The Birth of a New North American Strategic Zone

By Elliot Forwell

The corridor between Laredo, Texas and Monterrey, Nuevo León is becoming an informal binational Special Economic Zone, shaped less by government mandate and more by the layered interplay of logistics, capital, law, energy, and security. In other words: a convergence site.

This isn’t the maquiladora model of the 1990s. It’s something much stranger, more liquid. State and federal incentives collide. Private equity developers from Houston buy up land on the Mexican side under shell structures. Energy companies quietly build autonomous grid infrastructure under private contracts. Chinese electric vehicle parts are being routed in through the Port of Lazaro Cardenas, trucked to the border, and re-labeled for U.S. domestic production. Everyone is building, but no one is naming what they’re building.

In this vacuum, the Convergence Fund becomes the sovereign agent, capable of designing its own operational layer atop the jurisdictional blur.

Laredo is already the largest inland port in the United States, handling over $800 million in goods per day. But that headline masks the real leverage: the moment goods leave the bridge, they enter a dense, jurisdictionally ambiguous zone of influence where property rights, trade classifications, and security control vary block to block. It’s here that a fund doesn’t just invest: it constructs terrain.

The real prize is Anáhuac, a little-known rail hub just west of Monterrey, where northbound freight consolidates before crossing into U.S. customs. This is where fund architects can embed: purchasing adjacent land, laying fiber and solar infrastructure, pre-clearing customs via bonded warehouse frameworks, and embedding semi-autonomous security protocols using private guard forces contracted under dual-licensed shells. The energy layer, meanwhile, can be built via distributed solar with localized storage arrays - bypassing both the CFE (Mexico's federal grid) and ERCOT’s instability in Texas. This is a fund-controlled energy microgrid, capable of insulating the entire corridor’s industrial node from sovereign disruption.

Meanwhile, capital structure is its own weapon. The fund holds U.S. land through Delaware LLCs, with shadow leases to operating entities in Texas. Mexican land is acquired through a cascade of FIBRAs (local REIT structures) and fideicomisos (trusts), tied to operators with local political ties. Tax exposure is mitigated through bilateral treaties. Labor flows are managed by creating structured housing just outside of regulatory oversight zones, in informal settlements that can be formalized later once political alignment is secured. These aren’t companies. These are autonomous operating environments - soft states built from concrete, permits, diesel, and narrative.

Security is constant and subtle. Armed logistics corridors are normalized in this region, but a fund can go further, embedding ex-military consultants under legal security firm fronts, coordinating convoy patterns via private radio bands, even staging low-profile drone surveillance over sensitive transport nodes. Insurance becomes geopolitical: premiums shift dramatically based on cartel heatmaps, and knowing where to build isn’t just a matter of cost: it’s a question of who controls nightfall.

But none of this works without narrative capital. That’s why the most powerful funds now act like media firms. You fund think tanks in D.C. that push policy on “Nearshoring for Strategic Resilience.” You publish whitepapers on “Hemispheric Trade Sovereignty.” You show LPs that what you’re building isn’t a sketchy border logistics site: it’s a North American Strategic Zone, key to national defense, energy security, and AI supply chain sovereignty.

Every layer (logistics, land, legal, security, labor, narrative) is interdependent. The fund does not merely deploy capital into this environment. It engineers the environment to produce capital.

This is terrain-as-a-strategy.