On Texas Border, Outlook for Air Quality Is Murky : Environment: Poverty and lax enforcement of Mexican pollution laws hamper incentives for cleanup.

There is first the clunker factor.

The cars are old here, twice as old as the U. S. average, and that is part of the story of the air. Car dealers go to places like Phoenix and Dallas and Albuquerque to buy junkers and bring them back to El Paso.

The people who live here--the poorest large city in the nation--buy those cars. And when they have used them up, the next stop is across the border in Juarez, where the emission-control devices are often discarded. The cars wheeze along until they die. So the air is fouled even more.

And then there are the people, mostly on the Mexican side, who have no heaters or electricity but have to keep their children warm.

So they burn fires, thousands of them, that send plumes of smoke into the air. They burn wood or cardboard or anything else to generate heat. Even old railroad ties. Each day, trucks filled with cardboard and other burnable materials head south on El Paso’s Paisano Drive toward Juarez. American trash is used to heat Mexican homes.

The city’s dumps regularly catch fire, sending up more black smoke. In winter, the air often is so thick with smoke and grit that it is difficult to see the basin in which El Paso sits from the surrounding mountains.

The small brick factories of Juarez, hundreds of them, burn things like old rubber tires to bake their wares. And that smoke drifts over to El Paso. So does the dirt kicked up on the miles of dirt roads in Juarez.

Finally, there are the maquiladoras, the factories that have operated along the border for two decades, taking advantage of cheap Mexican labor. The monitoring of what they put into the air and the ground has been insignificant for lack of funding on the Mexican side.

Put all that together and it adds up to an American city that rivals Los Angeles and New York in air quality problems. And then include another factor: the North American Free-Trade Agreement.

Things are going to change even more along the border if the free-trade agreement goes into effect. More businesses are expected to move here and set up shop. That means more cars and people and those open fires in the El Paso Basin, where the Juarez and Franklin mountains keep the pollution from dispersing.

It also means more trucks waiting to cross the border, engines idling for hours. This in a city where polluted air has already been cited by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency as posing a health risk to the people who live here. Indeed, the El Paso area exceeded federal pollution standards for carbon monoxide, ozone and inhalable dust 15 days last year, earning it a “serious” rating from the EPA.

There are other places along the border with air quality problems. The EPA has said that improving air quality in the Tijuana-San Diego area and the Mexicali-Imperial County corridor need to be given priority status as the United States and Mexico work to clean up the environment along the border. Pollution has even affected some of the most pristine areas along the border. The spectacular Big Bend National Park of West Texas is often veiled in a haze blown in from Monterrey, hundreds of miles to the south.

But nowhere is air quality worse than in El Paso and in Juarez, where 240 maquiladoras employ 185,000 people. The possibility of an increase in air pollution after free trade is causing concern among city officials and environmentalists who have watched the continued fouling of El Paso’s air despite the implementation of strict air quality laws on both sides of the border--laws that are enforced on the U. S. side but rarely in Mexico.

“Environmentally, I think it’s going to be a disaster,” said Howard Applegate, an environmental consultant who has studied border problems for more than 20 years.

Jesus Reynoso, the city-county supervisor for air pollution control, is equally worried that the pollution will come far in advance of any solutions to the border’s well-documented environmental problems, which also involve the dumping of toxic materials. Juarez does not even have a sewer system.

“When new industry comes into the border area, you’re going to have all these companies coming in with little or no control over their emissions,” Reynoso said.

There is little argument that many companies relocating to Mexico do so because of strict environmental controls on the U. S. side of the border. For instance, the General Accounting Office, Congress’ investigative arm, issued a report last April showing that 78% of the furniture manufacturers relocating from Los Angeles to Mexico did so because of California’s stringent pollution-control laws.

And even with recent improvements, the ability to monitor and test emissions on the Mexican side is woefully inefficient.

“I don’t think Juarez even owns a street sweeper,” Reynoso said.

How the problems in the El Paso-Juarez corridor evolved can be directly equated to the success of the maquiladora programs. Twenty years ago, Juarez was a sleepy little border town whose principal industry was tourism. Soldiers from nearby Ft. Bliss would drink away the evenings in Juarez’s many bars.

As the maquiladora concept grew, Mexicans living in the interior increasingly began migrating to the border in hopes of landing a job.

That worked at first because there were enough jobs. In the early 1980s, however, the bottom fell out of the Mexican economy. The exchange rate went from 12 pesos to the dollar to more than 3,000 pesos per dollar today.

But the flagging economy only drove more people to the border in search of work. They built shanties of cardboard and anything else they could find, with no electricity and no running water. The huts were lined up along dirt roads that flooded often because there was no drainage. In time, the huts covered vast tracts of land and now, according to unofficial estimates, between 1.2 million and 1.8 million people live in Juarez. Combined with El Paso, the population now equals that of Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city.

So intense is the squalor that the colonias , as they are called, bear a strong resemblance to a Palestinian refugee camp. Many are inside this country, 350 in El Paso County alone.

“American and other international industries must be held accountable and responsible for these environmental problems on both sides of the border--not just the north,” Dr. Laurence Nickey, El Paso County health director, told a congressional subcommittee last April. “The U.S.-Mexico border is burning and the flames need to be extinguished before they consume us. Welcome to the other America and the forgotten Texas. I might also say the forgotten Mexico.”

The border problems may have long been overlooked, but the free-trade agreement has brought them into focus. The United States and Mexico are negotiating an environmental plan for the two countries. The EPA is now circulating a rough draft of what it calls the “Integrated Environmental Plan for the Mexico-U.S. Border Area.” The EPA found that air quality in the El Paso area had worsened during the past 10 years and that controlling emissions in Juarez “cannot occur without an ambitious quantification of all Juarez emissions and mitigating those that have a large-scale impact.”

President Carlos Salinas de Gortari has made a name for himself as the first Mexican head of state to give the environment a high billing.

In El Paso, the Mexican equivalent of the EPA, SEDUE, has been upgraded from a field office to a regional office with 15 new inspectors. But Reynoso said there was only one problem: They did not get the other things that generally would go with a manpower increase, such as vehicles, furniture or office supplies.

“It’s not so much that their heart is not in the right place,” he said. “They don’t have the supplies or the manpower to do the job they need to do.”

Still, there are small signs of progress, such as a joint effort by El Paso and Juarez to test auto emissions on both sides of the border. While that may seem insignificant, a sense of national pride on the Mexican side has worked to keep American assistance at bay until now. But having discovered the obvious--that cars on the Mexican side are fouling the air more than they should--there is little that can be done because of the grinding poverty in Juarez.

“To buy a set of points and plugs is a week’s wages in Mexico,” Applegate said. “You can’t expect them to spend a week’s wages to meet our standards.”

What success will be had in cleaning up the border air is clearly a project that will take years. Don Michie, a maquiladora expert at the University of Texas at El Paso said he believes the free-trade agreement may be a means to an end because debate has focused so heavily on the environment.

“It’s a way to focus resources on the problem,” he said. “The public attention is focused.”

El Paso: Facts and Figures Population: 515,342 Breakdown:

Anglo: 38%

Latino: 57%

Black: 3.4%

Other: 1.6% Per capita income: $9,177 (1986) Unemployment: 10.2% (Sept. 1991) Business: Government operations (military installations, federal prison), tourism, varied manufacturers, ore smelting, refining, cotton, food processing.