Common Contracts
1 similar Nafta contracts
Daniel CooperNafta • October 8th, 2021
Designed to integrate the economies of Mexico, the United States, and Canada by eliminating regulations that hindered the cross-border mobility of capital, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect on January 1st, 1994. For Mexico, the treaty would crown the previous six years of President Carlos Salinas’ radical market reforms which, building on those of his predecessor Miguel de la Madrid, had fundamentally restructured the country’s economy through privatizations and the deregulation of key industries. Buoyed already by broad public support, Salinas’ rightwing legislation was nevertheless injected with a crucial dose of cultural legitimation when Mexico’s most celebrated writer, the Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, enthusiastically endorsed it in the days leading up to its enactment. In a late December 1993 interview in The New Yorker, Paz adds with his poet’s voice a contemplative and even epic tenor to the official optimism surrounding the technocratic treaty:
