MEXICO CITY – Four campaign seasons have come and gone since presidential hopeful H. Ross Perot warned that NAFTA would create a “giant sucking sound” of jobs going to Mexico, and the trade pact is still generating plenty of noise. Calls to renegotiate the 14-year-old deal are rising from both sides of the border.

Thousands of protesters paralyzed traffic in Mexico’s capital in January to demand a redo of the pact, which they said had hurt Mexican farmers. In the U.S., the North American Free Trade Agreement looms large in states such as Ohio, which hosts a crucial presidential primary Tuesday.

The Rust Belt has shed hundreds of thousands of factory jobs since 1994, when the U.S.-Canada-Mexico trade bloc was implemented. Ohio alone had lost a net 50,000 jobs as a result of NAFTA, according to a 2006 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, who are campaigning for the Democratic nomination, say the deal needs to be retooled to protect American workers.

“Let’s get real about NAFTA. It simply isn’t working for all Americans,” Clinton said at a recent rally in Youngstown, Ohio. If elected, she said, she would call for a temporary freeze on new trade pacts and a thorough review of existing ones. Obama wants stronger labor and environmental provisions put into NAFTA and other accords.

Whether talk of revamping NAFTA amounts to more than election-year stumping remains to be seen. Three-way trade has soared and unemployment in the U.S. is substantially lower now than it was 14 years ago — 4.9% in January 2008 compared with 6.6% in January 1994. American shoppers have benefited from lower prices on imported goods, and U.S.-based multinational companies have boosted their competitiveness by whittling production costs.

Yet there is growing wariness among the public that the U.S. is giving away more than it’s getting. After all, the nation has lost 3.1 million manufacturing jobs since 1994, and its trade deficit with Mexico and Canada has risen to $138.5 billion last year from $9.1 billion in 1993.

Lawmakers who are critical of the Bush administration’s trade policies picked up 37 congressional seats in the 2006 election, according to Global Trade Watch, a Washington-based advocacy group. Although Congress approved a free trade pact with Peru in December, pending deals with Colombia, Panama and South Korea are stalled…

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