Pacific nations.