Foreign-Owned Companies Add to Mexico’s Pollution : Environment: Some fear that free-trade pact will increase the number of firms depositing toxic wastes.

Carmen Parra has a message for the cluster of foreign-owned factories, mostly of U.S. origin, atop the mesa northeast of her Tijuana neighborhood, Fraccionamiento Murua.

“Let them send their wastes back to their side of the border!” Parra, a mother of three, declared from her front yard, which faces the fetid Rio Alamar, a stream choked with household and industrial effluent.

A mile upstream from Parra’s home, water pouring from a concrete outfall below the heavily industrialized mesa showed levels of mercury almost five times the maximum freshwater health standards of U.S. and California law, according to independent testing by The Times in August. Mercury is a highly toxic metal linked to brain damage and birth defects that is still used in some manufacturing processes. The outfall flows into the Rio Alamar.

A nearby well, its acrid-smelling water widely used for household washing, had elevated levels of methylene chloride, an industrial solvent that is a suspected carcinogen, The Times tests showed. High readings of 1,1,1 trichloroethane, a less toxic solvent, also were present. Both substances are used in the electronics industry well-represented on the mesa.

Here, and in scores of other communities along Mexico’s northern frontier, is what some fear is a disquieting portent of a free-trade future: The degeneration of an ecosystem already ravaged by refuse dumped by U.S. subsidiaries gone south in search of cheap labor and relaxed environmental and work-safety standards.

Authorities in both nations have long acknowledged that some of the proliferating numbers of multinational firms, known as maquiladoras, have illicitly deposited toxic waste--no one knows how much--at Mexican dump sites and into border waterways, such as the channel flowing sluggishly past Parra’s home. But quantifiable data is hard to come by, part of a monumental information void on the scope of the problem.

One thing is clear: Only a small portion of the hazardous waste generated by the estimated 2,000 maquiladora plants throughout Mexico is being disposed of in accordance with Mexican law, which requires that most be returned to the nation of origin, usually the United States. Shipping north to licensed landfills is an expensive process, costing as much as $500 a barrel, and paperwork monitored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency shows that only a fraction of the waste crosses the border.

Some of the rest is being stockpiled in Mexico, often illegally, regulators say. Only a small percentage of maquiladora toxic byproducts are recycled in the handful of authorized facilities south of the border.

Recent analyses of samples culled from waterways and sewage pipes from Tijuana on the Pacific Coast to Matamoros on the Gulf of Mexico strongly suggest that many have become dumping venues for a volatile mix of untreated effluent from the maquiladora industry.

* Extensive EPA-sponsored testing last year of Tijuana sewage and of the murky waters of the Tijuana River documented surges of a wide range of hazardous chemicals used in maquiladoras, including solvents and heavy metals. The industrial waste problem is so serious that engineers fear the toxins could hamper operations of a $200-million binational sewage treatment plant expected to be completed by 1995.

* More than 100 miles east of Tijuana, the New River flows from Mexicali into Imperial County, its sudsy waters conveying solvents and other industrial byproducts, along with pesticides and domestic sewage, according to periodic analyses since 1983 by the California Regional Water Quality Control Board. The river empties into Salton Sea, California’s largest lake and the site of a national wildlife refuge. “I worry that the poisons in the river may do harm to our children,” said Maria de Los Angeles Canett, a 24-year-old mother of two who lives in an impoverished Mexicali squatter’s neighborhood constructed atop a former dump bisected by the Rio Nuevo, as it is known here.

* In Nogales, Ariz., and El Paso, Tex., there is fear that discharges from maquiladoras, already detected in area waterways, may be tainting ground-water supplies. Along the Rio Grande, the international boundary for about 1,200 miles between Texas and Mexico and a prime source of water for drinking, irrigation and recreation, deformed fish are an indication of widespread befouling.

Below Tijuana’s Mesa de Otay, home to dozens of maquiladoras, complaints from Parra and other residents prompted The Times to test waters from a well and an outfall leading from the mesa into an arroyo. Neighbors blame rashes, hair loss, persistent sore throats and sundry other ailments on the malodorous tributaries. “This is a contaminated zone,” said Juan Manuel Sanchez Leon, a physician who practices down the street from Parra’s home. “People here have complained about it, but no one listens.”

Although Mexican industry likely contributes to the toxic brew found in border channels, experts say that the volume and type of industrial pollutants point toward the overwhelmingly U.S.-owned maquiladoras.

“It is apparent that some corporations have ignored environmental concerns in the construction and operation of their maquiladora facilities,” John Hall, chairman of the Texas Water Commission, stated in a recent letter to the EPA. “Consequently, tons and tons of toxic materials are being improperly disposed of along the border.”

Industry officials scoff at the notion that the maquiladoras are illicitly disposing large volumes of hazardous refuse, insisting that the bulk is returned north. “I would say most of it is going back to the United States,” said Guillermo A. Jiron, a consultant who heads the Tijuana Maquiladora Assn.’s environmental committee. “Our industry is a clean one and we show extreme compliance with the law.”

Jiron theorized that a confusing maze of paperwork had baffled U.S. and Mexican regulators attempting to determine how much waste is being shipped to the United States.

Although authorities in both nations say they have put considerable effort into tracking the document trail, they have unearthed little evidence that the expected volume of maquiladora byproducts is leaving Mexico.

During the first six months of 1991, only 63 firms in Mexico reported sending wastes to California and Arizona, according to the EPA. That figure continues an upward trend; only 37 reported shipments to California and Arizona during all of 1990. But it remains “a minuscule number” compared to the almost 1,000 maquiladoras in the neighboring Mexican states of Baja California and Sonora, including more than 500 in Tijuana, said Kathleen Shimmin, chief of health emergency planning in the EPA’s San Francisco office.

But Mexican inspectors who visited some 1,000 maquiladora facilities nationwide this year found that about one-third could provide proof that waste was being returned to its country of origin, said Sergio Reyes Lujan, ecology undersecretary for the Mexican Secretariat of Urban Development and Ecology, the nation’s environmental ministry (known by its Spanish acronym SEDUE). A year earlier, Reyes said, fewer than 15% of the plants possessed the paperwork.

While Mexican authorities have embarked on a much-publicized crackdown--”SEDUE will shut down any plant that continues to contaminate the environment,” Reyes vowed during a recent interview--officials acknowledge that only slightly more than half of the maquiladoras producing toxic byproducts likely qualify for environmental operating licenses. The officials could not say how many even have the licenses. The volume of toxic waste produced also remains a mystery.

“We need to have an inventory,” said Rene Altamirano, SEDUE’s director general of prevention and control of environmental pollution, who said that the agency was conducting an industrywide survey to answer this and other questions. “It’s important that we have the numbers.”

In both nations, environmentalists and others fearful of a free-trade regimen say Mexico does not possess adequate regulatory funds, sufficient landfills, waste removal expertise and technology needed to regulate polluters and properly dispose of ever-expanding waste flows. The much-ballyhooed recent enhanced enforcement, critics suggest, is largely designed to craft a get-tough public relations image to win over skeptics to the free-trade cause.

“Our laws are good, but the government doesn’t possess the will and the resources to apply them,” said Naachiely Lopez Hurtado, a representative in Tijuana of the recently formed Ecologist Party of Mexico.

To Lopez and others, it seems unlikely that a national leadership facing a decade-long economic crisis will risk antagonizing investors, foreign or domestic, no matter how grievously they may sully air, land and water. The maquiladoras generate about $4 billion annually, making the industry Mexico’s second-largest cash provider, after oil.

Only in the past few years has Mexico begun to enact comprehensive environmental laws, often based on U.S. statutes. This year, Mexican regulators say they have temporarily shut down dozens of domestic and foreign industrial polluters in the border region and dispatched 50 new inspectors to the northernmost states.

In all, about 100 inspectors now cover the massive area, a number everyone admits is woefully inadequate, though it represents a near-quadrupling of 1990 enforcement staff levels. Simultaneously, Mexican authorities are seeking to eliminate the wholesale trading and sale of junked U.S.-made chemical drums that once contained hazardous material used in the maquiladoras and other factories. (Residents commonly use the drums for storing water.)

“If companies want to be polluters and violate our laws, we don’t want them here,” said SEDUE’s Altamirano.

While a free-trade pact would presumably sweep away the preferential tariff and duty provisions that spawned the maquiladoras a quarter-century ago, experts expect that unfettered trade will translate into a further boom in such production facilities, drawn principally by Mexico’s low prevailing wage rates and proximity to lucrative U.S. markets. That will mean more toxic trash--an unnerving prospect for the border region’s more than 6 million inhabitants.

While maquiladora executives boast that theirs is a “clean industry,” the factories, which produce a wide range of products almost exclusively for U.S. markets--including auto and aircraft parts, furniture, toys, computers, televisions, clothing and foodstuffs--consume and produce vast quantities of unsafe materials. Solvents, acids, resins, paints, plastics, oils, varnishes, heavy metals and pesticides are among toxins left over after production.

Although methods of handling, transporting and disposing of such waste are delineated in Mexican and U.S. law, transborder industrialists complain that the phalanx of statutes and regulations in the two nations stymies compliance. “The administrative policies and the documentation of the United States and Mexico governing shipments of dangerous materials are so voluminous, complicated, and at times redundant, that even the most conscientious company can have problems complying with the regulations,” said Mario Gutierrez, who heads the environmental committee of the Matamoros Maquiladora Assn., a trade group representing transnational firms in that border city.

In April, Mexican inspectors briefly shut down a General Motors auto parts facility in Matamoros for improper handling of waste. Soon afterward, the U.S. company announced that, where necessary, it would refit its Mexican operations with pollution abatement equipment--the kind of “pre-treatment” apparatus mandated in the United States since the Clean Water Act of 1972.

That landmark statute generally requires that industries cleanse effluent before discharging it into sewers or waterways. Such pre-treatment--considered by U.S. authorities to be a seminal tool in moderating water pollution--remains embryonic in Mexico, experts say, even though Mexican law theoretically requires that industrial wastes undergo a similar regimen.

“I don’t know personally of any pre-treatment that’s going on in maquiladoras, though it could be under way on a small scale with specific facilities,” said Diahn Perry, director of international programs at UCLA’s Center of Occupational and Environmental Health, which conducts periodic training sessions for Mexican regulators.

Some see a double standard: Corporations pre-treat their industrial wastes in the United States, but in their Mexican operations, the same companies deposit the byproducts directly into sewage systems and waterways. “You operate under the rules and regulations of the country in which you’re a guest doing business,” said Jerry Bishop, a GM spokesman.

General Motors’ decision to install the kind of pre-treatment equipment long present at its U.S. facilities came after environmental advocacy groups publicly accused a separate GM auto components plant of dumping xylene--a common solvent linked to lung, liver and kidney damage and other ill effects--into a Matamoros canal. GM executives heatedly deny the charge. Only minuscule amounts of xylene may have been released, they said.

Before reaching the GM facility, the canal meanders behind several chemical and pesticide firms, mostly U.S.-owned, and along the fringes of a densely populated neighborhood known as Colonia Chorizo. “Sometimes there’s a rancid odor and we all run inside,” said Juana Sifuentes, a mother of three who lives in a wooden shack about 50 yards from the canal.

The scene is not dissimilar along fetid rivulets coursing through fast-growing eastern Tijuana and other border metropolises.

Salvador Sanchez, who has kept pigs along the Rio Alamar in eastern Tijuana for two decades, said he has seen firsthand what the toxic mix regularly ingested by his swine has wrought: The average weight of 4 1/2-month-old piglets has plummeted by almost one-third during the past six years, while sows have suffered diminished fertility, miscarriages or greatly reduced numbers of offspring. Those increasingly are born with deformities and terminal liver damage.

“It’s the stuff they’re dumping in from the American factories,” Sanchez, 69, and the father of 12, contends. “This water has acid in it. It has chemicals. Sometimes it’s yellow, sometimes it’s green. Unfortunately, I can’t keep my pigs out of it.”

Further downstream in the Tijuana River, the channel that is the drainage destination of the Rio Alamar and much of the sewage generated by Tijuana’s growing population and industries, EPA tests showed high levels of various industrial discharges. In April, 1990, levels of lead--a highly toxic metal that can attack the brain and nervous system--were recorded on the U.S. side of the Tijuana River at 768 parts per billion, almost 100 times the U.S. maximum standard for human health purposes.

U.S. and Mexican officials downplay the potential health consequences of the Tijuana River’s industrial pollutants, noting that the channel is not a source of drinking water, fish or other edible aquatic life. However, the river has long been a depository of pathogens found in residential sewage, a health threat so severe that California this spring declared a state of emergency in the Tijuana River Valley.

In Tijuana, thousands of people reside near the banks of the river and its tributaries, regularly collecting the water for washing, livestock and irrigation. Inhabitants also make liberal use of adjacent wells, which are periodically recharged with river flows. Environmentalists and others in both nations worry that the industrial toxins being discharged may be linked to long-term health problems even more insidious than those produced by the residential sewage.

“I don’t want to be alarmist here, but what is happening is that people are being exposed to a toxic soup in their everyday activities,” said Marco Kaltofen, laboratory director at the National Toxic Campaign Fund, a Boston-based environmental advocacy group, who reviewed the findings of the EPA tests from the Tijuana area. “There’s no way we can predict what risk people are running for increased cancer, liver and kidney diseases, for other problems. All we know is that the outcome will be bad.”

Once in San Diego, the Tijuana River winds through an agricultural strip before emptying into sensitive Pacific coastal wetlands--a thriving habitat for various endangered bird species. Some fear that the toxins could work their way up the food chain from here. An adjacent two miles of state beach have been quarantined for almost a decade because of high bacteria counts.

Near the international boundary, thousands of illegal immigrants heading north on foot regularly traverse the Tijuana River and adjoining channels, swamps and ponds. Despite their haste and lack of funds, many pause and invest 50 cents in a pair of clear plastic bags hawked by enterprising salespersons who urge northbound travelers to yank the sacks over their shoes.

“This river can make you sick,” said Ismael Alvarado, a 28-year-old border vendor from Mexico City, who said he has experienced headaches and rashes because of the fumes and contact with the waters of the foul, cement-lined channel where he daily sells chewing gum, sandwiches and other foods to migrants en route north. “We’re being poisoned here.”

THE BORDER ENVIRONMENT A look at factors in the troubled environment along the U.S.-Mexico border: MAQUILADORAS: ENVIRONMENTAL CULPRITS? * What They Are: Maquiladoras are factories and assembly plants, mostly U.S.-owned, that have set up shop in Mexico since 1965, when Mexico City and Washington established the industry via special tariff exemptions and other preferential guidelines. The concept proved attractive to firms seeking cheap labor, relaxed environmental and worker-safety standards, and quick access to the U.S. consumer market. * The Numbers: There are currently more than 2,000 such facilities, employing some 500,000 workers, mostly in fast-growing cities along Mexico’s northern border. * The Products: The so-called maquilas-- after a word used in colonial times for a grain-milling fee--produce everything from televisions to toys, furniture to foodstuffs, almost exclusively for export to the United States. * The Environmental Factor: The industry utilizes vast quantities of toxic materials, including solvents, heavy metals and a wide array of dangerous chemicals. What happens to the huge volume of hazardous waste generated is somewhat of a a mystery, but there is suspicion that much is being deposited into sewage systems, waterways, arroyos, dumps and unauthorized storage sites in Mexico. PROBLEMS AND TROUBLE SPOTS Fouled Waterways Various U.S.-Mexico border channels are polluted with sewage, industrial wastes and/or agricultural runoff: A. Tijuana River: Flows from Tijuana to San Diego, emptying into the Pacific at sensitive wetlands area. Daily carries up to 12 million gallons of raw sewage, spiked with industrial wastes, into the San Diego area, where the river flows through a residential and agricultural zone and into a sensitive wetlands habitat, adjacent to a state beach. In Mexico, thousands live alongside the river and its tributaries, often using its waters for washing. B. New River: Long considered one of North America’s most polluted waterways, the river carries agricultural, industrial and domestic wastes from Mexicali, Mexico, to Imperial County, California. Flows though densely populated residential areas in Mexicali, capital of the Mexican state of Baja California. The river empties into the Salton Sea, California’s largest lake, a popular resort are and site of a national wildlife refuge. C. Nogales Wash: Flows from Nogales, Sonora, in Mexico, to Nogales, Arizona, emptying into the Santa Cruz River. There is evidence of some pollution of groundwater drinking wells on U.S. side. D. Rio Grande: Flows south from Colorado, joining the border at El Paso, Texas, (Ciudad Juarez, Mex.) and defining the international boundary until emptying into the Gulf of Mexico at the Brownsville,Texas/Matamoros, Mexico, area. Raw sewage and industrial contaminants have sullied the once-majestic channel, which has long been tamed with dams and, in the El Paso-Ciudad Juarez area, concrete flood-control banks. The river is a major source of water for drinking and irrigation in the two nations. Tainted Air Smoke and other emissions belching from vehicles, factories, smelters and open fires have combined to create significant air pollution in various U.S.-Mexico “sister cities,” where most of the border zone’s population is concentrated. Ports of entry, characterized by huge traffic backups, contribute mightily to the photochemical haze. A look at areas where tainted air is a major problem: 1. San Diego/Tijuana: San Diego has severe air pollution; ozone is most significant pollutant, as it is elsewhere in California, but inhalable particulates, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide are also sometimes present in high concentrations. Sparse emissions data for Tijuana, but city shares an atmospheric basin--and smog--with San Diego. 2. Mexicali/Imperial County: Inhalable particulate concentrations have exceeded standards on U.S. side; likely also reach unhealthy levels in neighboring Mexican city of Mexicali. 3. Southern Arizona/Northern Sonora, Mexico: Large-scale emissions of sulfur dioxide--a noxious gas that can cause respiratory difficulties and even lung failure--have long been associated with copper smelters on both sides of the border. The problem eased considerably after 1985, following signing of a binational agreement designed to reduce the offending fumes. Of five smelters on the U.S. side of the border area, two have been shut down; the others have instituted major efforts to control of sulfur dioxide and particulate emissions. 4. Ciudad Juarez, Mexico/El Paso, Texas: El Paso and adjoining community of Sunland Park, New Mexico, have long failed to meet U.S. standards for various pollutants, including ozone, inhalable particulates and carbon monoxide. The two U.S. cities and Ciudad Juarez, Mex., share a basin cupped by mountains that act as a trap for the smog. 5. Big Bend National Park and Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas: Occasional visibility problems in these two mostly pristine parks in rural West Texas have been linked to border area air pollution. NOTE: Generally, a lack of monitoring on the Mexican side of the border makes it difficult to quantify air pollution south of border.