Mexican plant workers blame Trump for dashed dreams
VILLA DE REYES, Mexico: Word spread quickly through cellphone messages and shouts between co-workers that Ford Motor Co. had canceled its new $1.6 billion car plant at its sprawling 700-acre high desert site in north-central Mexico.
“When I saw it on the phone, (I thought), ‘Well, no, it can’t be,’” said Higinio Salazar, a security guard who spent the past five months logging traffic into and out of the site and hoped to have steady work for months to come. “It was on orders of Mr Trump,” he said bitterly.
That was not the case, Ford insists, but the perception here in Mexico’s burgeoning auto assembly region was largely that Presidentelect Donald Trump, who had promised for months to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US while at the same time disparaging Mexicans, had made good before even settling into the White House. Trump took a shot at Toyota on Thursday over its move to make Corollas in this region, though the Japanese company defended its plan.
Ford’s announcement sent shockwaves across Mexico, which has become tightly meshed with the US economy since the advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement, sending 80 percent of its $532 billion in exports across the border in 2015. The US government says $100 billion of that was in vehicles and parts, making Mexico the biggest exporter of automotive products to the United States. Mexico’s auto plants now account for 20 percent of all light vehicles built in North America, industry figures say.
State officials in San Luis Potosi did not find out much earlier than Salazar that plans had been scrapped for the long-awaited plant, which promised 2,800 direct jobs and more than 10,000 indirect ones through Ford’s supply chain. State Economic Development Secretary Gustavo Puente Orozco said Ford told state officials about an hour before CEO Mark Fields made the announcement Tuesday.
Puente said Ford made very clear it was a “definitive cancellation,” citing supply and demand rather than politics. “They told us that it was a market issue - the issue that the Ford Focus that was the vehicle they thought to build, this light vehicle they planned to build in San Luis Potosi, they say the demand had dropped,” Puente said.
Low gas prices have Americans turning again to larger vehicles and Focus sales have fallen victim to that trend. Fields said Ford will produce the Focus at an existing plant in Hermosillo, Mexico, and use some of the savings to invest $700 million in an existing Michigan plant to make hybrid, electric and autonomous vehicles.
The San Luis Potosi plant was well past the theoretical stage and there were high hopes the state would see further economic growth from the opening of its third auto plant - General Motors Corp. has been producing the small Aveo and Trax vehicles up the road since 2008 and a BMW plant nearby is scheduled to begin production in early 2019.
The steel bones of Ford’s plant had begun to rise and signs designated the future spots for each part of the operation, from “stamping” to “final warehouse.”
On Wednesday, Fernando Rosales Ortuno, who deals in hydraulic hoses for Parker Hannifin Corp. was pacing the site’s perimeter with cellphone pressed to his ear trying to arrange for a trailer to get hauled away. It’s essentially a portable store that had been set up to service the big machines preparing the site.
He had hoped that once Ford was up and running, the plant might become a long-term client. — AP