Weekly Report - 15 January 2009 (ISSN 1741-7422)

Mexico's President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa entertained the US president-elect, Barack Obama, at lunch at the Instituto Cultural de México in Washington DC on 12 January. To the horror of the Mexicans, the Obama team claimed that the key issue in the meeting was Obama's proposal to Calderón to “upgrade" the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). US Mexican watchers argue that Nafta, unchanged since it came into force in 1994, could do with an update, and claim that Obama's appointee as US Trade Representative, Ron Kirk, a former mayor of Dallas, and thus familiar with Nafta and Mexico, may be the man to achieve this.