Posted on 12/18/2001 2:04:35 PM PST by expose
Mexican Trucking Companies Sue U.S. Government, Alleging Discrimination
By Lynn Brezosky Associated Press Writer
Published: Dec 18, 2001
BROWNSVILLE, Texas (AP) - Eleven Mexican trucking companies filed a $4 billion lawsuit Tuesday, accusing the U.S. government of discrimination by denying them permits to operate and do business in United States. The complaint asserts that federal agencies, including the Department of Transportation, violated the North American Free Trade Agreement by allowing Canadian trucking firms more access than Mexican companies.
"There is no problem when trade is coming back and forth across the border," said lead attorney Fernando Chavez, the son of the late labor leader Cesar Chavez. "What causes the problem is when an individual who's Mexican is bringing it across."
The suit also alleges that Mexican truckers have been denied the right to invest in or own trucking companies based in the United States.
The plaintiffs' lawyers said the suit, filed in federal court in Brownsville, was on behalf of at least 185 Mexican trucking concerns. The $4 billion figure includes business and profits lost by Mexican companies since 1995, attorneys said.
A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Transportation Tuesday said he had no immediate comment.
Rob Black, spokesman for the Teamsters union, which represents more than 120,000 U.S. truck drivers, called the suit "baseless."
"We would call on the trucking companies and the government of Mexico and say that now is the time they should do what should have been done seven years ago when NAFTA was passed: Improve their trucks," Black said.
The issue of Mexican trucks in the United States has simmered since a part of the NAFTA agreement called for allowing trucks to travel first throughout Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas by December 1995 and throughout the United States by January 2000.
While Canadian trucks were allowed, the agreement was delayed for Mexican trucks by former President Clinton.
After the White House threatened a veto on stricter legislation, a compromise was approved earlier this month that requires U.S. inspectors to conduct safety examinations of Mexican trucking companies, their vehicles, as well as driver's license verification.
Implementing the rules is expected to take months
Yes this is protectionism, protection of the motorists, and their familys on our highways. If you don't believe it, you should take a trip on a truck route or two in Mexico.
With our system rampant with PC, I have no doubt they will win too.
One gripe here is that I know the immigrants will vote for Democrats. They aren't going to vote for Republicans until the Republicans turn socialists, and where does that leave us? Those of us who are conservatives will live to see the day when we'll have no political clout left. Numbers don't lie and they will outnumber us.
I don't think there is anything facing our country that puts us more in peril than illegals and the newly legals voting for Hillary Clinton...or Tom Daschel in 2004. Which I say they will do, and Bush will be out.
I've been a Pub since l960, and witnessing their spinelessness over the years has given me high blood pressure.
Oh really, Route 1 in Northern Mexico is the only route from interior Mexico to Baja California, that is not a short haul. Go stand beside Route 1 for a couple of hours and see what goes by.
I think I'll trust Phil Gramm over some truckers' union spokesman.
OK, what the hell does this stand for? Please use asterisks where appropriate, or freepmail me. :)
If telling the truth is making an ass of yourself, then the answer is no. A resounding NO.
Eric has a habit of calling names when he's losing a discussion or fears a particular issue. Needless to say, he does it a lot.
What does immigration have to do with trucking? If anything I would think that prohibiting residents of Mexico who are truck drivers from driving their trucks into America and back would only give them another reason to move to America and drive up here for an American company.
That's OK with the unions because the Mexican drivers who immigrate will probably have to join the union in order to drive for the American companies. And your nightmares will increase because they will bring their brown-skinned wives and breed little brown babies who will be American citizens. Better for you to let the trucker drive up through America and back down to their holmes in Mexico.
Just like the Democrats they have no intention of shutting it down. Just the opposite, they want wide open borders. All for the mighty buck. They have made this inordinately obvious.
What you're seeing is the difference between long haul and short haul trucks. Apply the same rules to Mexico as Canada and you will see the same trucks.
Read post 26.
Mexican drug killings spread
By Mark Stevenson
ASSOCIATED PRESS
MEXICO CITY — The violence of Mexico's drug trade is beginning to seep into all levels of society. No longer confined to high-rolling drug lords in rough border towns and addicts on the streets, it is striking at lawyers, judges, police, soldiers, even doctors.
The latest attack came Nov. 11, when two federal judges and one of their wives died in a hail of gunfire in the Pacific coast resort of Mazatlan, in the worst attack on the courts in recent memory.
Judges Benito Andrade and Jesus Ayala were on their way to a baseball game with their wives when they were ambushed. Authorities quickly put police guards around judges in drug- and violence-plagued Sinaloa state, and there were calls for the kind of anonymous "hooded judges" that Colombia used to try dangerous suspects at the height of its drug wars.
The two judges had presided over drug cases in another northern state, Tamaulipas, and the nature of the slayings — a lone gunman sprayed their van with 40 rounds from an AK-47 assault rifle — led police to believe jailed drug traffickers may have ordered the attack.
Three days later, in the northern city of Monterrey, lawyer Silvia Raquenel Villanueva, who has represented drug informers, survived her fourth assassination attempt. In the last 13 years, she has had a gasoline bomb thrown in her office; suffered three bullet wounds in a 1999 attack; had 13 bullets fired at her in her office last year; and, most recently, ducked a barrage of shots on a Monterrey street.
Mexican Supreme Court Chief Justice Genaro Gongora says criminals are trying "to take Mexican society hostage." To some, the social damage was already clear before the killings of the judges last month. The industrial-scale drug trade has transformed the once largely nonviolent trafficking of marijuana into one of Mexico's deadliest activities, while making more common crimes like kidnapping ever more violent.
The trade's most insidious effect is its ability to warp society, said Jorge Chabat, a drug expert at the Center for Economic Development Research in Mexico City. "The drug trade is like AIDS — it attacks society's antibodies, the immune system," Mr. Chabat said. "The corruption focuses on law enforcement agencies and makes them extremely inefficient at combating any kind of crime." Even something as seemingly unrelated as environmental law has become susceptible to drug-related violence.
Navy patrols are wary of stopping and searching dozens of boats that practice illegal dragnet fishing off the coast of Baja California because that area has become a favored route for drug traffickers.
"The navy and the army send out patrols, but the problem is that they never know what's going to happen when they stop a boat. It could be full of smugglers," said Adan Hernandez, who helps run a sea-turtle conservation center in Magdalena Bay, near the southern tip of Baja. And at least eight doctors are known to have been murdered in recent years after operating on suspected members of drug gangs.
Other crimes also have become more violent and destructive under the influence of the drug trade. In many cases, common criminals seem to have picked up the kind of secrecy and eliminate-all-witnesses attitude long exhibited by drug traffickers.
Some kidnappers in southern Mexico, for example, are killing their victims even after ransom is paid, apparently in order to cover their tracks.
Most attention directed toward the drug trade has focused on wildly violent, cocaine- or heroin-fueled crime like the "narco-satanic" dismemberment killings carried out by a pseudo-cult of addicts along the U.S. border in the late 1980s.
But the biggest change has come in activity present for centuries in Mexico: the small-scale growth and consumption of marijuana, a tradition immortalized in folk songs like "La Cucaracha."
Traditionally, marijuana caused little violence and seldom spread beyond the mainly lower-class users. Luis Hernandez, 68, remembers the smell of marijuana smoke drifting over the rooftops of his rough-and-tumble Tepito neighborhood in the 1940s.
"Mothers would just lie and tell their kids that somebody was burning the 'hooves of the Devil,'" he said. "If any little kid happened to find a guy smoking marijuana, the guy would try to hide it, or scare the kid off. Now they just offer the kid some, try to get him hooked," he said disapprovingly.
Nowadays, marijuana smoke wafts through the streets of Tepito as young men smoke it openly on the sidewalks. The increasing industrialization of the drug trade has made marijuana a big business, with tanker trucks carrying multiton shipments north to the border.
And as profits soared, the marijuana trade became deadly. The biggest and bloodiest drug massacres in the past three years have involved marijuana, not harder drugs like cocaine or heroin.
Rather than killing a few rivals at a time, as the big cocaine cartels do, marijuana traffickers wipe out entire extended families. In February, a gang of gunmen stopped a truck carrying farmers to a town festival in Sinaloa, and methodically shot to death every passenger — 10 men and two teen-agers. The motive, according to police: One group of farmers was believed to have stolen marijuana from another.
A year earlier in the western state of Michoacan, an entire family was gunned down in the rural home they used as a marijuana storehouse.
In September 1998, near Ensenada, gunmen rousted from bed a marijuana trafficker and 18 members of his family, including eight children. They were lined up against a wall and shot with semiautomatic rifles. The motive: The trafficker had infringed on rivals' business.
"Unlike the cocaine trade, where a few professionals pass imported drugs through Mexico, marijuana involves a lot of farmers, a lot of peasant growers," said Chabat, the drug expert. "That means there is a lot more friction between the growers themselves and the police."
You have enough trouble stuttering and speaking for yourself. Why are you trying to speak for someone else?
That is a bullsh*t and cowardly thing to post....READ ALL THE POSTS before you state such unadulterated crap...most of the posts are about the crap-trucks they drive, not about them!...SHEESH!
FReegards and Merry Christmas...hope you get some understanding under the tree..
FMCDH
"get around get around..I get around"...Beachboys?...BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
FMCDH
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