MEXICO CITY - Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum reiterated on Monday that "Mexico is a free, sovereign and independent country" in response to US President-elect Donald Trump's suggestion that Mexico and Canada should be annexed to the United States due to the subsidies they had received.

"We all know that and we always defend it," Sheinbaum said during the usual morning press conference at the National Palace in Mexico City.

Trump said Sunday in an interview with NBC that Americans are "subsidizing Canada with more than $100,000 million dollars a year. We're subsidizing Mexico with almost 300,000 million dollars. We shouldn't. Why are we subsidizing these countries? If we're going to subsidize them, let them become states" of the United States.

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Sheinbaum dismissed these statements, noting that the "subsidies" Trump mentioned could be related to the increasing Mexican exports to the United States.

"The only way to compete with other regions of the world is to maintain and strengthen the trade agreement, the USMCA (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement), because we should not see each other as competition, but as complementarities," she said.