Legacy of Pollution : Mexico Port Wakes Up to ‘Oil Bust’

In the port of Coatzacoalcos, the reality of the decline in Mexico’s oil boom is so harsh you can taste it. You can eat it, breathe it and bathe in it, though none of this is especially recommended.

This is a place that knew the heady rush of sudden oil prosperity, the $32-a-barrel days when giant refineries were put up almost overnight and work was as plentiful as the summer rains that sweep in over the Gulf of Mexico.

“The city to live in forever,” local boosters called Coatzacoalcos.

In the boom years of the 1970s and as late as 1982, no one suggested that abundance was less than infinite, and hardly anyone noticed the blackened water and acrid air that accompanied the wealth.

And Now the Hangover

Now comes the hangover, after the price of Mexican oil plunged as low as $12 a barrel (though it now is up to $17). Jobs are scarce, and half-finished petrochemical plants dot the landscape like futuristic ruins. Dead catfish in the river attest to the pollution. Tests on edible river and sea life have turned up concentrations of cancer-causing chemicals. The air is foul.

Coatzacoalcos is waking up at the end of a dream and trying to deal with what is real.

“The city benefited for a few years, sure, but then the price of oil dropped and everyone is wringing his hands,” Francisco Mata, a schoolteacher and former member of the legislature, told a visitor.

Lorenzo Manuel Bosada, a biologist and ecology expert at City Hall, said: “We lived mesmerized by a bewitching vision of endless prosperity. We’re paying the price now.”

From Texas to Arabia

The pain of prosperity’s end is not unique to Coatzacoalcos, or to Mexico, which depends on oil for the great part of its export earnings. The tale is told, with variations, from Texas to Saudi Arabia.

But perhaps nowhere did change come so fast and, according to many people here, so carelessly. An industrial revolution, compressed into a few years, has taken a heavy toll on tropical Coatzacoalcos.

Coatzacoalcos--in the local language the name means Place of the Snakes--has the look of new money spent quickly. Its buildings are mostly made of plain concrete slabs stacked four and five stories high. Streets lead out uniformly from a central plaza and give way to dirt paths where population growth has outpaced municipal improvements.

Oil was discovered here at the turn of the century, but the quantity of known offshore reserves increased sharply in the 1970s. The town’s population grew from 50,000 in 1950 to 250,000 in 1970 to almost double that by 1980.

Technicians flocked in from Mexico City to run petrochemical plants built by Pemex, the giant, state-owned oil company. Laborers working at offshore oil rigs rested at hastily constructed boarding houses and took their pleasure in the so-called Red Zone on a bluff overlooking the new plants.

Peasants exchanged their hoes for hammers and found jobs in the burgeoning construction business. Local merchants turned to dealing in steel plate and cement.

52 Plants Built

The appetite for new industries was seemingly endless. In all, 52 plants sprang up to process crude oil into fuels, plastics and exotic chemicals.

“We were told by the government that we merely had to administer the wealth; the rest would take care of itself,” said Jaime Quintanilla, the president of the Chamber of Commerce.

As new plants opened, the landscape changed dramatically. Mangrove swamps were filled in, chimneys replaced palm trees and rivers and lagoons turned brown and yellow as they became the repository for waste of all sorts--chemical from the plants, human from the town, all of it untreated.

The fish began to die. Pelicans dove into oil slicks and were grounded, their wings made useless by the goo.

Fishermen Compensated

Fishermen brought fouled nets to Pemex and demanded payment. The company, flush with money, made good. It became a town joke. Even after it was clear that no fish survived in the rivers and along the coastline, fishermen still came with blackened nets looking for handouts.

“We never imagined that all the fish would die; if we had, we would have cried to heaven,” said Jesus Anaya, a member of a fishing cooperative.

Anaya’s cooperative is trying to get money from Pemex for new, bigger boats that could take them farther out to sea, away from the polluted coastline. But half the group’s 60 members, giving up on Coatzacoalcos, have gone elsewhere.

In 1982, Miguel de la Madrid took office as president of Mexico and found the treasury almost bare. Mexico was heavily in debt and oil prices were beginning to decline.

De la Madrid cut government spending, especially for big projects of the kind that had so changed the face of Coatzacoalcos. Work on two giant petrochemical complexes was stopped. Suppliers’ orders were canceled. Construction workers had nothing to build.

“We thought that with the certainty of oil there would always be work,” said Santos Centeno, secretary of a construction transport union. “We were wrong.’

Centeno’s union hall is a shadow of what it used to be. Brawny men sit around playing dominoes or sleeping. Union membership has declined from 800 to 400 since 1982. Ten-hour shifts used to be guaranteed; today, a man is lucky to find a five-hour shift.

Rumors of Layoffs

Declining opportunities have reduced the town’s population to about 350,000. Employment at the three main Pemex petrochemical plants has remained stable at about 20,000--the jobs are union-protected--but there are rumors that layoffs are imminent.

Employment in construction and service industries has dwindled to almost nothing, and the town’s unemployment rate is estimated at 30% to 50%.

Now there is fear that Pemex purchases of everything from barrels to bolts will decline. “Then we’ll really be hurting,” the Chamber of Commerce’s Quintanilla said.

While the prospects for renewed oil prosperity have withered, worries about the state of the Coatzacoalcos environment have increased. Last month, a local newspaper published a university report on pollution in the city’s waterways. Among the disturbing findings were high concentrations of cancer-causing hydrocarbons in shellfish and other fish that people here are accustomed to eating.

‘Most Contaminated’ Sites

“In the judgment of specialists . . . (the rivers) are the most contaminated sites on the Mexican shore,” the report said. “And if one compares them with other areas of the world, they are among the most impacted.”

Commenting on the report, a Pemex spokesman said the company cooperated in preparing it and is taking steps to correct the problems.

Meanwhile, Mayor Pompeyo Figueroa is trying to devise a civil defense plan for use in the event of an explosion or fire at one of the three petrochemical complexes that border his town.

“We’re sitting near a tinderbox,” Figueroa said.

Rising Levels of Lead

Depending on which way the wind blows, the air carries a chemical haze either to Coatzacoalcos or inland to Minatitlan. A study last year showed increasing levels of lead in the bloodstream of residents. Doctors linked the findings with a higher incidence of birth defects and nervous illnesses than in the general Mexican population.

Pemex has repeatedly announced programs to resolve the pollution problem. But with its customary secrecy, it declined to discuss the question with a reporter.

There is on view one effort at restoring the environment. Along Teapa Creek in Coatzacoalcos, the company has planted a stand of banana trees where the original foliage died.

The planting was completed the other day just before a fact-finding visit by a group of senators from Mexico City.