The Secretary of Economy, Ildefonso Guajardo Villarreal, and the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, José Antonio Meade Kuribreña (in his capacity as president pro tempore of the Pacific Alliance), led a meeting of the Council of Ministers of this mechanism of integration, held on the sidelines of the period of sessions 69 of the General Assembly of the United Nations, in New York.
In this workshop, which was attended by foreign ministers and finance ministers of Chile, Colombia and Peru, were realized the preparations for the meeting of the Pacific Alliance with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which will be held next Friday in New York.
This meeting will represent the first contact between the two mechanisms and will seek to establish a productive dialogue on issues of common interest, such as trade and cooperation.
Notably, the approach to the Asia-Pacific is one of the central objectives of the mechanism, which is embodied in the Declaration of Lima 2011. The meeting seeks to establish a dialogue between both mechanisms.
The countries of the Pacific Alliance make a plural, inclusive and pragmatic mechanism, in which converge the most open economies in the region. Its foreign trade accounts for 60 percent of its GDP. Together, they represent the eighth largest economy in the world and 50 percent of the trade in the region.
The meeting was also attended by the Undersecretaries for Latin American and Caribbean of the chancellery, Vanessa Marquez Rubio, and the Under Secretary of Foreign Trade, Francisco de Rosenzweig.