U.S., Mexico Probe Border Dumping of Pemex Wastes

U.S. and Mexican authorities have launched a joint investigation of illegal waste dumping in Imperial County by truckers from Pemex, the Mexican national oil company, officials of the two nations said Thursday.

A Pemex trucker from Mexicali, arrested late last month during a dumping incident on the U.S. side of the border, pleaded guilty Thursday to a U.S. misdemeanor charge under an agreement securing his cooperation in the investigation.

Mexican prosecutors, meanwhile, may bring criminal charges against a high-ranking Pemex employee in Mexicali as early as next week, an official of the Mexican ministry of ecology said.

Investigators believe Pemex truckers repeatedly have drained oily wastes along the border near Mt. Signal, a few miles southwest of El Centro, according to Assistant U.S. Atty. Charles S. Crandall. Environmental officials from the two countries are working together to determine on which side of the international boundary the additional dumping took place, he said.

If the cooperative effort is successful, officials will have turned a major embarrassment into a notable success for a new U.S.-Mexican agreement to stem the transport of hazardous wastes across the border.

The improper dumping was first detected Nov. 18, when U.S. Border Patrol officers saw Pemex truckers draining oily sludge from two 5,000-gallon tankers on federal land a few hundred yards north of the border at Mt. Signal Road. Officers arrested Francisco Macias Lujan of Mexicali, but the other Pemex workers fled into Mexico with the trucks.

Less than a week before, the United States and Mexico had signed an agreement requiring each country to notify the other before wastes were carried across the border.

Imperial County health officials were outraged by the apparent flouting of the pact, describing the dumping as a significant international incident. But officials of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency were more subdued, saying Mexican authorities also were dismayed by the dumping and had pledged to abide by the bilateral pact and investigate the incident.

Crandall said Thursday it seemed the pact was working after all.

“The office is hopeful this case will be an example we can build on for the future in terms of cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico in the area of environmental concerns at the border,” he said.

“There’s a specific provision in the agreement we just signed for the exchange of information,” Crandall explained. “That’s what we hope to do. We hope it will result in effective enforcement for both countries.”

Geronimo Esquina, Baja California chief of the Mexican Secretariat of Urban Development and Ecology, said Thursday that Mexico, too, values the new pact with the United States.

“We have a very important agreement,” Esquina said in a telephone interview from his office in Mexicali. “We have worked by the terms of that agreement.”

Pemex is cooperating with Mexican officials in the inquiry, Esquina said. Investigators believe a Pemex official in Mexicali ordered the dumping without clearance from the government or from higher-ups in the oil company. The official may be charged as early as next week, he said.

“We feel this was the action of individuals who acted wrongly,” Esquina said. “In no way is the government of Mexico in agreement with this action.”

Investigators, he said, have found that the truckers drained their tankers on the Mexican side of the border on Nov. 17, a day before the incident on the U.S. side.

Macias Lujan has insisted that he did not know which side of the border he was on at the time he was arrested. He faces a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a $100,000 fine, but Crandall said prosecutors will recommend that he be placed on probation if he fulfills his promise to cooperate in the investigation.