More than a hundred years after its enactment the Mexican Commercial Code, which is a federal statute governing commercial matters in the 31 states and the Federal District, was finally amended on 1993 to modernize and update its commercial litigation and arbitration chapters.

New Title Four of Book V of the Code closely follows the guidelines of UNCITRAL (United Nations Commission of International Trade Law) Model Law. Mexico had previously ratified the U.N. (1958) New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards and the OAS (1975) Panama Inter-American Convention on International Commercial Arbitration. However, before the new arbitration law came into effect an apparent dichotomy prevailed as commercial arbitration was governed by two different sets of rules (international and domestic).

Cases with an international component were regulated by Mexican international law while domestic cases were still conducted by the local codes of civil procedure. Although the Model Law is geared to international arbitration, in order to avoid two legal regimes concerning arbitration coexisting within Mexico, Congress made the necessary changes to provide that the new statute should apply to both domestic and international disputes, when in the latter case the arbitral proceedings were conducted in national territory.

Summing up, the new (1993) statute governing commercial arbitration is a state-of-the-art piece of legislation, which should further the international settlement of disputes.