'Year of Germany in Mexico' underway
June 6, 2016
Under the theme "Alliance for the Future," the two countries have organized 120 projects and more than 1,000 individual events in 13 Mexican cities in order to strengthen ties between Mexico and Germany.
A concert by the German and Mexican youth philharmonic orchestras in Mexico City is being held during Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier's visit to Mexico to mark the "Year of Germany in Mexico." The initiative aims to strengthen cultural, educational, scientific, economic, tourism and scientific relations.
Other events underway include "The Beautiful Language of the Maya" at the Gropius Bau museum in Berlin and an exhibition of the expressionist painter Otto Dix at the National Museum of Art in Mexico City.
A goal of the "Dual Year" is to give greater visibility to Mexican-German relations.
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto had visited Berlin in April to mark the start of the yearlong series of events in Germany.
On Sunday, Steinmeier went to the the pre-Aztec city of Teotihuacan, 48 kilometers (30 miles) northeast of modern-day Mexico City. In the first half of the 1st millennium AD, Teotihuacan was the largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas.
Mexican archaeologists recently discovered a tunnel with huge monolithic green stones under the "Temple of the Moon," the largest structure in Teotihuacan.
German and Mexican cooperation
Germany and Mexico cooperate across a range of issues at the bilateral and international level. Germany is Mexico's fifth-largest trading partner, and Mexico is a major center of investment and production of German automobiles.
As part of the yearlong events being organized, Mexican professor of math and computer science at the Free University of Berlin, Raul Rojas, is to provide 10 Mexican universities with scale models of self-driving cars developed by his team. The two sides will then work to further develop this cutting-edge technology. Projects like this will help to further cooperation between Mexico and Germany in the automotive industry.