Pemex Truckers Discovered Dumping Mexican Oil Sludge in U.S.

Just days after the United States and Mexico signed an agreement to stem the flow of hazardous wastes across the border, American authorities this week discovered truckers from Mexico’s government-owned oil monopoly dumping thousands of gallons of oily sludge in the California desert.

Border Patrol aircraft Tuesday afternoon spotted two 5,000-gallon tankers bearing the markings of Pemex, the Mexican state oil company, draining their loads on U.S. government-owned land just across the California-Mexican border at Mt. Signal, a few miles southwest of El Centro, according to Thomas Wolf, Imperial County director of environmental health.

Both trucks and five of the six men in them drove back into Mexico before officers on the ground could reach the dump site, Wolf said Friday. But one Mexican, Francisco Macias Lujan of Mexicali, was arrested on a federal misdemeanor charge of draining petroleum products and waste water onto public lands.

Macias Lujan, who identified himself as a Pemex employee at his arraignment Thursday in El Centro, is in custody at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego.

According to Assistant U.S. Atty. Charles S. Crandall, Macias Lujan’s attorney told U.S. Magistrate Joseph Schmidt that the truckers thought they were on the Mexican side of the border. There is no border fence in the area, and no border markings along the unimproved road on which the trucks drove into the U.S.

But Wolf said the Mexican had told U.S. investigators the incident was the third time in recent weeks that the Pemex truckers had purposely driven into the United States to dispose of wastes from diesel fuel storage tanks.

He “was saying they have brought quite a bit of material to the Mexican side and dumped it in that location,” Wolf said. “But it was getting so mushy over there, they were afraid they would get the truck stuck, so that’s why they were bringing it over here.”

A Pemex truck returned to the site and dumped a load of waste on the Mexican side of the border Wednesday while officials from Wolf’s department and the U.S. attorney’s office were surveying the area, Wolf said.

“My people were saying they felt certain (the Mexicans) would have brought the truck over to this side if they hadn’t been standing there,” he said.

Top U.S. and Mexican environmental officials signed a bilateral agreement just last week requiring each government to obtain the other’s consent before shipping hazardous wastes across the border.

According to Wolf, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is studying samples of the water-oil sludge to determine if it is concentrated enough to constitute a hazardous waste under federal regulations. An EPA spokesman in San Francisco said Friday that he was unaware of any move by the agency to cite the incident as a violation of the anti-dumping pact.

But Wolf said the waste clearly was a hazardous material under California’s more stringent rules. The sludge trickled across a quarter-mile of desert, killing scrub and posing a danger to the underground aquifer.

“It should be a diplomatic incident,” Wolf said. “Whether they’ll pursue it in that vein I don’t know.”

A Mexican official familiar with the incident said Friday that Pemex acknowledged the waste had been dumped, but insisted the truckers “did it without realizing the dumping was taking place in U.S. territory.”

Mexico sought the dumping agreement. The Mexican government has been under increasing pressure from its citizens to halt the flow of wastes across the border since the discovery of an illegal dump containing U.S. wastes near the border town of Tecate this year.

Ironically, U.S. prosecutors obtained guilty pleas Tuesday morning from three American businessmen charged in the Tecate dumping incident--just hours before the Pemex trucks drove into Imperial County.