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(English | Espaņol) By Charles Bowden 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? The table erupts in laughter. The man facing the empty liter of beer smiles and says, "Professional secret." The younger man in the black T-shirt offers one phrase, "Magic dust." There are more smiles and mention of "special chemicals."
And then they are off, a torrent of words and quips and smiles, and a knowing discussion of that jolt when a line of cocaine locks in. They are all family men who run the highways at least 25 days a month and they are adamant about two things -- that nobody can run these long hauls without cocaine and crystal meth, and now and then some marijuana to level out the rush. And that the biggest danger on their endless runs comes from addicted Mexican truck drivers, which means all truck drivers. Dangerous Drivers The men earn about $1,100 a month. In Mexico, the cost of living is roughly 80 or 90 percent that of the U.S. The only real bargain in Mexico is labor. Many other items cost more than the U.S. -- the telephone rates are among the highest in the world and a sack of cement or a board foot of lumber costs more than in any American town. None of the drivers at the table has driven in the U.S. save for short crossings where they dump the load and instantly return on special routes like the World Trade Bridge. The man with the empty beer explains "We make almost nothing -- less than $300 a week. I work 48 hours non-stop. I drive 2,400 kilometers per trip and get no time for turnarounds." And every man at the table agrees on their biggest problem -- the government. And by that they mean the police, especially federal, who rob them at will. "If you drive to Mexico City," another driver adds, "you are robbed, for sure. Police are the first to rob you. If you report a robbery, the police try to make you the guilty person."
And now the table is rolling, about the bad equipment they are given, about the fact that the owners often stall them on payment, about how there is no escape from the job, that they all know drivers who are still out there on long hauls at 70, how they have all been robbed and hijacked, have all killed people with their trucks and, given the nature of Mexican police, have all fled such accident sites, that they are all doomed to spend their lives on an asphalt treadmill. And so they take pride, enormous pride, in the fact that they can survive the life that has been dealt them. "Dust in the Air" The basic Mexican trucker is living the life that American truckers once tasted before the Teamsters fashioned over-the-road contracts. There are warm moments in this life. Women. The men talk with smiles of cachimbas, which means fireplaces. In earlier days on the road, there would be wooden shacks with fires going, roadside brothels. Mexico now has four-lane roads for many truck routes and stouter buildings, but the term cachimba has stuck for truck stops where women and drugs are freely available. One man says, "Don't print that. If you do, all those American truckers will want to drive down here." A woman costs about $20 and drugs are like dust in the air. A Mexican trucker can get anything at a cachimba but decent food. They all agree that the most beautiful women are on the West Coast route that snakes through the narco state of Sinaloa. For a moment, the men are all smiles and then this moment passes. "The worst thing," one says with some bitterness, "is not being home. We all have two or three Sanchos," meaning strangers who sleep with their wives when they are gone. No Sleep at All Francisco Samuel Angiana is around 40 years old and he is out of sorts as he lingers at a truck stop in Santa Ana, Sonora, about 60 miles south of the Nogales, Arizona crossing. This is yet another NAFTA corridor, a sketch on some future map that will eventually be the route for torrents of Mexican truckers moving freight from the planned Mexican ports. He was robbed the night before at a truckstop in Caborca, a narco town on the Mexican federal highway that links Baja, California with the Mexican mainland. He points to the hole in his dashboard where his CB radio and regular radio once rested. He is on his basic run from Tijuana to Mexico City. Normally, he is allowed 72 hours for this route, but sometimes he does the express run of 48 hours and then he gets no sleep at all. "I have 20 years experience," he adds, "Here you make the rules and take a lot of amphetamines." But he tries to live cleanly and so he personally uses massive vitamin doses and various power drinks of caffeine and herbs to keep him rolling. A crucified Christ hangs in one corner of his cab and when he drives he stares at portraits of his wife and three children to keep him moving. On the seat beside him is a laptop computer -- he is constantly monitored by GPS and he is never told what his cargo is for security reasons. He drives at least a 130,000 miles a year, is almost never home and earns maybe $1,100 a month. And he is very intelligent and once planned to be a lawyer before the reality of the Mexican economy put him behind the wheel of a semi. Pawns in a Game He has been robbed before and tries to be ready for such moments. He hauls out a small baseball bat, and his knife. He demonstrates how he can do a karate kick to the head while seated behind his steering wheel. He is a small man in jeans, blue shirt and cowboy boots and he repeatedly shows me this practiced kick to within an inch of my head. Then he brings out his infrared binoculars. At night they prove useful, he explains. He can see lights ahead, stare out through them, and if he sees a federal police roadblock, then he pulls over and tries to find a way around the cops lest they also rob him. He also carries two sets of identification because you never really know who you are dealing with out there on the road. He's been hijacked twice. He points to the photographs of his family and says, "They give me the energy to keep going. If you are alone, no one helps you. It is you and your truck." He adds softly, "The hardest part of my job is staying alive." He has never heard of the Teamsters Union. But he has a brother in the United States who drives a truck for Wells Fargo. "He is constantly telling me to come to the U.S.," Francisco says, "That you only have to work certain hours there." But he stays in Mexico. Francisco is a proud man all but killing himself on Mexican roads. Now he faces a 1,000-mile leg to Mexico City without the security of his CB. He will drive a gauntlet of Mexican cops and bandits. He'll make his haul, have a few brief moments with his family, and then return to the road. He keeps a gallon of water and a liter of apple juice on the floor where he can reach them. He will never stop rolling until he dies. It is very hard to see him and the other truckers as the enemy. They are pawns in a game that has never been explained to them. As the truckers in Nuevo Laredo explain their lives to me, lives typical of Mexican truckers like Francisco, a demonstration of 3,000 drivers takes place at the World Trade Bridge. The truckers protest the 90-minute wait they face to cross the bridge, a delay that cuts into their earnings since they are not paid by the hour. No one at the table mentions this since no one at the table believes anything will ever get better. La Santisima
I stand in front of the yard of Trans Mex Swift, an American-owned Mexican trucking company. The traffic of the World Trade Bridge roars past. In less than an hour, four truck tires explode. Mexican truckers are not coddled with good rigs or good tires. One semi pulls over. Both tires on the left rear back axle are gone and the trucker stares at rims resting on the pavement. One tire, he explains, went about 150 miles ago, but he had no money with which to buy another one. Now both are gone. Politicians, unions and lobbyists will sort out what to do about Mexican truckers coming north. But here on the actual ground, the truckers have sought their own relief. All over the country, a strange figure has appeared in the last five years or so, La Santisima Muerte, Most Holy Death. She is skeletal, wears a long robe, carries a scythe and holds the whole world in her hand. She is recognized by no church or government. But she is known to all who move down these roads. At the cloverleaf where the truck traffic spins off the I-35 corridor to the World Trade Bridge, a small tin structure the size of a doll house appeared five years ago. Now three large chapels have come out of the ground and in front of them are two statues of the La Santisima seven or eight feet tall. Semis constantly pull over, engines idling, and the truckers walk to the statues and pray. They leave candy bars, fruits, small coins and burning cigarettes. They ask La Santisima to spare their lives, to protect them on the dangerous roads, to bring them home to their women and children. They speak softly with that careful voice of reverence normally heard only in churches. If the free-trade bureaucrats have their way, Mexican truckers will come north and they will be overworked and underpaid and pushed almost beyond human endurance. Right now, La Santisima is the only one watching out for them. That will have to change or nothing will change at all.
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