Will Mexico join Mercosur?
Former Mexican President Vicente Fox once vowed that a Free Trade Area of the Americas would be formed ‘with or without Mercosur’, a common market composed of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay. But there appears to be a thaw in relations under his successor, Felipe Calderon, with both Argentina’s President Nestor Kirchner and Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva visiting Mexico in the past two weeks. Kirchner invited Mexico to join Mercosur. Lula stopped short of doing so, urging Calderon to look south and suggesting that Brazil — whose bilateral trade with Mexico reached nearly 6 billion dollars last year — could be Mexico’s passage to Mercosur. Calderon played his part, saying that Mexico may be located in the north, but its heart was in the south and in Latin America. Mexican membership of Mercosur is hardly a novel idea: there were overtures to incorporate the country in 2004, although they foundered on Mexico’s membership of NAFTA and Fox’s increasingly frosty relations with
