EMERSON ASSESSES NAFTA ON TRIP

U.S. Rep. Bill Emerson, one of 11 congressmen who made a fact-finding trip to Mexico over the weekend, plans to announce Friday if he will support or oppose the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Emerson said Monday from Washington, D.C., that he's still assessing the issue but plans to reach a decision by Friday. Emerson will reveal his stand on the controversial issue at a press conference in Cape Girardeau.

Emerson said the congressional delegation was just another in a long list of such groups that have visited Mexico amid the lengthy debate on NAFTA. "There probably have been a hundred members that have gone down there," he said.

He said the majority of the congressmen on last weekend's trip were undecided about NAFTA.

"I do not believe that there are necessarily simple answers to the larger issues at hand, and I believe there is reason for concern about the level of confusion among the American public because of so much information and misinformation -- much of which is not easy to digest -- being thrown at them," said Emerson.

The delegation left Washington Friday morning, stopping off at Laredo, Texas, before heading across the border into Nuevo Laredo.

There, the delegation toured Packard Electric's plant, which makes wiring components for Buicks, Emerson said. The congressmen also visited a waste-water treatment facility that serves areas on both sides of the Rio Grande.

"We went on from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City and spent the whole weekend in meetings," said Emerson. The congressmen met separately with American and Mexican business leaders and officials of the Mexican government, including President Carlos Salinas.

Emerson said the group met with Salinas for about two hours Saturday.

"The bulk of the people I talked to were proponents of NAFTA," he pointed out. That included Wal-Mart officials in Mexico.

The Cape Girardeau Republican met Saturday afternoon with officials from Southwestern Bell, which is the principal player in Tel-Mex, a consortium that has purchased the Mexican telephone system.

Southwestern Bell is planning to spend $2 billion a year for five years to upgrade Mexico's ancient telephone system, Emerson said.

"I went to see a representative sampling of the Mexican telephone system that was installed in the 1920s, and then I went to see a representative sampling of the system that is replacing the only telephone system that Mexico has ever had," he said.

Emerson said he met with Roger Minson, a Cape Girardeau native and the Southwestern Bell engineer who is overseeing Mexico's conversion to a modern telephone system.

"Most of the material going into this upgrading, high technology equipment, is made in the United States," the congressman said.

The delegation spent Sunday morning with Mexican opponents of NAFTA. The group involved political, labor and social leaders.

"Their principal objections are that NAFTA has too much to do with economics and not enough with social welfare," said Emerson.

Many of the opponents are socialists who are unhappy with the economic changes taking place in Mexico, the congressman said. "The Mexican government," he said, "has privatized 80 percent of the entire economy over the course of the last two years. They have privatized everything except the oil industry."

Before departing for home Sunday, the congressmen toured the world's largest Wal-Mart store. "That place is so big you could fly a helicopter indoors. I mean it is huge," said Emerson.

"Fifty-five percent of everything that is sold in the largest Wal-Mart in the world is made and manufactured in the United States," he said. "Wal-Mart Supercenters are going into every metropolitan place in Mexico even as we speak, and it is all consumer goods."