Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff met Tuesday with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto in Mexico City to foster a closer relationship between the two largest markets in Latin America and the Caribbean. This event was Rousseff’s first official visit to Mexico since she first became president in 2011.
Rousseff kicked off her official visit to Mexico on Monday evening and was welcomed by the Minister of Foreign Relations José Antonio Meade. She arrived with a delegation of business representatives interested in exploring investment opportunities in Mexico.
On Tuesday, Rousseff and Peña Nieto signed investment agreements and other accords to increase air travel and tourism. They also agreed to review their bilateral preferential trade agreement (the acuerdo de complementación económica Brasil–México, known as ACE 53) in an effort to lower tariffs overall and extend reduced tariffs to over 6,000 new products. As ACE 53 currently stands, less than half of the products that Brazil exports to Mexico are included in the list of goods with reduced tariffs.
Together, the Brazilian and Mexican economies comprise 62 percent of Latin America’s GDP and make up 58 percent of Latin America’s exports. The bilateral trade between the two countries stood at $9.2 billion in 2014, up from $ 5.7 billion in 2006. With the new agreements, the countries hope to double their trade within the next decade.
Brazil invests a little over $2 billion per year in Mexico, while Mexico’s investments in Brazil total over ten times that amount at $23 billion. Brazil is Mexico’s second largest investment destination after the United States—particularly in telecommunications, food and industrial production. Brazil has investments in steel plants in Mexico and is interested in investing in the Gulf of Mexico through its state-owned oil company, Petrobras.
Since 2013, Mexico and Brazil said they would consider cooperation between Mexico’s Pemex and Brazil’s Petrobras. However, joint projects have yet to be launched.
