Sawt Falasteen - Corona beer maker Modelo says to invest $3.6 bn in Mexico

"We stand with Mexico like good friends, in the good times and the bad," Raul Escalante, vice president of the brewer owned by Belgian-Brazilian giant AB InBev, said at President Claudia Sheinbaum's morning news conference.

He said the investment would be used to modernize the company's plants and stores.

Seeking to ease concerns about the Mexican economy in the face of US President Donald Trump's tariffs, Sheinbaum has invited several company executives to her news conferences to present their investment plans.

Last month, US retail giant Walmart said that it would invest more than $6 billion in Mexico this year, generating several thousand jobs.

E-commerce behemoth Amazon, its regional rival Mercado Libre, streaming giant Netflix and Spain's biggest bank Santander are among the other foreign firms that have announced major investments.

The government said that it had received nearly 2,000 investment pledges totaling almost $300 billion -- equivalent to around 16 percent of the country's annual economic output.

Trump this month left Mexico off the list of nations facing his "reciprocal tariffs," but its carmakers as well as steel and aluminum exporters still face duties.

The International Monetary Fund this week predicted that Mexico's economy, the second largest in Latin America, would shrink by 0.3 percent this year, pulled down by Trump's trade war.

Sheinbaum said the outlook was too pessimistic because her government's efforts to attract investment would offset the hit from US tariffs.

She said that Mexicans' strong work ethic would give the country an advantage over its competitors.

The image "of a Mexican sitting with his hat under a nopal cactus, as if we were lazy, is completely false," she said.

U.Shaheen--SF-PST