A small group of reporters were in Geneva, while then President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, with a large entourage that included, among others, the head of the office of the presidency, José Córdova Montoya, and Jaime Serra Puche, Secretary of Commerce, They moved to Davos, where the president was going for the first time to the World Economic Forum that was being held in that Swiss ski resort.
It was February 1990 and Salinas de Gortari was going to promote the changes that Mexico was making in order to receive international investment in a world that was opening up to globalization. A few months ago, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall had fallen and we were in the midst of the dismantling of the socialist bloc led by the Soviet Union.
But shortly after arriving in Davos, and after some bilateral meetings (then, like today, there were many leaders who went to Davos), Salinas discovered that European investments would not go to Mexico, but to those countries that were abandoning socialism and where everything was to be done.
After a night of talks with his team from Geneva, we were told off the records that a delegation led by Córdova Montoya had left on a private flight to Washington to meet with the team of then President George Bush to resume a proposal that in September of the previous year it had been discussed but left aside: signing a free trade agreement between Mexico, the United States and Canada.
More than 30 years have passed since then.
NAFTA became a reality four years later, on January 1, 1994 (the agreements had been concluded much earlier, but Bush’s surprise defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton forced another year of negotiations), and globalization was already a fact by then. The world economy in these three decades was transformed as never before in the history of humanity, and not only was the opening of many markets but also a new world economic power emerged, China and several other emerging ones, from South Korea to Singapore. including Mexico and Chile. The entire world economic scenario was modified.
But over the years, and among other reasons because the results of globalization were not as large as the expectations generated, at least for many social sectors, nationalism re-emerged, often at the hands of right-wing populist leaders. or left.
Boris Johnson and Brexit kicked Britain out of the European Union; Nationalist movements grew in several European countries, from the National Front in France to Vox or the Catalan independence movement in Spain, movements that today govern Hungary and Poland, for example. Vladimir Putin consolidated his power with an autocratic government and ended up invading, violating international law in every possible way, Ukraine. In Latin America, nationalism grew both in the hands of Jair Bolsonaro and Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, Daniel Ortega and Evo Morales as well as Cristina Fernández.
In Mexico, the nationalist vision that the PRI had maintained until José López Portillo, returned with President López Obrador, who considers that the best foreign policy is the internal one and who calls for us to become self-sufficient in many branches of the economy, from food to energy, despite the fact that Mexico is the country in the world with the largest number of free trade agreements signed and in force, especially those that make up the TMEC with the United States and Canada and the treaty with the European Union.
But the differences in energy issues and the legal insecurity of many investments today generate various conflicts with our main trading partners in the American Union and Canada and will make it difficult to renew the treaty with the European Union due to the position adopted against Spain and other countries of the Old Continent. and the unfounded criticism against the European Parliament itself, which is the one that must authorize this renewal.
The paradox of all this is that, as was said in the economic forum in Davos these days, it occurs when the world is facing various global crises that demand global solutions: one of the serious ones is the food crisis, but the energy crisis is not less, migratory, environmental, global security, triggered above all by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and all this in a context where not only Russia has been isolated from much of the Western world, but also from a clear trade confrontation between the United States United with China.
It would be a more than ideal moment for Mexico to benefit from this context, receiving all kinds of foreign investment, strengthening the North American regional bloc, but we have chosen to close key sectors of the economy or to bet on energy or food self-sufficiency. .
The fact is that, for the first time in 32 years, the Mexican government does not have a single representative at Davos. He hasn’t sent anyone. Let’s not talk about the president anymore, nor was it the chancellor, nor the secretaries of the Treasury or Economy, nor even minor officials. No one from the Mexican government has participated in the main forum to debate and participate in globalization that exists at the international level. Absence is much more than a message, it is a declaration of principles and intentions.
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