Mexican Held in Sludge Dumping in U.S.

Just days after the U.S. and Mexico signed an agreement to stem the flow of hazardous wastes across the border, American authorities caught 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 Mount 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.

The suspect identified himself as a Pemex employee at his arraignment Thursday in El Centro. He is in custody at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

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 United States.

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

The sludge trickled across a quarter of a mile of desert, killing scrub and posing a danger to the underground water supply.

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