Border Meeting Closes in Amity : Cooperation: U.S. and Mexican governors praise the Free Trade Agreement and vow to work together to fight growing environmental hazards along the border.

U.S. and Mexican border states must work together against environmental dangers that are likely to grow as trade increases between the two nations, the governors of the border states said Friday.

At an amiable but uneventful two-day conference in San Diego, the governors extolled the projected economic benefits of the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement to a region where binational economic integration is already becoming a reality.

But the 10 governors devoted much of their time to the problems of industrial pollution and dumping of toxic waste that the trans-border economy has produced.

The most significant event of the conference did not even occur at the conference but was clearly timed as a get-tough message: the Mexican federal government Thursday revoked with great fanfare the operating license of an embattled toxic waste incinerator in Tijuana just south of the border.

“We cannot let the environment suffer for reasons of economic development,” said Baja California Gov. Ernesto Ruffo Appel, who co-chaired the conference with Gov. Pete Wilson. They were joined by the governors of Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and the Mexican governors of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Sonora and Tamaulipas.

Two weeks ago, environmental activists from both countries led a series of simultaneous protests against the incinerator, and three proposed hazardous waste facilities along the Texas border. Wilson said the governors are keenly aware of such concerns.

“Overall, we welcome as a very good first step the border Integrated Environmental Plan” approved last month by the U.S. and Mexico, Wilson said.

A joint communique by the governors Friday supported the binational $850-million border cleanup plan and more federal funds to augment the burdened border infrastructure--bridges, crossings, and federal customs and immigration agencies.

However, the conference was notable for the issues that weren’t mentioned.

Asked about the absence of illegal immigration from the agenda, for example, Wilson said: “Indirectly it has been addressed.”

Wilson predicted that the free trade agreement will reduce illegal immigration by creating jobs in Mexico.

He quoted Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s expressed desire to “export goods, not people . . . to keep the risk takers, some of the most courageous of his people at home, to provide the energy and the drive for the Mexican economy.”

There are critics of the proposed agreement who question that widely held analysis.

Some Mexican migrant advocates and U.S. conservatives and other groups predict that illegal immigration will continue unabated because of an accelerated population shift to the economically developed Mexican border areas and entrenched poverty in that country.

Craig Merrilees of the Fair Trade Campaign said his coalition supports a trade agreement, but believes the current proposal doesn’t do enough to protect the environment and U.S. jobs. He said he views the governors’ communique “essentially as fluff piece. There was nothing new.”

He also took issue with the governors’ praise of the border environmental plan, which critics have called inadequate.

“It’s a taxpayer-supported bailout for costs of cleanup and infrastructure which should be paid for by the polluters,” Merrilees said. “It’s subsidizing companies that have turned their back on America, fled for the border and ignored environmental laws down there.”

Jose Bravo of the San Diego-based Environmental Health Coalition said both U.S. and Mexican environmental activists were disappointed in the conference.

“The free trade agreement has to take into account the poisoning of communities in Mexico,” he said. “As far as we see it now, that’s already happening. They talked about it a lot but it wasn’t anything new.”

The governors were also asked Friday about violence at the border. Both Wilson and Ruffo said increased cooperation between U.S and Mexican law enforcement has markedly reduced crime and human rights problems at the much-traversed San Diego-Tijuana border. They suggested that the concept of Grupo Beta, a multi-agency Mexican police unit created to fight border crime, be reproduced in other border hot spots.