Holding the Line: The NAFTA Trucker

[OhioChick]

There is a plan no one talks about very much, one that floats over the horizon like an approaching storm at sea. In this business dream, the Pacific ports of the United States will be shifted south to new massive anchorages in Mexico even though this increases the shipping distance by 30 percent for all the Asian tonnage. These new ports will be linked by major train and truck arteries -- NAFTA Corridors -- to the cities of the United States and Canada. Mexican trucking companies will be bought (and are being bought up now) by American firms and Mexican truckers will deliver the freight and freely drive all U.S. highways. In this plan, the shipping of the United States leaves union ports and the long haul trucking leaves union drivers.

An enlarged I-35 will reach north from the sister cities of Laredo/Nuevo Laredo 1,600 miles to Canada via San Antonio, Austin, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Kansas City, the Twin Cities and Duluth and I-69 will originate at the same crossing and streak north to Michigan. Each corridor will be about 1,200 feet wide. Six lanes will be dedicated to cars, four to trucks and in the middle will be rail and utilities. The goods will come from new Mexican ports on the Pacific coast. At the moment, at least five such corridors are on the drawing boards.

This is the story of some of the drivers who will be used by this plan. They know nothing of this scheme. They are too busy simply surviving to study such matters.

Professional Secrets

The five men sit at the truck stop table about 20 kilometers below the Rio Grande at Laredo-Nuevo Laredo on the Texas border. They, or their sons or grandsons, may someday be shock troops on the NAFTA Corridors. Just a few hundred yards from where the men eat and smoke, the major highway coming from the Mexican south forks. One road leads into Nuevo Laredo, the other arcs west and connects just west of the city with a trucking center on the U.S. side by means of the World Trade Bridge. This new bridge and dedicated truck highway is an early link in this NAFTA Corridor. At the moment, 5,800 trucks enter and leave this border crossing each day, a trickle compared to the traffic that will pour north once the new ports, rails and roads come on line by 2025.

Their small lunch is finished, an empty liter of beer stands before one driver, and at the moment, they smoke and laugh and talk. For a Mexican trucker, life is an endless highway and the moments for conversation and fellowship can be few and far between.

They don't want their names used because they don't want trouble and life on the roads of Mexico is trouble enough.

"The longest distance I drive," said a driver about 30 in a black T-shirt, "is from Ensenada to Cancun, 4,500 kilometers. Five days and six nights alone. Tomatoes. The company won't pay for a second driver."

Ah, but how can a man stay awake and drive for five straight days?

More:http://www.teamster.org/resources/members/TeamsterMagazine/06August/nafta.htm

[redqueen]

1. Maybe we should elect someone with the courage to stand up to the corporations

who are pushing this through.

[fasttense]

3. Something that Mexican drivers are not use to

dealing with - winter. I wonder how a coked up truck driver who has never driven in deep snow will fair? I wonder how the people in cars around him will fair?

[Bitwit1234]

2. Well bush and the republican dream of far right wing judges

has also come thru. The judge ruled in the Mexican truckers favor.

[BonnieJW]

4. We can only hope

that the judge and all right wingers who favor this slave making way of life will have the opportunity to experience first hand what it's like to have a driver who has not slept in five days and is high on coke and meth drive on a highway near each of them.