MEXICO CITY, Oct. 1 (Xinhua) -- Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto on Monday hailed a new trilateral trade agreement with the United States and Canada by speaking with his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Pena Nieto spoke with the two leaders in separate phone conversations to mark the successful conclusion late Sunday of more than a year of negotiations to modernize the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), now called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
"In his talks, the president noted that the new version of the treaty ... fulfills Mexico's expectations, as well as those of the United States and Canada," the president's office said in a statement.
Negotiations to update the 1994 trade pact began in August 2017 at the insistence of Trump and were often fraught with disagreements.
As of the end of August, Mexico and the United States reached a preliminary agreement without Canada, a development that threatened to turn the three-way trade deal into a bilateral accord. Canada rejoined the talks in September.
Pena Nieto hailed the fact that the "trilateral nature of the treaty was maintained, which will lead to the deepening of North America's productive integration and the consolidation of the region as one of the world's most competitive."
The three negotiating teams still have to iron out some technical details over the next few weeks, before the leaders sign the USMCA into law sometime at the end of November, the president's office said.
Earlier in the day Pena Nieto said via Twitter, "The modernization of the trade agreement between Mexico, Canada and the United States caps 13 months of negotiations and achieves what we set out to achieve from the start: a win-win-win agreement."
