PERSPECTIVE ON MEXICO : The Silence of the Labs

A $2.5-million settlement reached two weeks ago with a U.S.-owned battery-recycling firm for cleanup of a toxic-waste site near Tijuana is part of a continuing campaign by the U.S. and Mexican governments to preempt environmental opposition to the pending North American Free Trade Agreement. Unfortunately, preemption of this sort, in the guise of “punishing” the polluter, is one of the milder tactics being used by the two governments to silence critics of rapid industrialization.

(A Gardena company, Alco Pacific, was accused of dumping lead from car batteries; the settlement was with the firm that hired Alco Pacific, RSR Corp. of Dallas, which will pay $2 million for cleanup plus $200,000 in fines and $300,000 to help monitor the cleanup--but the Mexican government says it may cost as much as 10 times the $2 million agreement to clean up the 14-acre site outside Tijuana.)

In the United States, for instance, “fast track” legislation was adopted in 1991 in a deliberate effort to limit congressional debate on NAFTA; the Bush and Clinton administrations have provided minimal public disclosure about negotiations with Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s regime in Mexico.

(A U.S. district judge on Wednesday ordered the Clinton Administration to prepare an environmental impact statement on NAFTA before submitting the trade pact to Congress; that would almost surely delay its implementation.)

In Mexico, efforts by the government to hush environmentalists have been even more overt. For example, much of the public awareness of the toxic dumping at the Tijuana site resulted from investigations conducted by Carmen Hernandez de Vasquez, former head of the civil-protection office for the Tijuana area. Although the initial inquiries resulted from complaints by nearby ranchers that cattle were mysteriously dying, local authorities warned Hernandez that her investigations and public-awareness campaigns were “alarming” the citizenry. She persisted in her work and was abruptly fired in March, 1992.

Hernandez’s fate is not atypical. In fact, many environmental critics have been hushed in recent years by direct action, by intimidation and by research priorities that are changing to accommodate North American integration.

For example, last summer the government closed Mexico City’s Center for Ecodevelopment (CECODES), a highly productive institution that had published about 70 books and 250 papers. As a result, 35 of Mexico’s leading researchers lost their jobs, among them CECODES founder Dr. Ivan Restrepo, an agricultural economist and well-known critic of Mexico’s chemical-and-machinery-intensive export agriculture; Jorge Legorreta, author of a book on transportation and atmospheric contamination in the Mexico City area; Dr. Alejandro Toledo, a critic of the nationalized petroleum industry in the southeastern states; Dr. David Barkin, an agricultural policy specialist, and Dr. Lilia Albert, one of Mexico’s most prominent environmental toxicologists.

Albert’s case is particularly instructive. She had previously led one of the few groups in Mexico doing field research on pesticides and heavy-metals contamination at the National Institute for Research on Biological Resources, which was similarly closed in 1988. That move left 60 researchers out of work.

After the CECODES closing, Albert charged that the same deceptive strategy had been used in both cases: government-appointed committees were given power to decide which research projects would be preserved and false promises of rehiring were made to deprive some scientists of full severance pay.

Another telling case is that of Jesus Arias Chavez, a physicist and professor at the National Polytechnic Institute. A well-known anti-nuclear activist, Chavez founded in the early 1970s the Fundacion Xochicalli, a research and action institute promoting alternative technologies, especially biological digesters. In 1988, the institute’s laboratories and workshops were destroyed by a fire that investigators attributed to arson. The perpetrators were never found.

After the fire, Chavez was denounced in the press as an agitator (which he denies) in a controversy involving the forced removal of squatters in an area south of Mexico City. In May, 1989, he was fired on specious grounds from the institute after 25 years on the faculty. He recently won a court judgment for restitution of severance pay, but remains unemployed except for occasional consulting for foreign governments.

At the same time that critical environmental research was being curtailed, Mexico’s National Council on Science and Technology increased its budget (with help from the World Bank) for industrial research projects that serve the needs of private companies, including foreign corporations. These businesses stand to gain the most from NAFTA.

The political forces at work here are not hard to discern. Researchers whose work lends credence to environmental concerns about North American economic integration lose their funding. Scientific subsidies that promote North American integration have the full political support of national governments, as well World Bank backing.

The Mexican government has a poor record on human and civil rights, including academic freedom and freedom of expression. This undermines the independent research and communication that gives voice to environmental concerns in one of the most polluted countries in the world. The Salinas administration claims that, having pushed through economic reform in its first four years, it will address political reform in the next two.

The preemptive environmentalism of the U.S. and Mexican governments gives little assurance that such reform is actually being accomplished. Compelling evidence of significant change must be a precondition of NAFTA, not an empty promise at its ratification.