South-South and Triangular Cooperation - Mexico

Within the framework of the Mesoamerican Development Project, Mexico has carried out actions aimed at strengthening trade facilitation and competitiveness in the region.

• In December of 2015, AMEXCID financed a one week workshop for customs experts from all the Mesoamerican countries on “Non-Intrusive Inspections and International Goods Transit,” imparted by Mexican Customs officials at different ports of entry in Mexico.

• In October of 2016, the Mesoamerican countries participated in a workshop in Colombia to exchange best practices on trade facilitation, with the goal of outlining the short and medium term cooperation strategies in Mesoamerica.

• In 2016, the Mexican Government began joint efforts with the Executive Directorate of the Mesoamerican Project, the Inter-American Development Bank and the Secretariat for Economic Integration of Central America to develop a comprehensive Mesoamerican Framework for Trade Facilitation and Competitiveness that will guide regional actions on this subject. The first meeting of the Mesoamerican Trade Facilitation Working Group is expected to be held during the first trimester of 2017.

During 2016, AMEXCID and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) developed a triangular cooperation project for capacity building on trade facilitation and competitiveness. The purpose of this project is to strengthen the Central American Strategy for Trade Facilitation and Border Management, targeting specific areas of need.

Mexico was identified as a valuable source of expertise and knowledge to share with Central America and hence AMEXCID and USAID have partnered with SAT (Customs) and the Ministry of Economy to carry out workshops during 2017 on specific subjects such as Single Windows for Trade, Secure Operators, Joint Border Inspections, among others.

Currently México is an important South-South cooperation provider. 75% of cooperation activities are directed to benefit Latin America region.

In 2016, 36 triangular projects were implemented primarily in the region. The main players were Spain, Germany, Japan, and the US, United Kingdom, the Netherlands and multilateral organizations. These projects benefited the whole region on sectors such as environment, agriculture, health, education, civil protection etc.

From 2011 to 2014, the 3.1% of Mexican cooperation was Technical Cooperation in the South-South modality.

Mexico has had an important participation in multilateral forums working about South-South Cooperation, as co-president (or co-chair person), representing dual countries in the global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation, and recently as the President (or Chairperson) of ECLAC’s Committee on South-South Cooperation from 2016 to 2018. During its presidency (or chairmanship), Mexico established three action lines approved for the Committee: 1) Sharing experiences of implementing 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development; 2) Promoting multi-stakeholder partnerships for SSC; 3) Sharing experiences and best practices for South-South cooperation methodologies and metrics, including commitments to improve its implementation, this space could be used to share experiences on trade for capacity building on South-South Cooperation.

In 2014, the Ibero-American countries reported that they had participated in 39 programs and 59 projects under Regional SSC. Slightly more than half of this initiatives were based towards socioeconomic issues (52.0%) were socio-economically oriented, with a particular focus on capacity building in the Social sector (27.6% of total) and on creating Infrastructure and economic services (24.5%).