How an American construction company became the center of a US-Mexico dispute
Vulcan Materials Company is embroiled in a high-level legal dispute with the Mexican government after it attempted to expropriate a quarry supplying building materials for the southern U.S.
Vulcan is the largest producer of construction materials in the United States. While most of its operations are domestic, the southern coastal regions of the U.S. lack a proper limestone quarry, and logistics make transportation of limestone from other parts of the country exceedingly difficult and expensive. In 1986, the company was given permission by the Mexican government to develop a quarry near Playa del Carmen in the Yucatan Peninsula. To ship the crushed limestone building materials extracted from the quarry, Vulcan developed the only deep-water port in the peninsula.
Legally, Vulcan has full title to the quarry, the surrounding land, and the port. The company operated the area without incident for nearly four decades.
The tranquil state of affairs was interrupted after President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power in 2018. The Mexican president was a harsh critic of Vulcan, arguing that its operations were environmentally damaging.
On May 5, 2022, López Obrador shut down the quarry, alleging Vulcan had violated its contract. The Mexican military occupied the property in March of the following year.
On Sept. 23, 2024, the president decreed that a stretch of land including the quarry and surrounding area was a Naturally Protected Area, preventing Vulcan from conducting operations there.
Vulcan took the matter to the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, demanding over $1.5 billion in compensation. Parallel to the legal effort, the Alabama-based company enlisted the help of Congress to protect American business interests.
Sens. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) and Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Reps. August Pfluger (R-TX) and Terri Sewell (D-AL) introduced the Defending American Property Abroad (DAPA) Act of 2025 in an effort to protect Vulcan and other American companies abroad. The bill would amend the 1974 Trade Act, to punish foreign governments that take part in the “expropriation of the assets of United States persons in acts, policies, and practices of foreign countries that are unreasonable or discriminatory.”
Speaking with the Washington Examiner, Pfluger stressed the bill’s bipartisan nature.
“It seeks to protect American business interests in other countries to give us a level playing field, to make sure that other countries don’t take advantage of American businesses. In the case of Vulcan, we’ve been working with this company for several years, trying to work with the Mexican government, unsuccessfully,” he said.
Pfluger said that Trump wasn’t directly involved and hadn’t commented on the matter to his knowledge, but that it was perfectly in line with his vision.
“I’ve worked for several years to try to right this wrong, and I think definitely you see a bipartisan, bicameral effort on this legislation, which would make a strong statement and again, protect American businesses abroad, is exactly the kind of thing that President Trump has continued to say, that we need a level playing field, that other countries have taken advantage of us,” he said.
“And unfortunately, the Biden administration, we really couldn’t get much help from the administration to protect Vulcan or to go to bat for Vulcan, and we hope that that will change here,” Pfluger added.
Though the U.S. as a whole has seen a slight improvement in relations with the new President Claudia Sheinbaum, Pfluger said he hasn’t seen much of a difference regarding this issue.
Sheinbaum has largely taken the same line as Lopez Obrador, arguing that action is needed as Vulcan was breaking their contract and ruining the environment.
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“In that letter they’re suggesting that there was an expropriation. There was never an expropriation — the land is theirs, the property is theirs,” she said earlier this year.
“The problem is that they went completely out of their authorized area of operation,” Sheinbaum continued. “They went to other areas, affecting cenotes and aquifers.”