Environmentalists Split on Trade Pact Pollution Impact : Cleanup: Backers say agreement is a bold step for U.S.-Mexico border areas. But critics see wider dangers.

At the midpoint of the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, the twin cities of El Paso and Juarez seem to smolder in the late-afternoon sun--a murky, malodorous backdrop to the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In the view of many environmentalists, this populous patch of desert illustrates both the promise and the peril of the proposed trade agreement. Their divergent assessments reflect an unusual schism between activists who fear that the trade pact will undermine U.S. environmental standards and advocates who consider it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to clean up a blighted region and launch an era in which trade policy is firmly linked to environmental preservation.

The neighboring border towns are separated by a river so fetid that an 18-mile stretch is called las aguas negras --the black waters. Juarez, a city of 1.2 million people with no waste-water treatment facilities, dumps about 55 million gallons of raw sewage into the Rio Grande every day.

Nor is the air much cleaner. By day, some 400 open-air auto paint shops spew out clouds of smog-producing compounds. Brick-making operations located throughout Juarez belch black smoke as they fuel their ovens with everything from old tires to scrap plastic to sulfurous diesel fuel. On cool nights, people who live in cardboard shacks and battered trailers burn trash to stay warm and to keep rats at bay.

The environment of this ruined borderland is almost certain to improve if the trade pact is ratified by Congress.

The agreement between the United States, Mexico and Canada would be accompanied by an $8-billion border cleanup initiative. Cities like El Paso and Juarez would get a major infusion of funds for water treatment and air pollution mitigation.

The trade pact would be likely to make El Paso and Juarez a critical node in an expanding network of north-south trade, helping to lift the twin cities out of their grinding poverty and subsidizing improvements in their environmental infrastructure.

In addition, a key side agreement would require Mexico, as well as its trading partners to the north, to aggressively enforce the strict environmental laws that all now have on the books. For the first time, residents of environmental “critical zones” like Juarez would be able to call their government to account for any failure to ensure compliance.

Arguments like these help explain why six of the most influential U.S. environmental groups, representing some 7.5 million members, support the trade agreement, despite some lingering misgivings. They also explain why the Clinton Administration’s senior environmental officials tout NAFTA as “the greenest trade accord ever”--an unprecedented effort to write environmental concerns into the legal framework for trade between nations.

But the environmental community is not speaking with one voice. Some activists fiercely oppose the agreement because of its potential impact on the rest of America’s environment--the land beyond the battered border territory.

The critics include one of the nation’s oldest environmental groups--the Sierra Club--and one of the most active grass-roots organizations--Greenpeace U.S.A. With 2.3 million members between them, their opposition provides more ammunition to an already-withering volley of arguments against ratification.

The pact’s environmental opponents charge that the agreement would create new pressures on the United States and Canada to dilute their relatively strict environmental laws in the interest of maintaining open trade with Mexico.

Cheaper goods and services produced in Mexico with little regard for American environmental standards would flood into the United States, they maintain.

By making it easier to sell such goods in the United States, the accord would create what opponents are calling a “pollution subsidy” for Mexico. They fear that American firms, in turn, would seek to block stricter U.S. environmental protections and roll back those already in place.

Proponents counter that the accord’s side agreement would require its signers to enforce all of the environmental laws on their books. Mexico, they add, already has passed strong environmental laws. What it needs is money and pressure from its own citizens--both of which are expected to increase if the agreement goes into effect--to enforce them.

“We have a tendency in this country to get carried away with processes, sanctions and enforcement technologies,” said William K. Reilly, an advocate of the agreement who headed the Environmental Protection Agency during the George Bush Administration. “The issue is money. The Mexicans have the laws on the books. They just don’t have the means to enforce them.”

Perhaps no aspect of the free trade agreement has touched a raw nerve among environmental activists more than provisions involving public access.

Environmental activists say they fear that the trade accord would blunt the effectiveness of one their most potent weapons--the ability to use U.S. courts to gain access to governmental decision-making processes.

NAFTA may be the first trade agreement to include explicit environmental provisions, but it would not grant environmental activists the level of participation that they have come to expect in the formulation of policy.

And it is not just U.S. environmental policy they have in mind. Many opponents are adamant that they should be given access to Mexico’s courts and policy-making processes--a potential challenge to sovereignty that rankles Mexican government officials and many of that country’s struggling environmentalists.

“The environmental community is based on access and openness,” said John Audley, who until recently directed a trade and environment program for the Sierra Club. “It’s a religion to us. NAFTA doesn’t open the door in the dispute process, and it leaves environmental laws subject to dispute unnecessarily. The process itself is quite closed.”

The Sierra Club contends that the accord effectively “shuts out citizens” from the process under which the three governments would decide whether one country’s environmental laws are being used as a trade barrier in disguise.

“Panels of trade experts, with no special qualifications in environmental issues, would make these vitally important decisions in secret behind closed doors,” the Sierra Club has warned.

In many respects, the debate over the trade agreement’s potential impact on the U.S.-Mexican border region encapsulates the broader split within the environmental community over the agreement.

It is, essentially, a rift between purists and pragmatists--those willing to accept modest steps aimed at improving the environment in concert with trade policy and those who, in the words of one El Paso resident, “want the whole cake.”

Opponents, for instance, insist that no less than $21 billion is needed to bring the border region up to First World environmental standards. But experts like Pete Emerson of the Environmental Defense Fund’s office in Austin, Tex., counter that something is better than nothing at all. And nothing is what Emerson reckons the border area--and environmentalists nationwide--will get if the trade pact is rejected by Congress.

“An environmental side accord gives us a mechanism for the first time ever to have a continent-wide look at environmental problems and to give non-governmental organizations like ours access to the process,” Emerson said. “The problems in El Paso and elsewhere are going to get worse. Without the package, we have all the same problems and none of the tools to deal with them.”

For Mary Kelly, an environmental analyst with the Austin-based Texas Center for Policy Studies, that argument poses a troubling dilemma between pragmatism and principle.

Her group has been active in pressing for environmental improvements along the border, and Kelly said that she recognizes the trade pact’s potential for enhancing that effort. But the center has chosen to oppose the agreement, primarily because of procedural issues of access.

“You’ve got a built-in structure that presumes secrecy, and I think measures to protect the environment only work when the public has access to this information. This is a matter of democracy,” she said.

But in El Paso, U.S. officials who have worked with the Mexican government to build fragile environmental partnerships are not counting on money or cooperation to come their way if the trade agreement is defeated.

“If NAFTA goes down, we’re in trouble,” said Raul V. Munoz Jr., associate director of the El Paso City-County Health District. “I’m afraid the Mexicans will close a lot of the collaborative programs down on us that we’ve worked 10 years to build.”

Reilly agreed that the defeat of the accord would have the same effect throughout Mexico, delivering a significant blow to that country’s fledgling environmental movement and its allies in government.

“This is the large false assumption of NAFTA opponents, who say: ‘We’re not against NAFTA, we’re just against this NAFTA,’ ” Reilly said. “Well, there isn’t going to be a next NAFTA. What President (Carlos) Salinas (de Gortari) has done is something that presidents going back 50 years have been trying to get Mexico to do: to crack down on polluters, to reform the government’s bureaucracy. He’s taken on a lot of sacred cows. If after all this, he doesn’t get his principal priority, his successor will not be able to espouse it. We may see a return to anti- gringo insularity that’s characterized most of Mexican history.”

And that is a prospect that El Paso Mayor Larry Francis, an ardent supporter of the trade agreement, takes personally.

“These opponents, they’re playing Russian roulette with my town,” Francis said in an interview. “They can defeat this agreement and go home at night to their homes in Iowa, where the air is clear and the water is pure. But I’ll still be breathing the same polluted air and living by the same foul water. They’re playing with my future, and I resent that.”