LatinNews Daily - 30 April 2026

*Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum has announced a new agreement to promote the country’s steel industry as part of her flagship ‘Plan México’, which is designed to strengthen national industry. In her daily press conference, Sheinbaum said the agreement involves 19 government institutions and three business chambers – the national iron and steel chamber (Canacero), the national chamber of housing developers (Canadevi), and the national chamber of the construction industry (CMIC). Sheinbaum said that as part of the agreement “the commitment we are making here is that the government’s purchases will be steel produced in Mexico”. Also speaking at the daily press conference, the minister for anticorruption and good governance, Raquel Buenrostro, highlighted the plan’s three pillars. These are: 1) public procurement (coordinating working groups between institutions, business meetings between public buyers and steel firms, and incentives to promote the use of domestically produced steel); 2) industrial policy, which seeks to defend against unfair trade practices, promote domestic suppliers, and apply an import substitution strategy; and 3) financing which includes incentives for infrastructure projects to use Mexican steel. Canacero’s president, Sergio de la Maza Jiménez, hailed the agreement as “a decisive step to support 90,000 direct and indirect jobs”. The announcement comes as Mexico faces 50% tariffs on steel and aluminium imposed last year by the US administration led by President Donald Trump, and ahead of the review of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) this year. However, during a visit to Mexico last week, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told Mexico’s auto and steel industries that they should not expect the USMCA review to remove these tariffs on their sectors, according to a 21 April report by Reuters, citing four industry sources familiar with the discussions.

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