Union-Tribune (San Diego) | By Bob Morales | June 21, 2001
The Mexican writer, Carlos Fuentes, tells a story of his travels in central Mexico when he was looking for the birthplace of Emiliano Zapata. It was high noon, and he stopped and asked a campesino, "How far is it to that village?" The man answered, "If you had left at daybreak, you would be there now." That answer, notes Fuentes, was given by a specific man from a unique culture, reading his own internal clock.
Soon the United States, operating under a clock of its choosing, under the obligations of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), will open its border to unsafe Mexican trucks. But the border will not be opened for the benefit of a poor Mexican driver desperate to reach for a better life. It will be opened for monetary gain to a trucking industry reaching for better and higher profits through unrestricted motor carrier access to the United States.
The impoverished Mexican may drive the truck, but he will never see the profit. That will belong to the industry, which will pay him a meager wage, and use him to hide behind the official NAFTA policy that exploits the poor in Mexico, while endangering both Mexican and U.S. citizens with unsafe and largely unregulated trucks.
My union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, has been leading the effort to alert the public to the consequences of this ill-considered decision. Why ill considered? Because a recent audit by the Department of Transportation's inspector general found that fewer than 1 percent of the 4.5 million Mexican trucks that enter the United States every year are inspected. Yet, one in three trucks that are inspected is removed from service for dangerous safety failures.
Moreover, Mexico still has not harmonized its safety standards with the United States, as NAFTA requires. For example, Mexico has no laws to regulate the number of hours an already fatigued driver can drive behind the wheel of a big rig, and it has only recently proposed in its Diario Official logbook requirements to record those hours of service. Thus, Mexican drivers and citizens are faced with a dangerous drive-through policy, which relegates questions of safety to a secondary consideration.
Make no mistake about it. This is no fault of Mexican drivers. Their legitimate desires to feed their families are used by modern day Mexican and U.S. caciques (chiefs) to justify a policy that fails to require even a minimum rest time per day, or per week.
Thus, Mexican drivers are offered at best four things: first, the spur of poverty; second, the incentive of a wage slightly higher than the meager wages that consign most of their countrymen to a kind of economic involuntary servitude; third, unsafe vehicles, and no rest; fourth, a requirement that they drive across the border, into and across the United States, and deliver their cargo on time and in good condition. And this is what Latinos, on both sides of the border, are supposed to think is a good deal?
The fact is that for Latinos on both sides of the border -- the drivers coming across from Mexico and the Mexican-American families already trying to make a better life in the United States -- it is a potentially dangerous deal.
But the clock continues ticking. Without a much-needed re-evaluation of this misguided policy there will inevitably be a tragic crash, a loss of life, and a devastated family, on one or both sides of the border. The clock cannot be turned back, but the policy must be turned around before it's too late.
Morales, a member of Teamsters Local 350, is president of the Teamsters Hispanic Caucus.
Copyright 2001 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.Union-Tribune (San Diego):
