Mexico to Seek Solution to Trucking Fight
Gary Martin - Express News
WASHINGTON — Mexico will press the United States to resolve a trade dispute and allow its trucks to travel U.S. highways past the border region when Presidents Felipe Calderón and Barack Obama meet later this week, Mexican Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan said Monday.
The dispute erupted this year when Congress cancelled a pilot program to allow Mexican trucks to carry cargo deep into the United States. Mexico retaliated by slapping $2.4 billion in tariffs on U.S. goods and agricultural products.
“We think some members of Congress decided to continue to move the goal posts, and this is why Mexico, sadly, had no other option than to impose counter measures,” Sarukhan said in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News.
Obama will meet with Calderón in Mexico City to discuss trade, immigration, environmental policy and measures to curb violence associated with narcotics trafficking.
A provision of the North American Free Trade Agreement signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1995 allowed Mexican trucks access to U.S. highways. Congress authorized a pilot program but cancelled it this year.
Mexico blamed Democratic lawmakers for adopting protectionist policies on behalf of the Teamsters Union, which sought the ban on Mexican trucks past a 25-mile corridor along the border.
Sarukhan said Mexican officials are actively working with Congress and the administration to find ways “in which Mexican trucks can get back on U.S. roads in the same safe, regulated, controlled fashion that they've been doing under the demonstration project that is now extinct.”
The U.S. Transportation Department has told lawmakers it plans to restart the pilot program, although it can't say if an announcement will come during the president's visit to Mexico.
The escalating drug violence that the two presents will address accounted for 5,700 deaths in Mexico last year. Calderón has deployed 36,000 soldiers and federal police in his crackdown on narcotrafficking cartels, an effort that has been praised by Obama and key U.S. lawmakers.
Mexico is seeking U.S. support to screen inbound traffic to slow the smuggling of guns and cash into Mexico, used by the cartels to fight Mexican military, police — and each other.
“It's all about the ability to defang the drug syndicates of their firepower,” Sarukhan said.
Obama and Calderon will later travel to Trinidad and Tobago for the Summit of the Americas.
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