From Mexico to the US, a NAFTA tale of two truckers

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico — Raúl García Miranda wants Carlos Flores’ job. Flores doesn’t think he deserves it.

The two men haul goods that travel from Mexico into the United States. Both come from a Mexican border town infested with drug cartels. But Flores got out.

He became a U.S. citizen, giving him the right to drive through the American heartland and earn good money delivering washing machines and broccoli sent from Mexico. Miranda, a Mexican national, doesn’t have that option. He can make only short trips, back and forth across the border, from a lot on the southern side to truck lots 24 miles to the north.

Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed in 1993, the United States agreed to eventually let drivers like Miranda deposit their cargoes anywhere. Then the union representing truckers revolted, staging protests at the border and pressuring the White House to abandon the idea.

So ensued a decades-long cage match, waged by American truckers, clinging to a stronghold of blue-collar work, and their Mexican counterparts, desperate to claim territory they had been promised. In 2015, the Obama administration finally allowed Mexican drivers to seek permission to travel beyond pockets of land along the border.

Only a handful do so. But the fight has entered a new round, with a U.S. president who has shown a special fondness for truckers and their big rigs. The Trump administration has thrown its America First agenda behind the cause in the NAFTA negotiations, demanding that Mexico agree to a provision that could, in the future, block its drivers from making deliveries into the middle of the United States.

Mexico has rejected that suggestion outright, challenging the fairness of shielding a slice of laborers from low-paid foreign competitors, in a trade deal meant to allow most everything to flow freely across borders.

The dispute offers a window into the stakes involved in rewriting, or blowing up, an agreement that has become highly contentious but also extremely lucrative for all sides. It also hints at the impact that market forces — more than rules agreed to on paper — may have on the ways

GEORGE ETHEREDGE / THE NEW YORK TIMES Raul Miranda, left, prepares to leave Fema, one of Mexico’s largest trucking companies, on Nov. 6 after his trailer was inspected by a dog handler before a trip to the U.S. from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. Restricted from operating in the United States, most...