National Briefing | Southwest: In Texas, First Mexican Truck Enters U.S. Under Nafta

For the first time under the North American Free Trade Agreement, a Mexican tractor-trailer crossed the border into the United States on Friday on its way to the country’s interior. The Nafta trucking program had been stalled for years by American opponents who said it would put highway safety and American jobs at risk. But after the Department of Transportation said that safety concerns had been resolved, a commercial truck hauling a steel drilling structure entered the United States at Laredo on Friday afternoon. Nafta, signed in 1994, had called for Mexican trucks to have unrestricted access to highways in border states by 1995 and full access to all American highways by January 2000. Canadian trucks have no limits on where they can go.

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