Free-Trade Pact Targeted by Protesters : Border: About 500 workers, and labor and environmental leaders rally against agreement.

Nearly 500 people, including garment workers, labor and environmental leaders, joined Thursday at the U.S.-Mexico border to protest the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement.

Chanting “$4 a day, no way!” the demonstration against the trade agreement was one of the largest thus far in San Diego County, which analysts say will feel an immediate impact from the agreement.

The event, sponsored by the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union and the AFL-CIO, was largely orchestrated: American Fashion Inc. in Chula Vista closed for three hours so that about 475 of the clothing plant’s 500 workers could take 10 school buses to the rally, held at a parking lot at the border.

Union leaders contend that approval of the trade agreement will lower American salaries in manufacturing jobs.

“I know for a fact I’ll eventually be making $6 an hour less (if the trade agreement is ratified),” said Alan Gilbert, a lining spreader and one of hundreds of American Fashion Inc. workers who forfeited three hours’ pay to attend the rally.

Raul Marquez, leader of Mexico’s Authentic Labor Front, which he said is the only union not under government control in Mexico, said Mexican workers are already facing “miserable salaries with U.S. companies that have transferred to Mexico. The corporations have added to the destruction of our country and our health.

“We must unite the Mexican, American and Canadian workers,” he told the crowd, most of whom carried manufactured signs stating, “Free Trade Is Not Free--You Will Pay With Your Job.”

“These workers are fighting for their jobs,” said Rick Bunch, director of industrial relations at American Fashion. “If they don’t, they’ll see their jobs go south of the border.”

Bunch was asked whether his company plans to move to Mexico if the agreement is approved.

“I don’t think so,” Bunch said, “but, if we can’t compete with these (foreign) plants paying miserable wages, we’ll be out of business.”

Union and environmental leaders repeatedly criticized President Bush and asserted that he has helped corporate America shift jobs overseas and, as a result, exploit cheap foreign labor and drive down wages in the United States.

A report released recently by a committee of 21 international unions contends the U.S. State Department’s Agency for International Development has spent more than $1 billion over the past 12 years on programs to encourage U.S. manufacturers, particularly apparel firms, to lay off U.S. workers and take advantage of cheap labor in Central America and the Caribbean.

The report was prepared by the National Labor Committee Education Fund in Support of Worker and Human Rights in Central America.

Environmentalists from both sides of the border--some speaking Spanish and others English--also took to the stage during the rally. They decried what they allege is environmental insensitivity by U.S. and other foreign corporations in Mexico, where environmental laws are tough, they said, but enforcement has until very recently been lax by U.S. standards.

Environmentalist and Tijuana community leader Maurilio Sanchez spoke in an interview after the rally of what he said are many irresponsible, polluting maquiladoras in Tijuana’s oldest industrial park, called Ciudad Industrial and situated just south of Otay Mesa.

He said the maquiladoras there are likely culprits in five recent cases of babies being born without brains in a neighborhood near Ciudad Industrial called Colonia Chilpancingo.

Doctors are trying to determine the exact cause of the five cases, he said.

Five minutes south of the border, he explained through an interpreter, “We have people with skin problems, intestinal problems, and bronchial problems.

“We’re about to complete a decade of suffering with industrial contamination from the maquiladoras. “

The rally, depressing in tone but lifted by interludes from mariachis, included campaign rhetoric from San Diego mayoral candidate Peter Navarro and San Diego Councilman and congressional hopeful Bob Filner.

“I believe NAFTA ought to be called SHAFTA,” Navarro told the crowd. “I’m an economist. . . . I can tell you as an expert on international trade that, if you have wages across the border at $1.50 an hour and work over here at $6 an hour, all you’re going to have is exported jobs.”

Besides, he asked, “Who’s going to pay for all the infrastructure to accommodate all the trade across the border? The city’s broke; the county’s broke; the state’s broke.”

The rally was the southernmost destination of the Teamsters-backed Economic Earthquake Express, a caravan that includes a semi-truck with a pop-up stage and a truck full of video displays and literature that illustrate the alleged economic and environmental ills of NAFTA.

The caravan has logged more than 8,000 miles since it hit the road Sept. 4. It has served as a rallying point for anti-NAFTA events in 52 California cities, organizers said.