WASHINGTON — House lawmakers are stepping up the pressure on the Obama administration to eliminate a controversial cross-border trucking program with Mexico and resolve a long-simmering dispute.
A bipartisan group of 78 lawmakers wrote letters to U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood last week urging the administration to renegotiate and eliminate from the North American Free Trade Agreement a section that opens up U.S. highways to Mexican trucks.
“We believe the U.S. should renegotiate…the U.S. commitment to liberalize cross-border trucking and thus eliminate the requirement to open our borders to Mexican trucks,” the lawmakers said. “This would remedy all the truck safety, homeland security and unemployment issues associated with this long-standing trade dispute. A successful renegotiation would also eliminate retaliatory tariffs, which are negatively impacting our export markets.”
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USTR declined to comment and the Department of Transportation did not respond to requests for comment.
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The U.S. agreed to open its borders to Mexican trucks in 1994 as part of NAFTA, but a prolonged battle with the Teamsters Union led to several court cases and delayed implementation. Democrats in Congress also cut off funding for a pilot program last year, citing safety concerns and potential job losses in the U.S. trucking industry.
In response, Mexico imposed punitive tariffs on $2.4 billion in U.S. goods, including personal care products, sunglasses and synthetic staple fiber yarns.
In recent months, the Obama administration has held talks with Mexican officials and U.S. transportation and trade officials to try to restore and restructure the program.
LaHood said this month the U.S. and Mexico had established a working group to consider “next steps of the cross-border trucking program.” LaHood met with his Mexican counterpart, Juan Molinar Horcasitas, secretary of communications and transportation for the Mexican government, on April 12 in Mexico to discuss a broad range of transportation issues, including resolving the cross-border trucking problem, which they said was their highest priority.
The lawmakers stressed in their letter that Congress has “repeatedly and overwhelmingly rejected the cross-border program because it failed to adequately protect Americans from unsafe Mexican trucking standards.”