Monterrey, Mexico – For nearly the whole year, only one of the five machines at a metal products workshop in Apodaca, Nuevo Leon, in northern Mexico, has been operational. The small business was forced to drastically reduce its production capacity after United States President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on steel and aluminium.

“It affected us greatly,” Jose David Garcia Torres, chief of operations at Maquinados Bera, told Al Jazeera. “Many companies decided to halt production, and our services were no longer needed. We were stopped for months, literally doing nothing.”

The US initially implemented 25 percent tariffs on steel imports in March and doubled that to 50 percent in June. In the first seven months of the year, the latest data available, Mexican steel and aluminium exports to

See Full Page