Imagine returning home from your vacation, car full of kids anxious to get home.  Or maybe taking a bus to your next destination.  And then, suddenly, the highway is blocked and you spend a whole day wondering what comes next.

Well, this is not an old episode from “The Twilight Zone” or some version of “Friday the 13th”.  No at all.  This is what’s going down south of the border because truck drivers are furious with the federal government.  Here is the story:

Truck drivers blocked some major highways in central Mexico on Tuesday to protest that the government hasn’t paid them for work they did on a tourist train line.

The protest by truckers blocked two major highways leading north out of Mexico City for a few hours Tuesday morning, and other highways on the Yucatan Peninsula, where they had worked carrying gravel and other materials for the government’s Maya Train project.

President Claudia Sheinbaum acknowledged Tuesday that the subcontractor companies that hired the truck drivers hadn’t paid them because the government owed them money.

‘The payments to the companies have started, so that they, in turn, can pay the truck drivers,’ Sheinbaum said.

It was the latest in a series of complaints by workers and businessmen who said the cash-strapped government has fallen behind in payments.

Mexico’s federal government is running big budget deficits to pay for ambitious pet projects and entitlement programs from the previous administration.

Last month, suppliers and contractors for the state-owned oil company published an open letter saying they hadn’t been paid $5 billion for work they had done.

‘This situation ... has caused adverse affects [sic] on our finances and on the regions where we work,’ the Mexican Association of Petroleum Services Companies wrote in the letter.

Under former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who was Sheinbaum’s political mentor, the government began transferring large amounts of money to the state-run Pemex oil company, started large building projects and implemented cash handout programs.

That led to federal budget deficits of about 6% of Mexico’s gross domestic product in 2024. Mexico’s treasury department said it would aim to reduce the deficit to 3.9% of GDP in 2025, but it was unclear if it could achieve that. López Obrador left behind a lot of unfinished train and oil refinery projects, and Sheinbaum has expanded benefit programs for older people.

As a friend in Mexico told me recently, loosely translated:  “These [expletive] are good at winning elections but [expletive] can’t govern.”  Honestly, I thought that he was talking about Chicago, but it’s Mexico.

Cash strapped and falling behind in payments?  That’s the real story.  I remember a client years ago who would not do business with PEMEX, the oil monopoly.  He said that they don’t pay their bills.  They keep extending their payments and mess up your balance sheet.  The problem has apparently now extended to other agencies as well.  It’s pure arrogance, and another consequence of having a corrupt state run so much of the economy.

So what happened to the poor people in their cars and sitting in a bus?  The people closing the highway apparently opened up a lane and let some out.  Will the government send the army to break up the protests?  They may, but it won’t end well.

By the way, where is former president Lopez-Obrador, or the author of this madness?  No one has seen him lately, and I can’t blame him for hiding this one out.

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Image from Grok.