Shameful disregard for the law

One of the Clinton admin’s most shameful acts in transport policy has been its unwillingness to implement the provisions of the NAFTA treaty allowing Mexican trucks onto US roads. Large contributions to party funds by the Teamsters Union have, in essence, bribed the Clinton admin into imposing an illegal and trade-suppressing embargo for over five years. An independent panel of experts from both sides of the border recently ruled unanimously that the US had no legal grounds for the embargo and stands in violation of its treaty obligations.

Mexican trucks presently operate under pre-NAFTA rules allowing them to operate only 32km (20mi) into the US to ferry trailers into special commercial zones or transfer yards, from where US trucks pick up their loads. According to the NAFTA treaty signed in 1993, each country’s trucks were supposed to be granted full operational rights in the other’s territory by late 1995. Grovelling to the Teamsters Union the Clinton administration’s defiance of treaty provisions, freely entered into, and endorsed and given legal force by the Congress, has been accompanied by vague talk of Mexican trucks being “unsafe.” Fact is any truck, whatever its national registration, may be unsafe and Mexican trucks have to stop at all US inspection stations and be checked like any US (or Canad) truck, and are just as liable to be removed from the road for defects.

Hopefully Dubbya will move quickly to honor US legal commitments and welcome Mexican truck competition in the US. Both countries will benefit.