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3 “Mexico agrees with our stance. We passed this on to the Government, which has nodded positively to a change”. Anfavea asks for more: while both governments discuss the rule of origin, the quota system would again be put in place – with values higher than the ones practiced last year: “Last year’s quotas were not reached. We could even increase the value and it would not cause changes in the trade volume in the short term”. Then again, the association is concerned with the medium and long term: with trade made free, the higher Mexican competitiveness could direct investment decisions towards the North American country rather than to Brazil. At any rate, the Brazilian government officials have at no point in time seemed inclined to follow this path. Results – The difficulties in the Argentinian market are affecting exports from Brazil. In the first quarter, the reduction in sales volumes as compared to last year’s first quarter was 42%, with 104.5 thousand units shipped. According to Megale, Argentina (which once meant 75% of our exports), closed this quarter at 60%: “The good news is that we doubled our volume to Colombia, who recently signed a trade deal with us, and that represented 10% of our exports in the period”. In March, we exported 39 thousand vehicles, a volume that is 42.2% lower than the same month of 2018, and 3.7% lower than February’s. In net sales, the fall in billings was as much as 43.6% in the year-to-year comparison and 2.9% in the monthly comparison, to US$ 850.8 million. For the quarter, manufacturers of cars and agricultural machinery billed US$ 2.4 billion in sales abroad, a reduction of 38.9% as compared to the first three months of last year.