Mosbacher Stumps for Mexico Pact

Secretary of Commerce Robert A. Mosbacher and his Mexican counterpart, Jaime Serra Puche, ended a weeklong tour of the United States in Los Angeles on Friday, selling the upcoming free trade talks between their nations to businesses already eager to find new markets and reduce trade barriers.

The negotiations, which will begin next year and may include Canada as well, are aimed at eliminating the many remaining trade barriers between Mexico and the United States. The result, government officials hope, will be a North American trading block that will be better able to compete against Europe and Asia.

U.S. officials see Mexico--America’s third-largest trading partner--as a nearby source of lower-cost labor and a market of 82 million consumers. Mexico considers the U.S. a major source of investment and a lucrative market for its growing export industries.

The five-city U.S. tour “has been very successful,” Serra said in a press conference with Mosbacher during a daylong trade seminar in Los Angeles. “The reaction (from business) has been enthusiastic.”

Mosbacher, in response to previous criticism that a trade agreement would shift U.S jobs to Mexico, said a stronger Mexican economy would boost demand for U.S. products and create jobs here.

“When (U.S.) companies go . . . into Mexico, it creates jobs in the U.S.,” Mosbacher said. “That’s not true anywhere else in the world.”

Some business people at the seminar said they hoped that a trade agreement would address what they see as unfair advantages held by their Mexican counterparts.

“An American tuna vessel has an impossible task of fishing in Mexican waters,” said a Southern California fishing industry executive who asked to go unnamed. “It’s the age-old question of having an even playing field. And we don’t have that right now.”

Many at the seminar said an accord would help stabilize the often tumultuous relations between the nations that have stunted U.S. investment in Mexico. The agreement would also ease fears that future Mexican governments might abandon the current administration’s efforts to open Mexico to foreign investment and trade.

“One of the overriding fears is, ‘What about tomorrow?’ ” said Crawford F. Brubaker, a Glendale-based import-export consultant, expressing his clients’ concerns. “A free-trade agreement would set things in concrete. It would make them hard to change.”

While Mexico has reduced trade barriers and tariffs, many restrictions and differences remain. For example, AST Research, an Irvine-based computer maker that entered the Mexican market this year, finds itself in court trying to win back the right to use its trademark after a Mexican competitor copyrighted it.

“We are fighting a legal battle to get our name back,” said AST President Safi Qureshey. “These are things that could easily discourage companies” from doing business in Mexico.

Business people working on the Mexican side of the border also see benefits to the trade agreement.

Javier Sustaeta, who owns a real estate development firm in Tijuana and an import-export firm in San Diego, said his plans to build a dinnerware plant in Mexico will prove even more lucrative should the U.S. eliminate a 7% value-added tax on certain imports. Additionally, larger flows of investment into Mexico might help his real estate business.