This Sunday in Mexico General elections are being held where Mexican citizens will elect their new president for the next six years. This country is an important trading partner of the Uruguay and the results of these elections could change the course of bilateral relations.
Mexico He goes to the polls this Sunday with two women as clear favorites to win the presidency of a country in which, on average, around 10 femicides a day are recorded and devastated by the violence of drug trafficking gangs.
Claudia Sheinbaumphysicist and candidate of the left-wing ruling party, and Xóchitl Gálvez, center-right senator of indigenous roots, are the favorites to govern the twelfth economy in the world, with 129 million inhabitants, until 2030.
According to an average of surveys by the Oraculus firm, Sheinbaum, 61 years old and of Jewish origin, leads Gálvez by 17 percentage points, boosted by the president’s popularity Andrés Manuel López Obrador, his political godfather.
Bilateral relations with Uruguay
Mexico belongs to the regional bloc with USA and Canada (Umsca), agreement where some legislators proposed that Uruguay will join in March 2024. If the “Law of the Americas” presented by Republican and Democratic leaders in both chambers of the Parliament United States, Uruguay would join the FTA(FTA) starting in 2026.
The Uruguayan exports without free zones towards the Usmca increased to 10.5% during 2023, compared to the 8.5% they represented in 2022, according to a study by the International Business Institute (INI) of the Catholic University of Uruguay (UCU).
The survey highlighted that the beef It was a flagship product, with sales of $120.4 million last year, an increase of 137.2% year-on-year. Behind them were tallow (65.8 million), preserved meat (56.3 million), wood plywood (47.5 million and chilled or boneless beef (39.7 million). These 5 products represented 33.1% of the total.
Regarding the payment of duty, The INI report reflected that towards Mexico They were reduced as a result of an agreement, so the greatest impact is seen in meat shipments to the other two countries.
For meat and edible offal, there is a quota of 20,000 tons towards USA and exported products are taxed at $44 per ton (an ad valorem tariff of 0.7%). If that amount is exceeded, it becomes 26.5%. In the case of Mexico, the first 250 tons are free of tariffs and, exceeding this quota, the applied tariff is 7%.
On the other hand, when analyzing the imports, those from the countries of the Usmca They represented 11.5% of total Uruguayan acquisitions in 2023, a decrease of 38.8% compared to 2022.
Among the five main products purchased, three of them correspond to mineral fuels and in all cases the common external tariff corresponds to 0%.
The largest amount of imports was crude oils from Petroleum, for 396 million dollars, followed by other similar oils (130.1 million), vehicles of a cylinder capacity greater than 1,500 cm3 and less than or equal to 3,000 cm3 (40.6 million), others medicines (31.6 million) and petroleum bitumen (21.8 million).
Source: Ambito
