Borderline Efforts on Pollution

It’s Friday night in the Rio Grande Valley, and a weekend bucket brigade is lining up to get drinking water from the coin-operated spigot at Watermill Express. With its cute windmill and 25-cent-a-gallon charge, Watermill is one of several commercial outlets serving thousands of U.S. border residents who do not have potable tap water or, in many cases, tap water at all.

A few miles away in Reynosa, Mexico, horse-drawn trash wagons plod through a new industrial park where parts are made for Pontiacs and Chevrolets. The wagons, sagging under the weight of a boomtown’s refuse, disgorge their loads at a dump next to a lagoon. At the site, people scavenge alongside dogs and pigs.

A bizarre hybrid of the 19th and 21st centuries, the U.S.-Mexico border is an embarrassment of riches. A $150-billion economy is fueled by 11 million people, many living below the poverty line in communities that cannot afford modern sewers, water mains or sanitary landfills.

Three years ago, officials of both governments pledged to bring the border’s basic systems up to code with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

NAFTA promised better jobs, healthier living conditions and more money for the environment.

Moreover, by lowering trade barriers throughout Mexico, the accord was supposed to ease the border region’s growing pains.

But for a lot of people, not much has changed in the past three years.

Only 16 of 98 public utility projects have been approved for financing through NAFTA; just one has been completed. Less than $1 billion has been tentatively committed to do a job that experts said would cost as much as $20 billion.

On Mexico’s side of the border, 40% of the population still lacks sewers, potable water or both, according to a NAFTA commission set up to review environmental projects. On the U.S. side, several hundred thousand people are still without basic services.

Now, as the Clinton administration is expected Tuesday to report to Congress on the economic benefits of NAFTA, it must confront the enduring bleakness of the border’s defining imagery: the scrap-wood shantytowns metastasizing in the shadow of Fortune 500 assembly plants; the “black” canals of Matamoros and Reynosa, where chemical waste has been measured at levels vastly exceeding permissible standards; the eye-stinging air full of soot and dust from brick-making ovens, smoldering tire dumps and unpaved streets.

The NAFTA environmental program, drawn up to win over congressional opponents of free trade in this hemisphere, was never intended as an all-out war on border pollution.

The agreement did not create tough new police power to make up for years of regulatory neglect and shoddy enforcement of environmental laws on both sides of the border. NAFTA did not mandate a crackdown on polluters or a cleanup of existing pollution.

Instead, it sought to help border communities build adequate water and sanitation systems. (NAFTA’s Commission for Environmental Cooperation does have limited authority to investigate charges of lax enforcement of environmental laws.)

But modernizing the border’s primitive infrastructure has moved slowly because of the recent severe recession in Mexico and, say some critics, because NAFTA did not tap into the profits of the maquiladoras, the mostly foreign-owned businesses that operate tariff-free on the Mexican side of the border and drive the region’s economy.

“These industries have attracted thousands of people to the border to work for low wages and live in shantytowns. Conditions won’t improve until more of them contribute their fair share,” said Linda Taylor, a board member of the Border Environment Cooperation Commission, set up under NAFTA to review environmental improvement projects.

In the meantime, lending policies and high interest rates by NAFTA’s financial arm, the North American Development Bank, have made it difficult for many small borders towns, especially in Mexico, to qualify for assistance.

“There are still no programs to deal directly with a lot of the smaller communities where conditions are often the most backward,” Taylor said.

‘Critical Mode’ Coming

Some of the border’s biggest problems also remain unresolved.

Flowing north from the Mexicali Valley into California, the toxin-laden New River, long known as the dirtiest in North America, still runs black on days when Mexicali’s inadequate sewer system is overwhelmed. Even with NAFTA, plans for a long-overdue $47-million replacement system have not been realized.

As border cities grow, ground water in some areas is being depleted at alarming rates. The main aquifer serving El Paso and neighboring Ciudad Juarez is dropping at a rate of eight to 10 feet a year, Texas officials say.

“At the current rate we are using the water, we’ll be in critical mode by the year 2020,” said Terry McMillan, an El Paso-based water specialist for the state of Texas.

Juarez, with more than 1 million people and a huge multinational business sector, is still without a waste-water treatment plant.

On the U.S. side, mostly in Texas, an estimated 400,000 people live in colonias, unregulated subdivisions without drinkable water, sewer systems or both.

To activists such as Eddie Anaya, a lawyer who grew up in a south Texas colonia known as Las Milpas, the fruits of the trade accord look like leftovers.

“Let me tell you how Las Milpas got its streets paved,” Anaya said with a chuckle. “After NAFTA, the Texas Department of Transportation authorized $1.4 billion in state and federal funds to improve highways used by the maquilas [businesses]. When they started fixing Highway 281, we got to use the old, ground-up pavement.”

Clinton administration officials say it is unfair to condemn NAFTA after just three years, given the formidable obstacles that existed in 1994.

Conditions along the border were the outgrowth of a 29-year experiment in unfettered capitalism in a rural, underdeveloped region wholly unprepared for the onslaught of industry attracted by low taxes, low wages and lax regulations.

The government of Mexico opened the floodgates in 1965 when it exempted maquiladoras from protectionist tariffs and laws requiring majority Mexican ownership.

With migrants from across Mexico looking for work on both sides of the border, the population of 4 million nearly tripled. In the mid-1990s, just as the architects of the trade accord hoped to lure foreign business to other parts of Mexico, the peso crashed, driving down Mexican wages and sparking a new surge of border maquiladoras.

Employment in border industries grew by nearly 12% a year, while spending on infrastructure grew by less than 5%, according to Raul Hinajosa-Ojeda of UCLA’s School of Public Policy and Social Research.

Today, the region rivals Hong Kong as a magnet for international investment. More televisions are made in Tijuana than anywhere else in the world.

But the average hourly wage on the Mexican side of the border is less than $1.50.

And as the trucks roll north carrying Zenith TVs, General Motors auto parts, Sony computer monitors, Whirlpool appliances, Converse shoes and a host of other name-brand products, they pass through communities with elevated rates of tuberculosis, typhoid, hepatitis, salmonellosis and other diseases associated with bad air and bad water.

“Given everything there is to contend with, it is illogical and unfair to declare NAFTA a failure after only a few years,” said Victor Miramontes, managing director of the North American Development Bank, set up under the trade accord to help communities build sewer and water systems. “You don’t solve problems in underdeveloped areas just by passing out money; 90% of the problem is human attitude. You have to show people how to set up and run modern systems.”

But a shortage of capital has been an obstacle to progress.

In Juarez, where desert dust kicked up by cars and trucks is a major contributor to the worst air pollution along the border, Oscar Ibanez, the city’s environmental director, has been trying to figure out a way to blacktop the city’s streets, half of which are unpaved.

“Do you know how long it would take to pave all of this at the rate we’ve been paving for the last three years?” Ibanez asked, waving at a giant aerial photo of the city streets. “Thirty years. It’s a problem of money. I can’t find the money.”

Border Is Great Divide

To get an idea of the financial squeeze on the Mexican side of the border, consider Juarez’s resources compared with those of El Paso, its sister city across the Rio Grande in Texas.

El Paso, population 600,000, has an annual budget of $411 million. Juarez, with almost twice the population, has a budget of $53 million. El Paso has a fleet of 100 street sweepers. Juarez has eight.

With Mexican environmental laws sporadically enforced, little has been done about some of the border area’s most polluted industrial sites, among them a huge, abandoned lead smelter in Tijuana.

Atop the city’s Otay Mesa, amid a gleaming assemblage of maquiladoras, tons of exposed lead slag slump against a deteriorating metal fence.

Unguarded, the property is an easy mark for scavengers or curious children from the sprawling Colonia Chilpancingo, which spreads out just beneath the mesa. There are signs of forced entry in the fence, and workers who walk by the slag heap on their way to work each day say it has twice caught fire in recent months, sending toxic smoke over the neighborhood.

Potentially lethal, lead poisoning can damage the kidneys, the digestive tract and the nervous system. Even in small doses, lead ingested by children can cause learning disabilities.

Mexico passed its first environmental law in 1971. But until recent years, it averaged only about 1,000 federal inspections a year. That figure has now jumped to 12,000. Mexico reports that the enforcement activity has led to more than $2 million in fines against maquiladoras.

New legislation is being enacted that mimics the most effective statutes in the U.S.

Mexico, for example, recently passed a right-to-know law allowing citizens to request information on pollution from the government. “The right to the information exists,” said Alfredo Gidi, a senior official in the federal environmental prosecutor’s office. But he cautioned: “How much information we have is another question.”

Defenders of NAFTA point out that, as one of the first “green” trade agreements, it has set in motion an unprecedented effort to harmonize environmental regulations in the three countries, including Canada, that signed the agreement.

Paul Ganster, a professor of regional studies at San Diego State University, chairs an environmental task force made up of business and public agencies from border communities. He said, “A big part of NAFTA is just getting people on all sides to overcome their mutual mistrust and work together, but it is slowly happening.”

Perhaps the best example of this is nine working groups of the “Border 21” program, created by the U.S. and Mexican governments last year to look at all aspects of pollution in the area.

“You cannot judge the progress simply by what meets the eye,” said Laura Durazo, an anthropologist who heads an environmental education project in Tijuana. “If we don’t get much sense of actual improvement of the environment, the political climate has changed. NAFTA has stirred things up. For the first time, people are demanding accountability from government and industry.”

Officials Find New Resolve

Before the trade pact, other analysts noted, public works projects were often doled out by Mexican officials to their friends or their companies. White elephants abounded.

But now, said Octavio Chavez, an environmental consultant in Juarez, “NAFTA is a window for democracy. Authorities are forced to discuss [infrastructure projects] in public.”

If the trade agreement has not provided much legal clout, it has bolstered the resolve of public-spirited officials.

Take Francisco Nunez, Juarez’s director of water sanitation. With the help of his high-tech water lab, he pinpointed maquiladoras that dumped chemicals into the waste water. Then he adopted a carrot-and-stick approach.

The carrot is technical assistance to offenders so they can redesign industrial processes using nontoxic chemicals and recycling waste water.

As for the stick, Nunez did not hesitate to apply it to Thomson Consumer Electronics’ Mexico factory, one of the city’s biggest maquiladoras, last year.

In a surprise visit, Nunez’s inspectors found the factory’s employees dumping drums of paint, solvents and shellac into a drain, according to officials and media reports. Nunez slapped the company with a $45,000 fine.

Richard Knoph, a spokesman for Thomson in Indianapolis, acknowledged that the incident occurred but added that the company responded with an “extensive training program” and switched to water-based paints.

Nunez said that, in past years, businesspeople were not used to taking orders from local environmental authorities.

“Normally, these industrial people are very powerful,” Nunez said. “The first thing they do is call the governor, who is a friend” and can stop investigations.

“Here, it wasn’t like that,” he added. “We’ve had the total support of the governor and local authorities.”

An important factor in the change of attitude, he said, was local victories by the opposition National Action Party, or PAN, over Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

Juarez has also seen a crackdown on brick makers who illegally burn tires, old oil or any garbage they can find to heat their ovens. The constantly burning fires sent plumes of noxious black smoke over the city.

But the brick makers recently agreed to restrict their fuel to wood and clean sawdust and to hold burning to a strict timetable.

It has made a difference, residents say. Their eyes may still tear from the smoke, they say, but at least they can venture outside without turning black with soot.

Cleaning Up Waste Water

In one of the most important agreements brokered under NAFTA, Mexico two weeks ago agreed to virtually end its use of DDT and chlordane, two toxic pesticides severely restricted in the United States.

Perhaps the most notable border improvement since NAFTA took effect was the recent completion of a $400-million treatment plant in the Tijuana River Valley. Financed largely by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the plant is designed to clean up the area’s 25 million gallons of waste water per day flowing into the Pacific Ocean.

In south Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, state and federal agencies have committed more than $200 million--about half of what is needed--to provide colonias with water and waste-water systems. The EPA has made available to NAFTA’s development bank $170 million to help it defray interest costs of loans to poor communities.

Maquiladoras in several border cities have begun building new employee housing, and many of the larger companies have installed equipment to remove toxins from waste water before it is released from the factories.

One of the largest industrial parks, FINSA in Matamoros, borrowed $1 million from the NAFTA bank to build a waste-water treatment facility for its 22,000 employees. The project is the only one financed by the development bank to be completed, the Border Environmental Cooperation Commission said.

But it is the steady transfer of technology and expertise to a once-backward region that will make the most difference along the border, said Luis Zuniga, a former head of Sony’s operations in Mexicali and Tijuana.

“You’ve got engineers and technical experts leaving the maquilas every day to start their own businesses,” Zuniga said. “They represent a growing generation of highly skilled, middle-class people who have made the border their home and will, in good time, transform living conditions.”

Still, it can be hard to square Zuniga’s optimism with the reality of places like Anapra, a slum neighborhood on the outskirts of Juarez, or Colonia Roma, a cluster of plywood and cardboard houses perched over a stinking slough in Reynosa.

In Anapra, hundreds of thousands of people live without running water under a searing sun and in 100-degree summer temperatures. Residents who can afford to buy their drinking water store it in plastic jugs. Others use old drums from maquiladoras to collect water from city tankers that arrive once a week. Problems of dehydration and stomach illness plague the skinny children who play in whatever patches of shade they can find.

Water poses a different hazard for the residents of Colonia Roma.

When it rains, the slough rises into people’s houses, its vile water freighted with dead animals and fecal matter from neighborhood outhouses.

“We’ve had to get out of here a couple times,” said Sandra Baltazar, pointing to a watermark a foot high on the wall of the plywood shack where she, her husband and her daughter live.

Birth Defects on the Rise

Near Brownsville, contaminated air is a suspected culprit in investigations of an unusually high number of neural tube defects--sometimes fatal malformations of the spine and brain. Infants with the most serious form, known as anencephaly, are born with incomplete or missing brains.

By 1995, Brownsville and surrounding Cameron County in south Texas were reporting rates of neural tube defects, including anencephaly, at twice the national average.

The cause of the south Texas anencephaly cluster remains a mystery. But suspected culprits include high levels of chemical solvents released into the air by local maquiladoras. In a lawsuit by 27 parents of anencephalic babies, several companies agreed in 1995 to a reported $17-million settlement.

More often, environmental tragedies along the border must be endured without hope of reparation.

Two years ago, in an Alamo, Texas, colonia without sewers or running water, Raymundo Lopez, 2, took a toy into the family outhouse during a heavy rainstorm, apparently trying to play in the overflowing waste water. He drowned.

Even though they could not afford to have a septic system installed, Raymundo’s parents were determined to improve conditions for themselves and their one remaining child. This spring, they finished installing a do-it-yourself septic system and tore down the outhouse.

“The system is probably not as good as a professional job,” said Blanca Lopez, Raymundo’s mother. “But it’s progress.”