President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and other top officials met Tuesday in Mexico City with a U.S. congressional delegation to lobby for U.S. approval of a pending trade agreement between the two countries and Canada.
López
Obrador said he expressed the same sentiment in a letter he gave the delegation
to deliver to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi . It asks, he said, "respectfully,
for a timely approval to be achieved so that this important matter ... to favor
the economy of the three countries is not mixed up with and contaminated
by" the politics of the 2020 election.
López
Obrador posted a photo of him posing with Democratic Reps. Richard Neal , Jimmy
Gomez, Bill Pascrell , Jimmy Panetta and Dan Kildee . All sit on the key House
Committee on Ways and Means, with Neal as chair.
The
USMCA treaty was negotiated as a replacement for the North American Free Trade
Agreement , which U.S. President Donald Trump campaigned on renegotiating or
scrapping altogether.
Mexico's
Senate has ratified the agreement, but U.S. lawmakers have yet to do so.
Mexican
Foreign Relations Secretary Marcelo Ebrard, who took part in the meeting, said
the U.S. lawmakers expressed a desire to get to ratification but had questions
such as about how Mexico will implement labor reform.
López
Obrador told the delegation that improving wages and labor conditions in Mexico
is a crucial goal of his administration, independent of the USMCA, and that
"Mexico will no longer sustain its development on low salaries,"
according to Ebrard's account of the exchange.
"I
would be reasonably optimistic about the results of this meeting," Ebrard
said.
Recently
arrived U.S. Ambassador Christopher Landau, who was also present, tweeted that
"free and fair trade benefits us all."