The NAFTA Blueprint

by Rodrigo Garcia

The spokesperson had admitted to keeping the project out of the public limelight to avoid scrutiny. It was the same as with the Trans-Texas Corridor, public and private officials had not released a public statement about their plans. The citizenry was not their major concern.

  My next visit would have to be to the Lazaro Cardenas port in Michoacán, maybe Mexican citizens and officials wouldn’t be as secretive as their American counterparts. Mexicans were more open about political corruption and misconduct, like Argentineans and Russians. It was part of Mexico’s history. They held a paradoxical way of viewing death, religion, and politics. They viewed it with a revolving laughter. I had covered a few international stories in Mexico and I had some established contacts, but none in Michoacán. One significant difference between Mexicans and Americans I’d like to highlight. Mexican citizens viewed foreign investment positively, while the thought of international companies on American territory was absolute treason.

  The port of Lazaro Cardenas in Michoacán had two-thousand hectares of land for foreign direct investment to promote new projects or business. The Governor of Michoacán was supportive of the project because of increased revenues for the state and because of the thousands of immigrants from Michoacán in the United States trying to find employment. The goal was to reduce immigration.

  The NAFTA agreement in general had been ratified by Mexican legislators because they wanted to reduce immigration to the United States, but until now there had been no signs of reduced border movement. I presumed this idea would have to be investigated further. After all, illegal immigration was what landed me there in the first place. But, there was nothing of significant interest in the port of Lazaro Cardenas to discover, everyone kept blathering about increased TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit) used for measuring cargo capacity because of the increased demand in goods.

  Local citizens and the local government, in general, seemed to accept the foreign project in its totality, with the exception of a few union miners who made one key observation. The port of Lazaro Cardenas was owned by the Hudson Port Ltd. Company, which was the largest developer and operator of deepwater seaports, which also owned all the main ports in Mexico, which also owned the shipping ports in the Panama Canal and about thirty-five percent of the world’s major ports, which was a Hong Kong-based private company that often facilitated shipments from China to Mexico traveling through with tons of pseudoephedrine. That was the raw material used to manufacture methamphetamine. It seemed like monopolies were at the core of this investigation. Perhaps NAFTA was facilitating that in order to swindle the entire operation. So far, anything was plausible.

  For decades now, Chinese businessmen had been detained in Mexico for drug smuggling, yet they had never been prosecuted, a perennial problem stemming from the Mexican Revolution. The union miners gave me one last tip before I left―if I seriously wanted to discover government misconduct, I should go to Baja California where the ‘Port of Illusion’ was being bid on by major investors, about four billion dollars to be exact, for the development of the Port Colonet a few miles from Tijuana.

  I returned to the hotel shocked about the interconnectedness of it all, but I felt too slothful to concentrate. I hadn’t had adequate rest for a few days so I wasn’t able to focus on work, even though I was excited to review my notes to put a proposal together. I was starting to see the connections between the monopoly and the blueprint but I didn’t have solid evidence, not enough for Franklin to allow me to go on some wild sheep chase throughout North America.

  I slept for a few hours then went downstairs to head next door to a food joint and grabbed a few tacos, some beers, and a local newspaper to bring to my room. I scanned a few stories in the paper for anything significant―nothing, then I switched on the television to get a glimpse of local news. Corruption, drug trafficking, murder, and travel destinations. Mexico’s famed contributions to the world.

  I started working, although distracted by the television. I crammed out two brief summary proposals, one for the Kansas City housing concern and the other for this Lazaro Cardenas port. I wrote another one for the Kansas City Rail Project, but I stored it on a miscellaneous document on my desktop file. I needed to make connections between government departments, public officials, lucrative deals, non-profit organizations, private corporations, and others, before I sold the car to Franklin. The story was beginning to unravel in a more intriguing and substantial manner, so I was eager to head over to the next vessel of the monopoly―Baja California.