U.S. Factory Leaves a Toxic Smell

Walking through an abandoned U.S.-owned factory, Lourdes Lujan cringes at the sight of mounds of broken battery casings and corroded barrels of lead slag. She covers her nose to block the noxious smell and pulls down her sleeves to shield her skin.

Lujan blames the battery-recycling plant -- just a few hundred yards from her home -- for the red welts on her arms, the swelling in her daughter’s chest and the high levels of lead in her sons’ blood. “If I could have one wish, it would be to get rid of this,” she said, a straw hat shading her face. “I would like a magic wand to clean it up.”

Mexican authorities shut down the lead smelter in 1994 and filed criminal charges against the former owner, Jose Kahn, who lives in San Diego. But the deserted plant still sits at the top of a hill in an industrial park about a mile from the U.S. border. Stenciled signs warn of the hazardous waste.

Lujan, 31, and her neighbors in adjacent Colonia Chilpancingo, who have been fighting for years to get the plant cleaned up, have renewed hope in a bi-national committee working to negotiate a loan and devise a cleanup plan by fall.

Top officials from the EPA and Mexico’s equivalent agency also announced at a meeting in Washington, D.C., last month that they were committed to finding funds for the project. And proposed legislation in Mexico would hold polluters accountable and allow individuals to seek civil damages.

“We’re more hopeful than ever,” said Amelia Simpson of the San Diego-based Environmental Health Coalition, which has been working with local residents near the plant. “This is a really poisonous, toxic and dangerous site. The community needs it cleaned up.”

Simpson said the Metales y Derivados plant is an example of the failure of the North American Free Trade Agreement to protect the environment and the health of residents who live near Mexico’s maquiladoras -- the foreign-owned assembly plants geared to export markets.

Legislation Lacking

Although most maquiladoras are conscientious about waste, the Metales case illustrates the need for tough legislation to ensure that owners do not dump toxic waste, said Paul Ganster, a San Diego State University expert on the US-Mexican border.

The Metales y Derivados plant operated for 12 years recycling car batteries into lead ingots before it was shut down. That same year, Kahn pleaded guilty in Los Angeles to illegally transporting hazardous material, was fined and agreed to clean up the factory. But he moved to the U.S. in 1995 with arrest warrants and charges still pending in Mexico and the factory in a state of contamination.

A new investigation was launched into Kahn’s actions after the statute of limitations expired in 1999.

“The Metales y Derivados case made evident some of the limitations of our legal system,” said Gabriel Calvillo, chief counsel for Mexico’s environmental enforcement agency. “At the end, the courts will decide whether Mr. Kahn is criminally liable for the ongoing risk generated by the site.”

Last year, Kahn and the plant’s parent company, New Frontier Trading Co., were denied an $850,000 loan to clean up the site. Reached at his San Diego office, Kahn declined to answer any questions.

A 2002 report on Metales y Derivados by a NAFTA panel said such factories use “the border as a shield against enforcement.” The NAFTA panel concluded that the factory remained polluted and posed a risk to the health of nearby residents. The report, issued by the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation, urged a cleanup to prevent the spread of lead, arsenic and cadmium.

The Border Environment Cooperation Commission, set up under NAFTA to review environmental improvement projects, is working with authorities in the U.S. and Mexico to determine the best option for cleanup. Baja California state officials are committed to determining who should assume responsibility for the plant, how much the cleanup will cost and how it should be funded, said Socorro Maldonado, coordinator of urban development for the state.

Colonia Chilpancingo residents want the roughly 7,000 tons of hazardous waste to be excavated and transported to a hazardous-waste landfill in the United States, a plan that could cost more than $7 million. A cheaper and safer option, according to the EPA, would be to leave the waste there and enclose the three-acre site with concrete or clay to prevent the waste from getting into the groundwater.

Cleanup “is a high priority,” said Tomas Torres, border coordinator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “We have been working and trying to do something at this site for the past eight years.... The bottom line is that there are no resources for cleanup. That’s why it’s still there.”

Mexico does not have a Superfund budget to pay for investigation and cleanup of contaminated sites.

At the Metales plant, posted warnings to keep off the polluted property are ignored. There are holes in the fences and the barbed wire has been bent in several spots. Lead-tainted dust pours out of the rusted and cracked metal drums. The debris has corroded the concrete-block wall around the plant. A mattress and a baby stroller sit among the plastic battery shells.

Across the street, workers at another factory play soccer during their lunch break. They said that the debris at the Metales plant had caught fire recently, causing smoke that irritated their throats and made their eyes water. Car mechanic Enrique Segovia, who works next door, said he gets a headache nearly every day.

Many of the 10,000 residents of Chilpancingo are assembly plant workers who live downhill from the contamination in shantytowns without electricity or running water. They burn trash behind their homes and their children play in the Alamar River, which is filled with car parts, appliances and old clothes.

At a small office in town, Lujan and several neighborhood women run an environmental justice center, which was set up by the Environmental Health Coalition four years ago. Veronica Cruz Garcia said she had gone to a meeting at the center last year and learned for the first time that lead is poisonous. Now she feels it is her duty to tell her neighbors about the dangers of lead poisoning, which has been linked to learning disabilities and behavioral problems.

Fears for Children

“I would like them to do something, not just about Metales, but about all the maquiladoras,” said Cruz, 27.

If they don’t, she said, the children are the ones who will suffer the consequences. Cruz warns her sons, ages 4 and 6, not to play in the dirt or in the water. She keeps them inside when it rains or when it’s too windy. “It’s part of my job as a mom,” she said.

Tests of 16 children who live near the site showed that they had double the average U.S. level of lead in their blood, according to the Environmental Health Coalition. Although no studies have linked the plant to the health problems, residents and environmentalists suspect that cases of asthma, cancer, skin rashes and birth defects are the results of the air and water contamination.

Dr. Wenceslao Martinez, who runs a private clinic in town, said he regularly sees patients with nosebleeds and skin rashes, as well as respiratory, throat and eye irritation. One of his patients, a 3-year-old boy, died of leukemia. Another, a baby, was born with anencephaly and died soon after birth. Most of his 800 patients work at the maquiladoras near their homes. Martinez advises them to buy protective gear and urges expectant parents to consider quitting their jobs.

But he acknowledges that jobs are hard to come by. “They don’t have another way of living,” he said.

Lujan, who worked at assembly plants along the border for 12 years, worries about the future of her community. She and many other families have made their homes in the ravine and do not want to be forced out because of the pollution.

“It’s not fair,” Lujan said. “We were here before the maquiladoras.”