Bush Administration Quietly Plans NAFTA Super Highway
Jerome R. Corsi / Human Events | June 14 2006

Quietly but systematically, the Bush Administration is advancing the plan to build a huge NAFTA Super Highway, four football-fields-wide, through the heart of the U.S. along Interstate 35, from the Mexican border at Laredo, Tex., to the Canadian border north of Duluth, Minn.

Once complete, the new road will allow containers from the Far East to enter the United States through the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas, bypassing the Longshoreman’s Union in the process. The Mexican trucks, without the involvement of the Teamsters Union, will drive on what will be the nation’s most modern highway straight into the heart of America. The Mexican trucks will cross border in FAST lanes, checked only electronically by the new “SENTRI” system. The first customs stop will be a Mexican customs office in Kansas City, their new Smart Port complex, a facility being built for Mexico at a cost of $3 million to the U.S. taxpayers in Kansas City.

As incredible as this plan may seem to some readers, the first Trans-Texas Corridor segment of the NAFTA Super Highway is ready to begin construction next year. Various U.S. government agencies, dozens of state agencies, and scores of private NGOs (non-governmental organizations) have been working behind the scenes to create the NAFTA Super Highway, despite the lack of comment on the plan by President Bush. The American public is largely asleep to this key piece of the coming “North American Union” that government planners in the new trilateral region of United States, Canada and Mexico are about to drive into reality.

Just examine the following websites to get a feel for the magnitude of NAFTA Super Highway planning that has been going on without any new congressional legislation directly authorizing the construction of the planned international corridor through the center of the country.

NASCO, the North America SuperCorridor Coalition Inc., is a “non-profit organization dedicated to developing the world’s first international, integrated and secure, multi-modal transportation system along the International Mid-Continent Trade and Transportation Corridor to improve both the trade competitiveness and quality of life in North America.” Where does that sentence say anything about the USA? Still, NASCO has received $2.5 million in earmarks from the U.S. Department of Transportation to plan the NAFTA Super Highway as a 10-lane limited-access road (five lanes in each direction) plus passenger and freight rail lines running alongside pipelines laid for oil and natural gas. One glance at the map of the NAFTA Super Highway on the front page of the NASCO website will make clear that the design is to connect Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. into one transportation system.


Kansas City SmartPort Inc. is an “investor based organization supported by the public and private sector” to create the key hub on the NAFTA Super Highway. At the Kansas City SmartPort, the containers from the Far East can be transferred to trucks going east and west, dramatically reducing the ground transportation time dropping the containers off in Los Angeles or Long Beach involves for most of the country. A brochure on the SmartPort website describes the plan in glowing terms: “For those who live in Kansas City, the idea of receiving containers nonstop from the Far East by way of Mexico may sound unlikely, but later this month that seemingly far-fetched notion will become a reality.”


The U.S. government has housed within the Department of Commerce (DOC) an “SPP office” that is dedicated to organizing the many working groups laboring within the executive branches of the U.S., Mexico and Canada to create the regulatory reality for the Security and Prosperity Partnership. The SPP agreement was signed by Bush, President Vicente Fox, and then-Prime Minister Paul Martin in Waco, Tex., on March 23, 2005. According to the DOC website, a U.S.-Mexico Joint Working Committee on Transportation Planning has finalized a plan such that “(m)ethods for detecting bottlenecks on the U.S.-Mexico border will be developed and low cost/high impact projects identified in bottleneck studies will be constructed or implemented.” The report notes that new SENTRI travel lanes on the Mexican border will be constructed this year. The border at Laredo should be reduced to an electronic speed bump for the Mexican trucks containing goods from the Far East to enter the U.S. on their way to the Kansas City SmartPort.


The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) is overseeing the Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC) as the first leg of the NAFTA Super Highway. A 4,000-page environmental impact statement has already been completed and public hearings are scheduled for five weeks, beginning next month, in July 2006. The billions involved will be provided by a foreign company, Cintra Concessions de Infraestructuras de Transporte, S.A. of Spain. As a consequence, the TTC will be privately operated, leased to the Cintra consortium to be operated as a toll-road.
The details of the NAFTA Super Highway are hidden in plan view. Still, Bush has not given speeches to bring the NAFTA Super Highway plans to the full attention of the American public. Missing in the move toward creating a North American Union is the robust public debate that preceded the decision to form the European Union. All this may be for calculated political reasons on the part of the Bush Administration.

A good reason Bush does not want to secure the border with Mexico may be that the administration is trying to create express lanes for Mexican trucks to bring containers with cheap Far East goods into the heart of the U.S., all without the involvement of any U.S. union workers on the docks or in the trucks.

Like I said, its just an odd area....it has implications, good and bad, but what are the true motives behind it? Will it affect our lives in a undesirable way? I dunno....hard to figure out.

A place in Europe or Japan has been experimenting with magnetic railway systems, to completely remove any rail resistance from the train...allowing it to literally float on air. I think something like that would go a long way in making things easier to ship than some stupid massive highway system.

I should probably say, experimenting in improving the system, as I THINK its already being used somewhere over there....damn neat system

A good reason Bush does not want to secure the border with Mexico may be that the administration is trying to create express lanes for Mexican trucks to bring containers with cheap Far East goods into the heart of the U.S., all without the involvement of any U.S. union workers on the docks or in the trucks.

Highway twinning to proceed
By DAVE MABELL
Aug 17, 2006, 22:42

For coronary patients, a bypass can be a life-saving measure. For traffic-clogged arteries, Alberta highways officials say bypasses can be just as vital.
That’s why they’re anxious to call tenders for the Milk River bypass this fall, after nearly a decade of delay. They’re also pleased by progress on plans for bypasses at Claresholm and Nanton.
Work on the long-delayed Milk River bypass could start this fall, says Trent Bancarz, spokesman for Alberta Infrastructure and Transportation.
“We’re waiting for a final approval from Transport Canada.”
At a cost of about $35 million, the existing two-lane road through Milk River will be replaced by a 110-km/h route about two kilometres west of town. The price also includes replacing the existing Canadian Pacific bridge and relocating railway tracks.
Tenders should be called this fall, Bancarz says. If there are no further delays, grading could begin late this year and the rest of the work next spring. When it’s opened, the bypass will complete a Highway 4 twinning process that began in the 1990s.
Debate over where the Milk River bypass should run — east or west of town — began long before that. The government initially approved an inexpensive east-side route involving just one interchange, with Highway 501 connecting Milk River to Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park.
But then local business people began lobbying for a route much closer to town. Eventually Premier Ralph Klein intervened, ordering it be built west of town — a decision that still divides town residents.
Milk River ratepayer Wray Swanson, for one, says the latest route ignores a petition signed by 730 people and a University of Lethbridge survey that showed 79 per cent of those polled preferred the east-side route.
“What started as a common-sense, east-side bypass quickly degenerated into a political football skirmish between Premier Ralph Klein and Milk River’s political elite,“ Swanson said in a letter to the editor in the Lethbridge Herald this summer.
Milk River Mayor Terry Michaelis was not available for comment Wednesday. But some residents’ opposition, Bancarz noted, contributed further to the project’s delay.
“We had to expropriate some property,” he said, after owners on the latest right-of-way refused to sell. “That’s something we do very sparingly.”
With acquisition of that final piece of property, Bancarz said, all that’s needed is a positive environmental impact report from Transport Canada. The new route, he added, will include a realignment of Highway 501 east and west (to Del Bonita) as well as easy access to the seasonal visitors’ information centre for northbound travellers.
Farther north, Bancarz indicated, highway officials had far less trouble winning approval for bypasses planned for Claresholm and Nanton. Both will run east of town, he said, with convenient access to the business areas.
“The public process wrapped up in June,” he said, and the final recommendations have gone to each town council.
“We expect to have the final report in the next few months.”
When the bypasses will be be built, Bancarz said, is less certain.
“They’re not in our three-year construction plan,” although that’s reviewed every spring.
Neither is the Fort Macleod bypass, he said, although that route has been officially “gazetted” by the provincial government. More recently, the province also announced its favoured route for another part of the “export highway,” a Lethbridge bypass running north of Coalhurst and the Lethbridge city limits, then connecting with a realigned Highway 4 near the Broxburn Road.
Construction on that route was described as 15 to 20 years away, and Bancarz said there’s no indication so far that it’s been moved up the list of priorities.
Whatever the timing, Bancarz added, Alberta studies have shown bypasses have a positive long-term impact on a town’s business community even though some local businesses suffer initially.

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