Manuel Sanchez has mixed feelings about the North American Free Trade Agreement. Now he has 47. Main roads to the Rio Grande bridges and to Laredo's dozens of huge warehouses and cargo transfer yards often are backed up for miles.
Exhaust fumes linger in the balmy air amid the snarl of truck engines, the hiss of brakes.
At nearly every turn, it seems, Sanchez is stalled by spillover traffic from the highways, detour signs and sweat-drenched men spreading asphalt on worn thoroughfares. Like those who live near the city's highways and rail lines, Sanchez and other airport neighbors worry that the trade boom is ruining the quality of life in Laredo, which has a population of about 200,000, up more than 60 percent since 1990. It is a border city reveling in phenomenal, trade-fueled growth, yet also reeling from the strain of it. After the agreement took effect in January 1994, the acronym all but disappeared from the nation's political vocabulary. The dynamics differ from city to city, and economic outlooks along the border vary like the landscapes from El Paso in the desert to McAllen near the coast.