“…Strongly competitive systems of difference equations or maps are those for which the functions f and g are coordinate-wise stricly monotone. Competitive and cooperative systems of difference equations of the form (3) have been studied by many authors [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,12,13,14,15,17,18,22,23,24,25,28,29,30,31] and others. A classical result of Poincaré, Hadamard, and Sternberg (see Lemma 5.1 in page 234 of [16] and the Notes section in page 271 therein) gives conditions for the existence of a local smooth curve through the fixed point of a smooth map on the plane when the characteristic values are real and distinct and such that one of them is smaller than 1.…”