The recently concluded summit in Mexico City of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) benefitted from a speech delivered remotely by Chinese President Xi Jinping, which recalled earlier CELAC-China cooperation to achieve regional development. But the keynote address delivered by host Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador back-pedaled from that earlier approach and instead proposed that “together with the United States and Canada, we reach an agreement and sign a treaty to strengthen the internal market in our hemisphere, which is currently in the red in relation to Europe and, especially, with regard to Asia.”
López Obrador argued that the Americas are a bigger consumer market than Asia, and can also replace those nations in the U.S.’s supply chain: “Let’s bear in mind that the Western Hemisphere has only 24% of the population of Asia. Nevertheless, we consume 20% more than that continent; that is, per-capita consumption in the Americas is $23,347 a year, while in Asia it is $4,716.… The proposal is simple. It is a matter of reactivating the economy of our hemisphere in order to produce what we consume in the Americas.”
