Can this be the age of globalization on one of the world’s most important economic frontiers? Since the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994, Mexico has become the United States’ second biggest trading partner (after Canada). Ninety percent of the goods flowing between the two countries travel on trucks, and on Jan. 1, NAFTA was to allow truckers to make deliveries anywhere on the continent. But the Clinton administration has blocked the provision, arguing that Mexican trucks are unsafe. The resulting controversy–wrapped in politics and tangled in business and labor interests large and small–is a study in the complexities of free trade.
In the United States, the Teamsters Union has yet to hand out its presidential endorsement, and the Clinton administration’s move is widely seen as a way to shore it up for Al Gore. The union frets that an opening would cost U.S. truckers their jobs. But as the pro-NAFTA U.S. trucking lobby is quick to point out, there’s actually a shortage of truck drivers in the States. In Mexico, meanwhile, the dominant trucking companies enjoy fat profits in a protected market. They prefer the border shut, lest they face stiffer competition from mavericks like Marquez’s employer, Transportes Easo, which is 50 percent-owned by a U.S. hauler. That same competition, of course, would boost the Mexican economy as a whole. So the Mexican government demands that America live up to its NAFTA commitment.
Marquez is sort of a free-trader, too, but that seems as much a matter of wanderlust as economics. Now 38, he started driving trucks at 18 after dropping out of an accounting course. “I didn’t want to be a grandfather someday without seeing the world,” he explains. He lives with his extended family in Mexico City. But more often his home is a 1997 Freightliner cab, a chamber of padded blue vinyl that has traveled more than 400,000 kilometers. Scattered over the bed behind him are cassettes and pornographic comic books. Two decals of Jesus are stuck to the front windshield. His CB-radio handle is Cumbiadero, for the tropical Latin music he loves to dance to. At 60 centavos a kilometer, he earns $76 for the 27-hour journey to the border, an eighth of what a U.S. trucker would make. “If I could, I’d crisscross the continent,” Marquez says. “Alaska, Canada, anywhere they send me.”
The Clinton administration cites a 1998 Department of Transportation study to back up its claim that Mexican trucks are unsafe. Of 17,332 Mexican trucks inspected at the border, 44 percent failed to meet U.S. safety requirements; U.S. trucks have a 25 percent failure rate. Violations included badly worn tires, defective brakes and burned-out lights. But as the DOT admits, the Mexican vehicles that were inspected were the short-haul or drayage trucks, those used to make the transfers across the border. Drayage companies are where long-haulers (which would be making the trip if the border were open) go to die. The only other measure of Mexican trucks comes from another DOT study, which showed that several Mexican companies were illegally sending their trucks deep into the United States. In inspections, those trucks did better than the 25 percent failure rate of U.S. trucks.
What about the Mexican drivers, who aren’t as tightly regulated as U.S. truckers? They would, of course, be subject to U.S. laws in the United States. Mexico itself requires that all drivers pass medical and psychological tests to get a license, and legislation is being pushed along to set shift limits and require drivers to keep log books of their journeys. Still, drivers say a hefty bribe can get you a license or past the pandas, as the black-and-white federal police cars are called on the CB. Even learning to drive can be a hair-raising experience. There are trucking schools, but more commonly, truckers teach their friends on the open road. Marquez tells the story of a prostitute who persuaded a customer to teach her to drive, and then, with more customers and more practice, changed professions and became a trucker herself.
Marquez pulls into the El Pariente truck stop outside of Monterrey. The parking lot is filled with trailers, many bound for the United States. The inside of the restaurant resembles a barn, with rows of truckers hunched over $3.50 plates of fiery red sausages and strips of beef that land on the table before you sit down. It’s 10:30 in the morning. Two friends join Marquez at the table. Ezequiel (Little Goose) Lopez, a 39-year-old trucker who says he once drove 18 hours straight, declares: “It would be more difficult for an American to drive in Mexico than for us to go there.” The roads in Mexico are narrower and there are more potholes and sharp curves. In the lore of Mexican truckers, the U.S. highways, like the women, are smooth and perfect. Javier (Blind Mule) Fajardo, 34, has been studying a Spanish-English dictionary in preparation for the day he will be allowed across the border.
But lobbyist Miguel Martinez is hoping Fajardo never makes it. “Clinton is our ally,” says Martinez, a top official at CANACAR, Mexico’s biggest and most powerful organization of trucking companies. For one thing, CANACAR members fear that drivers allowed into the United States would abandon their trucks and flee in hopes of earning more money working as illegal immigrants. Beyond that, Martinez’s job is simply to defend a profitable status quo. Many Mexican haulers have agreements with U.S. companies to coordinate border handoffs and share trailers, which are allowed to cross the border. But any further integration would require investments of millions of dollars to modernize their fleets.
It isn’t that the U.S. truckers would convoy across the Rio Grande. A lack of decent motels (most Mexican drivers sleep in their rigs) and the language barrier would discourage that. So would the operating requirements: Mexican trucks are equipped with tougher suspensions and lower gears than U.S. rigs, and can run on a poorer grade of diesel fuel. “No company in its right mind is going to go into Mexico with its equipment and its drivers,” says Jim Giermanski, a professor at Texas A&M International University in Laredo. “They will enter into partnerships with Mexican companies.”
Transportes Easo’s deal with MSI Carriers of Tennessee is a case in point. Mexicans will do most of the cross-border work, making deliveries into the United States and then picking up cargo bound for Mexico. The two companies hooked up in 1994, soon after NAFTA was signed; ever since, Easo has been preparing for the border opening. It long ago quit CANACAR, and its 750-truck fleet is computerized and tracked by satellite. The company has also implemented random drug testing, catching 10 drivers last year. “We want into the United States,” says general director Alberto Anchustegui, whose father started the company 28 years ago. His company is among nearly 150 that have applied for access to the United States. Many are private fleets owned by manufacturers seeking to reduce the cost of shipping their goods.
To help them, the Mexican government is now suing the United States under NAFTA’s dispute-resolution process. But a U.S. countersuit is likely to stall any decision until after the November presidential election. Truckers like Marquez are patient, though. Sometimes he reclines his seat, stretches his arms to the wheel and lets the cigarette ashes fall onto the floor in front of him. Channel 5 on the CB crackles with trucker talk. The heroes are men like “The Drunk” and “The Papaya”–famous for their sharp and salty patter. Sometimes talk turns to the most famous Mexican trucker of all, the fictitious Lola. A character in a series of movies, she plies the highways looking for the drug traffickers who killed her father. And as her theme song goes, she is fighting for justice on the border. Maybe she could even sort out this international traffic jam.
