NUEVO LAREDO-LAREDO: SNIPPING THE RED TAPE Laredo, Tex., and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, are the border's busiest cargo crossing point, on the main truck and rail routes between the industrial heartlands of Mexico and the U.S. Day by day, NAFTA is generating more such traffic, but in the long run it may eliminate much of the customs activity on which the two cities have long thrived. More than 4,000 trucks rumble across the twin cities' three bridges each day. The downtown bridge is a permanent traffic jam as enormous tractor-trailers, engines idling and brakes gasping, creep both ways across the Rio Grande and roll down to customs yards on each side. In the cramped U.S. yard, drug-sniffing dogs scamper among the trucks, jumping aboard to check suspect loads. Unlike most big border towns, the two Laredos don't manufacture much. What keeps their economies ticking is the vast merchandise flow, reflected in rows of warehouses outside Laredo and a huge Wal-Mart distribution center. For the city's economy, ''God laid out the geography very well,'' says Gary G. Jacobs, chairman of Laredo National Bank. ''The quickest way from Mexico City to Detroit is through Laredo.'' Nuevo Laredo is dominated by customs brokers who deal with the red tape of shipping. ''U.S. brokers marry the daughters of Mexican brokers,'' says Diana Garcia, a U.S. broker whose family has investments in trucking, maquiladoras, and beer distribution. On the U.S. side, at the Laredo Country Club, Mexican members outnumber Americans. The Mexican elite feel more at home there than in Nuevo Laredo's vast sprawl of concrete buildings and wooden shacks--a city with an estimated 275,000 population, compared with Laredo's 163,000. As NAFTA kicks in more fully in the years ahead, though, it threatens to hurt the two Laredos by reducing the role of the customs broker. Computerized checkpoints eventually will let trucks zoom through customs all the way from Canada to Mexico. At the new Colombia Bridge 18 miles outside Laredo, where the first phase is in place, electronic filing of U.S. documents is enabling some 1,700 trucks a day to speed across in just three minutes apiece. Return to main story

Updated June 15, 1997 by bwwebmaster
Copyright 1997, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
Terms of Use