Environmental Nightmare on U.S.-Mexican Border Abates

Domingo Gonzalez and Jose Magdaleno Rodriguez, two well-dressed environmental activists, appeared out of place amid the acrid smoke, gulls and ragged scavengers at the city garbage dump here.

But they still fought through tears and burning lungs to poke through piles and piles of plastic car parts, asbestos, acetate, rubber and other industrial materials.

They were hunting for evidence to show that some of the largest corporations in the United States and Mexico might be to blame for illegal dumping just south of the border. Gonzalez calls it his weekly toxic tour.

Meanwhile, nearby in the sleepy Texas border town of Brownsville, Maria Guadelupe Esparza, 25, sat in her lawyer’s office and helped to further explain the environmentalists’ labors.

She said she was one of 16 mothers paid at least $100,000 each in a $17-million settlement last year with 40 U.S. and Mexican manufacturers.

The companies make everything from windshield wipers to hydrofluoric acid with cheap Mexican labor.

Esparza and the other mothers accused the firms in a 1993 civil lawsuit of killing or deforming more than a dozen newborn babies with factory emissions and the burning of toxic waste at the Matamoros dump.

“The moment they cut the umbilical cord, my baby died,” Esparza said. Her child suffered from anencephaly, a birth defect that the lawsuit linked to toxic emissions.

But she and others hope that such problems are in the past.

In the last two years, fueled largely by environmental requirements of the North American Free Trade Agreement and by the out-of-court settlement in the Brownsville case, the mentality that created an environmental nightmare along the U.S.-Mexican border is changing, they say.

The shift is incremental. As Gonzalez routinely and easily proves each week, illegal dumping continues apace in places such as Matamoros, which, during the debate over the North American trade accord, had become emblematic of border environmental woes.

But the self-styled environmentalist said the volume of discarded toxins is a fraction of what it would have been without NAFTA.

Some of the worst corporate offenders that helped turn parts of Matamoros’ “Chemical Row” into a wasteland have left; others have begun to change the way they do business outside the reach of U.S. environmental laws.

Even Esparza, who gave birth to a healthy girl a year after her other child died, said she believes that the border companies--known here as maquiladoras--are improving.

“I want to think they have changed,” she said. “When I lost the baby, I started drinking more bottled water, eating healthier foods and visiting the doctor regularly. And my new baby is very healthy. If I can change, I figure they can too.”

For the companies that settled with the mothers--without admitting guilt or fault--the change has been complex, costly and slow.

But it has begun at the sprawling Finsa industrial complex here. Opened in 1967, it quickly attracted U.S. and Mexican companies in search of cheap labor.

The complex now is home to 22 factories that employ 20,000 people at an average wage of $26 for a six-day workweek.

In the years since the lawsuit--and since NAFTA took effect, inspiring tougher environmental enforcement for companies operating south of the border--Felipe Fernando Paulin, the complex’s environmental director, said the factories have spent millions of dollars on sewage treatment, environmental studies and limited cleanup projects.

The centerpiece of its environmental effort is a $1-million pilot sewage-treatment plant. It is among the first efforts underwritten by the North American Development Bank, a lender created under the free-trade accord to finance border environmental projects.

“Since NAFTA, everything is on display,” Paulin said. “You can’t hide anything. . . . Our aim is to create ecological industry.”

Environmentalists in the agencies created under the trade accord to monitor the border--and even activists such as Gonzalez and Magdaleno--praised the treatment facilities installed by General Motors as indications of growing corporate consciousness.

They also said they are pleased with efforts by companies in the Matamoros industrial park to clean up a badly polluted canal running through the complex.

The canal flows into worker slums nearby, where, Gonzalez said, “almost everybody has some kind of respiratory problems and skin problems.”

“The changes [to improve the environment] are never dramatic,” Gonzalez added. “They happen very, very slowly.”

But the mess in Matamoros--and at other border sites--is huge.

It will take a long time to clean up. Meanwhile, it is dirty business as usual for other firms, he and others said.

During their search this day, Gonzalez and Magdaleno found a wealth of documents amid solid wastes banned from the dump--the paper records suggesting violations by some of the largest factories in the nearby industrial park.

“If it wouldn’t have been for NAFTA, the situation here would have been much worse,” Gonzalez said. “But, in reality, everything you see here is illegal.”

The officials and factory operators, he noted, “don’t seem to understand that if it’s burning here, they’re breathing it all the way on the other side of the border. It’s the ignorance of the public officials. They don’t understand: It doesn’t have to be toxic.”

Part of the problem, Gonzalez said, lies in Mexico’s disposal system--or lack of one--and its poverty: Garbage is burned here so that professional scavengers can sift out scrap metal for resale.

But when plastics, acetates and a range of other products are incinerated, they produce toxic fumes; the Brownsville lawsuit blamed these, in part, for birth defects in the early 1990s.

The lawsuit said the maquiladoras “failed to identify, manage and dispose of solid- and hazardous-waste materials in the manner required for similar facilities in the United States, thereby allowing emission of volatile and toxic compounds into the atmosphere.”

Gonzalez, who was born in Texas but now lives in Matamoros, observed of the toxins generated by torching garbage: “You don’t have this problem in the United States because you don’t burn these materials. . . . You bury them in sanitary landfills.”

He and Magdaleno are proposing such a facility for Matamoros.

Magdaleno, an engineer who worked as environmental director for the industrial park before he left to start the nonprofit Ecological Community of Matamoros, built a detailed scale model of the landfill.

“The whole thing would cost $2 million, and it would solve everything,” Magdaleno said of the landfill. “But I can’t get a dime for it.”

The two men contrasted their proposal with the $1-million sewage-treatment facility supported by the North American Development Bank to explain a critical issue confronting environmentalists.

“The problem is the [bank] won’t fund cleanup projects,” Gonzalez said. “They see their mandate as limited to new infrastructure. Cleanup is the responsibility of the companies and the community, they say. But the companies will only do so much, and the community doesn’t have any money.”

The lending bank--whose bylaws do limit it to funding new, income-generating projects that can pay for themselves--was just one of several NAFTA institutions designed by the United States, Canada and Mexico to deal with border environmental calamities.

The treaty also created the Border Environment Cooperation Commission, which evaluates projects for the bank from Ciudad Juarez, and the Montreal-based Commission on Environmental Cooperation, empowered to probe nonenforcement of environmental laws but not to prosecute violators.

“What I’m questioning is the bank’s priorities,” Gonzalez said. “Of the first six projects they’re in the process of approving, every one of them is a sewage-treatment or water plant. Not a cent is set aside for cleaning up the mess already here. And not a single sanitary landfill is up for funding.”

“But I’m going to keep trying,” Magdaleno added. “It took decades to create this toxic mess. I’m sure it’s going to take decades to get rid of it.”

Times special correspondent Joel Simon contributed to this report.