“Dialogues with Europe”

“I think that the EU with the Lisbon agenda has put the right emphasis on growth and employment.” (Angela Merkel)


With 27 member countries and a population of nearly half a billion, the European Union covers a large part of Europe. Since its creation, it has worked to bring prosperity and stability to its citizens. Its policies and actions affect us all directly and indirectly.

The main theme of the interesting conference given by Ambassador Mendel Chief Goldstein, leader of the delegation from the European Commission that work in México is the current and future relationship between Latin America, especially in México and Europe. The European Union is making a great effort to improve México and Latin America. The issues that were mentioned were the financial crisis, immigrants, political issues, trade and cooperation. In the other hand, Mendel C. said that most people think that their meetings are only to take the picture and that members don’t take it seriously, but actually they talked about very important issues that México is struggling like for example climate changes, reforms, fight criminal delinquency and money laundering.

He also said the reasons why the European Union IS interested in Latin America and particular in México and the reasons are because of their geographical position (between USA and Central America), territory, and change of politics because the past president Salinas looked ways to improve the economy.


We feel that the European integration with Mexico give a lot of advantages to our country in various ways, first of all, the social aspect for example: the EU help Chiapas’s government and support and capacitates the people working class like farmers. Then in the economic aspect, they support the market, helping little and medium companies to get closer to the European market. In Education and culture they want to increase scholarships, so Mexican students can go of interchange to Europe.
What do we discovered? This video makes us realized that México was the first country to establish a global agreement: free trade, politic dialogue and cooperation programs. Also, we learned that México have 9 years having a relation with the EU (since 2000) and that NAFTA don’t have political dialogue. And last but not least, we learned that México have 44 treaties with other countries. We feel proud of it! :)

We noticed that the Ambassador made little mistakes in Spanish with the pronunciation and he conjugated few words wrong, but overall he talks very good Spanish for being a German. Honestly, we were able to understand everything he said.
We wonder if the United States has this treaty with the European Union. We’d like to know more information about the Andina community and why the EU thinks that they would get to an agreement until 2010.
Questions were asked by the audience. Some of them were:
1) Do you think that having an impact in the short, medium or long term, development of missiles in Poland response to Russia-Georgia conflict if the main goal of EU is maintaining peace and stability?
2) What impact would if have in PESK?
3) What it would be the main feature if it would reach a comprehensive global agreement to be reached and what benefits would it had?
4) Which is the EU policy on immigration and more with the problems of creating needed jobs for Europeans?

To conclude, the goal of the EU is to form a region of freedom, security and justice. Freedom in this connection cannot be just the freedom of the strong, but it must be combined with fraternity and equality.