Doubts Voiced About U.S.-Mexico Plan : Border: A wide range of critics find fault with proposal for protecting the environment if a free-trade agreement leads to increased protection.

Conservationists, labor groups, government officials and a wide array of other speakers voiced serious misgivings Monday about a joint U.S.-Mexico plan to improve and protect the environment near the border during an anticipated period of unfettered trade.

“An insult from conception to delivery,” is how Diane Takvorian, executive director of the Environmental Health Coalition, a San Diego-based advocacy group, characterized the document during a hearing in San Diego, the latest in a series of such public sessions being held in border cities from California to Texas, and from the Mexican states of Baja California to Tamaulipas.

Similar heated complaints were voiced later in Tijuana, Mexico, where the two nations’ environmental departments--the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Mexican Secretariat of Urban Development and Ecology--held a second public forum.

“We don’t think this is a real plan,” said Naachiely Lopez Hurtado, secretary-general in Tijuana of the Mexican Ecologist Party, a recently formed, conservation-minded political group.

The joint plan, known formally as the Integrated Environmental Plan for the Mexico-U.S. Border Area, is designed to address ecological concerns that have emerged as perhaps the most pronounced obstacle to discussions of a North American Free Trade Agreement involving the United States, Mexico and Canada.

Detractors call the draft plan no more than a catalogue of problems, containing few concrete suggestions and no funding for curtailing pollution.

Among the greatests concerns: Flows of raw sewage and industrial wastes from Tijuana into San Diego, serious air pollution in the twin cities of El Paso, Tex., and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and agricultural, residential and commercial tainting of the Rio Grande, a prime source of water for drinking and irrigation.

The increased production anticipated as a result of the free-trade pact would only worsen those problems, critics say.

The public hearings were designed to elicit the opinions of border-area residents, noted Sylvia Correa, the EPA’s manager of Latin-American programs, who has participated in all the sessions.

“We knew we’d get creamed,” Correa said. “But we wanted to hear what the people had to say.”

Coordinating the opposition has been a coalition of labor, environmental and human rights groups, which have called for suspension of free-trade talks until ecological and worker-protection issues are addressed more fully. U.S. labor unions fear that free trade will hasten the departure of jobs south of the border, where wages are often one-eighth or less than those in the United States.

A particular target was the so-called maquiladora industry--mostly subsidiaries of U.S. firms that have set up shop in Mexico during the past 25 years, drawn in part by cheap labor and relaxed environmental and worker-safety controls.

Critics charge that the foreign plants, clustered in Tijuana and other Mexican border cities and mostly exporting products to the United States, illegally deposit vast quantities of untreated toxic wastes into border-area waterways, sewage systems and dumps, and that workers, predominantly young women, are routinely exposed to hazardous materials.

Executives of the maquiladora industry vehemently dispute those claims.