MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Thursday she did not specifically discuss tariffs in a call with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump a day earlier, after Trump threatened a 25% import tax that appears to contravene a free trade pact.
Sheinbaum told a morning press conference the two discussed the causes for which Trump had threatened tariffs, namely illegal migration and fentanyl trafficking, and that in time they would discuss the flow of U.S. guns to Mexican criminal organizations.
“It was a good conversation and we are going to keep having conversations,” Sheinbaum said, adding the two had agreed there would be good relations between the two nations.
Following the call on Wednesday, Trump said Sheinbaum had “agreed to stop migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border.”
Sheinbaum, however, said she had laid out a strategy that “attended to” migrants before they reached the U.S. border. “Mexico’s stance is not to close borders, but to build bridges between governments and their peoples,” she said in a post on X after Trump’s post.
Mexico and the United States are each others’ top trade partners.
The Mexican peso strengthened about 1% against the dollar on Thursday.
Earlier on Thursday, Mexican Economy Minister Marcelo Ebrard said in an interview with local media that he did not believe it was likely the U.S. would impose the tariffs proposed by Trump as it would be very costly on both sides of the border.
“It’s a shot in the foot,” he said.
(Reporting by Sarah Morland, Ana Isabel Martinez and Lizbeth Diaz; editing by Stephen Eisenhammer)
