Twelve years have passed since the launch o the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). NAFTA raised expectations for accelerated economic growth in Mexico, but the general feeling in our country is that the anticipated sustainable development has not occurred at the rate we had hoped.

Manufacturing plants hiring cheap labor ("maquiladoras") in proximity to the world's largest economy raised the quality of life for Mexicans near the border in the mid-1990s but some of the gains were short lived. Other nations, with considerably cheaper labor costs, eroded Mexico's relative advantage in some low-cost manufacturing sectors and took away market share. It quickly became ...