DUMP AT THE BORDER
Juffer, Jane
DUMP at the Border U.S. firms make a Mexican wasteland BY JANE jUFFER Acity dump in Ciudad Juarez, the Mexican city facing El Paso across the Rio Grande, smolders with burning plastics and...
...Some are so toxic that even a small amount, a few parts per billion, can do great harm...
...Many operate without licenses, handling wastes without The Case of the Mallory Children Marta Rocha, a five-year employee of Mallory Capacitors, was one of the first to lose her job on the assembly line when the company began laying workers off in 1977, a prelude to closing its Matamoros plant...
...The blame is placed on a Mexican contractor hired to dispose of the waste...
...In fact, Steve Rich, the U.S...
...Many of the drums still have residues of chlorinated solvents, organic compounds," says Bruna...
...The same well contained trichlorethane and dichlorethane at equally dangerous levels...
...Sitting behind his desk at his new job in the transportation department, he recalls only that "perhaps they were warned...
...In the past five years, the school's director, Dr...
...Early this year, another Matamoros company signed a contract to dispose of several hundred barrels of paint sludge...
...The one in Matamoros with the burning plastics is Jane Juffer is an associate editor of Pacific News Service...
...Environmentalists say the fumes have probably damaged a nearby wildlife refuge and fouled the river...
...The women also assembled capacitors after they were dipped...
...H Of the 400 or more maquiladoras on the Texas-Mexico border in 1987, only eleven registered with the Texas Water Commission to return wastes, according to this state agency that enforces EPA guidelines in Texas...
...The plight of los ninos de la Mallory, as they have become known in this northeastern border town, painfully represents the questions a handful of academics, including de la O, are posing about the possible misuse of industrial chemicals in the maquiladora industry...
...But we know the companies have been discharging horribly toxic industrial wastes into the New River...
...All claimed not to know of the 1987 presidential agreement...
...When Luz is told what the labels say, she points out that she washed them with soap several times and that she still plans to sell them...
...It's all too easy for the U.S...
...side are responsible for all 400 on the Mexican side...
...Freon...
...for others, it's too expensive...
...They don't even make an effort to follow the regulations," says Fuentes, the El Paso engineering professor...
...Next to it are two drums she plans to sell to the next family that moves here...
...The maquiladoras often leave drums in their yards for weeks or months...
...Maybe it is...
...The one in Matamoros with the paint sludge is Componentes Mecanicos, which makes dashboards, steering wheels, and brake hoses for its parent, General Motors...
...She was three-months pregnant...
...No one is lucky enough to have water...
...Mexican recycling companies are as eager as the rest of the country to make a living off the maquiladoras...
...In 1986, Mexico opened the entire country to maquiladoras by dropping the requirement that the foreign corporations operate near the border...
...Supposedly this outfit called SEDUE is working on the companies," Swajain says, "but we haven't seen any results yet...
...The owner of the industrial park is required to clean the water before pouring it into drains, but the owner says the plants must clean it...
...Embassy survey last year showed that one of the drawing cards for the companies is precisely that...
...Garratt Callahan Co...
...Nobody knew anything whatsoever about any environmental regulations," says Kamp...
...they store it in the chemical drums...
...Laboratory controlled printed circuit fab chemicals...
...And the two environmental agencies are organizing a conference to be held this fall to inform maquiladoras of their regulations...
...Water that goes into the drums may itself be contaminated...
...Some of the women say that during their years of employment in the early and mid-1970s, they suffered from headaches, nausea, and fainting...
...If you listen to us, it can be cleaned up," he says...
...One such enterprise is the Ceramica Primavera, a store in Juarez that's bursting with fifty-five-gallon drums...
...He believes these eleven plants on the U.S...
...One reads, "Alpha metals...
...A huge banner reads Fuera Maquilas...
...The real possibilities for environmental action in Mexico seem remote...
...The mothers of the Mallory children would like to pursue the company they now believe caused the children's deformities...
...At the very least, we must know that this will never happen again in another factory...
...And they have ruled out further investigation...
...The other says, "DuPont...
...Brownsville Rubber Company, a subsidiary of Parker Hannifin Corporation of Cleveland...
...H Testing of the Rio Grande River for industrial waste has been almost nonexistent...
...And that's just part of the problem...
...They said the union requires them to give them to the workers, who use them for garbage...
...The most contaminated border water is that of the New River, a seventy-fivemile-long waterway that originates in Baja California, enters the United States at Cal-exico, California, and empties into the Sal-ton Sea, a popular fishing and swimming site near Palm Springs...
...We Demand Water and Electricity...
...Precautions—causes severe burns to skin and eyes...
...This container hazardous when emptied...
...We can't prove that they're U.S.-owned because the U.S...
...drinking-water standards...
...A local environmental engineer believes the factories and assembly plants that fill the park are mixing toxic waste with other garbage and dumping it there, producing dangerous fumes...
...But, says his mother, 'He's not getting any better, and now I don't think he's going to.' Kelly...
...corporations to "donate" their wastes to charities, which can then sell them to unlicensed Mexican recycling plants...
...Some of the women call the mixture Electrolito 95...
...General Motors is a case in point...
...Because the maquiladoras began operating in 1964 and Mexico did not open its first toxic-waste site until 1981, some environmentalists fear clandestine dumps may have already caused chemical leaching into aquifers...
...But on the other hand, I think we always have to be aware of the fact that, for all the jobs created, we will pay some kind of environmental price...
...Research is rare because the U.S.-operated maquiladoras feel no obligation to divulge their safety practices or what chemicals they use...
...SEDUE is hopelessly understaffed, with only two or three engineers in each of the major border cities to regulate hundreds of foreign and domestic plants...
...corporations...
...Company officials say they return the wastes to the United States for recycling, but Kamp found no EPA or customs record of the wastes...
...Mexico doesn't have a ninety-day rule like the United States, where you can only keep yoUr wastes for a certain period of time...
...Laura Sanchez is one of these—a high-school graduate who left Mexico City with her mother and five siblings to join their father, a dishwasher who crosses the border daily to work in El Paso...
...She estimates that fifteen mothers have met with her, apart from those who send their children to the special-education school...
...And if you mismanage wastes, there will be contamination of air, water, and soil...
...others are like new...
...and other foreign corporations...
...We're very worried," says Herbert Fuentes, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso and cofounder of the Border Waste Management Society...
...Among the wastes generated are the carcinogen trichlorethylene and its less toxic but still dangerous relative trichlor-ethane, both common degreasers in the electronics industry...
...she asks...
...SEDUE is beginning to develop a plan for one, says Project director Richard Kamp...
...Maquiladora owners deny they move to Mexico to slide around the regulations of the U.S...
...Many critics wonder whether SEDUE really wants to police the environment...
...Health inspectors have found twenty-eight strains of infectious diseases—including typhoid, cholera, hepatitis, and polio—and at least a hundred types of toxic chemicals, which they trace to the industries of Mexicali, a border city with more than a hundred maquiladoras...
...The women told de la O they had all worked during their pregnancies in el departamento de lavando— literally, the washing department, where they were involved to some extent in immersing the capacitors in vats of a mixture the professor believes contained PCBs...
...One, for example, allows U.S...
...Outside the Zenith-Telson plant in Agua Prieta stand dozens of barrels, some with unused chemicals marked "trichlor-ethane" and others marked "sucios," or "dirty...
...companies with subsidiaries in Mexico to return their waste products to the United States, the companies have poured chemical wastes down drains, dumped them in irrigation ditches, left them in the desert, burned them in city dumps, and turned them over to Mexican recycling firms not qualified to handle toxic waste...
...General Motors doesn't even admit the sludge was dangerous...
...Laura's mother merely shrugs when the labels are translated to her...
...Isabel de la O Alonso, has discovered about twenty children born to women who worked at Mallory while pregnant who have slanted eyes, thin lips, and flattened noses...
...A series of doctors, including those at a Mexican government health agency, told her not to have any more children, that they would all be the same...
...It's very serious to mismanage wastes in a Third World country like Mexico because most of these cities do not have water-treatment plants...
...Multiquim dumped the drums in the desert...
...Everything pales in comparison to the issue of chemicals in the maquiladoras," says Maria Patricia FernandezLILA CHAVEZ Doctors said this Mallory boy would improve as he got older...
...The slowly growing recognition of the maquiladora wastes is generating at least the hope of progress toward a joint border solution...
...asks Russ Kimble, director of the Commission's toxic-waste-handling division...
...It is still awaiting the results of industrial tests...
...But agency officials don't grasp the magnitude of the problem...
...But the New River, which originates near Mexicali, Baja California, and enters California at Calexico, contains more than a hundred types of industrial wastes, almost certainly from maquila-doras...
...In 1981, four years after she lost her job at Mallory, Cano gave birth to Juliana, now a thriving, healthy six-year-old...
...Although maquiladora managers deny they move to Mexico to bypass environmental regulations, a U.S...
...Chemical wastes also enter the food chain when maquiladoras dump them into industrial park drains that lead to irrigation canals...
...Most of us come down here with OSHA in mind," says Don Nibbe, publisher of Twin Plant News and a maquiladora executive in Ciudad Juarez for almost twenty years...
...The city already has five, with more than 200 maquiladoras...
...De la O believes the mothers worked with PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, then a common insulator used in the manufacture of capacitors...
...Despite the hundreds of maquiladoras that line the Rio Grande from Brownsville to El Paso and the scattered reports of dumping into the river, the Texas Water Commission and the International Boundary and Water Commission have done no extensive testing for industrial contamination—only for fecal and pesticide contamination...
...There is strong evidence of mismanagement of industrial wastes by the maquilas...
...I think a lot of it is being left right in the plants waiting for a decision," says Emilio Bruna, founder of IESCO, a chemical-waste-management company in El Paso that handles the wastes of about thirty maquiladoras...
...She made no connection between her illness there and the baby's severe birth defects...
...Some drums are old and rusting...
...It's a trade-off," says Rene Franco, one of the country's first environmental engineers and a consultant to U.S...
...Until they resolve their dispute, the water is apparently not being treated at all...
...To store the water they buy, colonia residents use empty fifty-five-gallon drums that entered Mexico full of toxic chemicals for use in the maquiladoras...
...Many are without water or electricity...
...The pollution became evident around 1970, when the Mexican city outgrew its sewage system and began dumping millions of gallons of raw waste daily into the stream...
...El Paso engineering professor Fuentes says the Hueco Bolson aquifer that provides the bulk of the drinking water used in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez may be contaminated with industrial solvents, although no testing has been done...
...The paint sludge was nonhazardous material in containers mistakenly labeled 'hazardous waste,' " says GM spokeswoman Jane Mott...
...Maybe it isn't...
...and Mexican government agencies have contributed $1.2 million for a sewage-pumping plant, little is being done about the industrial wastes...
...I don't like to see my country becoming a big wastebasket for the United States—and some corporations use it that way...
...SEDUE revoked Multiquim's license, saying the site was not suitable for toxic wastes...
...Not until Rocha enrolled Yazmin in the Escuela de Education Especial in 1982 did she learn that some of her former co-workers had children with similar characteristics...
...Three years ago, she had Leonardo, also healthy...
...Only occasionally did they wear gloves, which reached only to their wrists and sometimes tore...
...And that is why it seems likely the border will continue to be what Chicana poet Gloria Anzaldua calls the "1,950-mile-long open wound...
...Our enforcement stops at the border...
...There are literally hundreds of thousands of chemicals [the maquiladoras] are generating that we're not testing for," says Dave Buzan, supervisor of the Commission's water-quality monitoring unit...
...companies to turn a blind eye to such incompetence when they know how much money they're saving by disposing of the wastes in Mexico...
...Even some workers don't want to admit these risks exist...
...Since there is only one government-sanctioned landfill for toxic wastes in the entire country—in San Luis Potosi—and just two SEDUE-authorized recycling companies, it's certain that the majority of the wastes are, or will be, disposed of improperly...
...They sell for 13,000 pesos apiece, or about $5...
...they were dumped in the desert instead...
...By and large, the companies are assembly plants for U.S...
...Those in Hong Kong and Singapore make more than three times the Mexican wage, and even those in Costa Rica and the Dominican Republican make half again as much...
...The city of Juarez has no water-treatment plant, so anything that is dumped into the drains goes straight into the canals, and some of that water is used to irrigate vegetables," Bruna says...
...By now, the maquiladoras represent Mexico's second-largest source of foreign currency, and their economic clout is a powerful sedative—even for those whose profession it is to worry about chemical wastes...
...companies themselves...
...Many of the colonia's residents came to Juarez specifically to work in the maquiladoras...
...Meanwhile, the maquiladora industry is growing rapidly, with Japanese and German companies joining the ranks...
...The researchers concluded the solvent levels indicate dumping by maquiladoras has caused an "immediate element of risk" to people who use the water...
...Downstream in Matamoros, opposite Brownsville, piles of plastics and other wastes were found burning last year along the riverbank...
...they operate in new industrial parks under Mexican laws that allow them to take advantage of cheap Mexican labor...
...In recent years, a small but growing number of border environmentalists and academics have cautiously begun to warn that the thriving maquiladora industry is contaminating the border region...
...SEDUE officials admit, however, that the three GM plants and Trico, a subsidiary of the Buffalo-based windshield maker, are involved in a dispute about the treatment of residual water...
...The tests showed trichlorethylene levels 20 per cent higher than allowed by U.S...
...Our river sampling is not oriented toward finding wastes produced by ma-quilas...
...But the system in the United States is so shot full of holes that there's no way to determine whether it's because nobody bothered to scrutinize anything that was coming over the border or whether it was because it wasn't returned...
...Meanwhile, construction of the permanent site has resumed and Multiquim has regained its permit...
...My interviews with other former Mallory employees have turned up another group of about ten mothers whose children have been similarly affected...
...I've gone to the maquiladoras and they told me they wouldn't sell them...
...After working her shift—6.30 a.m...
...But they don't know how...
...We're investigating now to see what percentage is contaminated...
...The mentality that prevails among officials and businessmen in Mexico is that these jobs are needed, and any kind of restriction will result in killing the goose that lays the golden eggs," says Maria Patricia Fernandez Kelly, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University who spent five years researching maquiladoras for the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego...
...The danger is that the containers get old and start leaking...
...Finally, in June, the Texas agency took samples of water near Nuevo Laredo...
...PCBs were banned in the United States in 1978 because they cause cancer...
...There's reluctance on the part of everybody to acknowledge the problem...
...Down the dirt street, Maria Luz shows us the cement reservoir her family built to store extra water for the times the water delivery man forgets the colonia...
...Government agencies have done little to enforce the agreement as it stands...
...Occupational Safety and Health Administration...
...The company contracted with Residuos In-dustriales Multiquim, a Mexican firm, to dispose of several hundred barrels of its subsidiary's paint sludge at a hazardous-waste site near Monterrey...
...Or he'll sell them to one of the cottage industries that profit from their sale...
...In a year, the plant uses 8,195 gallons of trichlorethane...
...If the plants are not returning the wastes to the United States, they are dumping them in Mexico on their own or turning them over to Mexican recyclers...
...But the haven is fast becoming a wasteland...
...even inquiring what they're disposing of, according to Bruna, the El Paso waste handler...
...By the time her daughter Yazmin was born six months later, Rocha had forgotten about the headaches and fainting spells she suffered at the plant...
...I think the company should help these mothers," Cano says...
...It's the kind of connection people hate to make because maquiladoras are always seen as a boon to the Mexican economy...
...In one of the crowded, dilapidated ru-las, or mini-vans, that shuttle workers around the city, Sanchez makes the one-hour trip back and forth, passing piles of broken-down autos and garbage, covering miles of rutted dirt roads that eventually lead to a colonia where people live in whatever they can afford—tents, cardboard houses, and, for the lucky few like the Sanchez family, one- or two-room homes of cement blocks...
...Yet 86 per cent of the 772 plants used some sort of toxic chemicals—not only the electronics industry, which accounts for the bulk of the plants, but also those in metals, auto parts, plastics, chemicals, wood, printing, and glass...
...Swallowing results in severe damage to mucous membranes and deep tissues...
...The maquiladoras are booming, with their numbers expanding at an annual rate of 25 per cent...
...While the 1987 agreement reflects Mexico's recognition of an environmental catastrophe in the making along its northern border, the law contains extraordinary loopholes...
...They think because they're in Mexico, they don't have to worry about it...
...The city is refusing to bring water and power to Colonia Anapra, Sanchez explains, because it hopes to turn that land into another huge industrial park...
...Not only has Mallory left Mexico, but it has changed identity several times because of corporate maneuvers...
...More maquiladoras are also turning from basic assembly processes to manufacturing, using greater quantities and more types of chemical products...
...A dispute followed...
...Contents: An Aqueous Solution of Caustic Soda...
...He says the maquiladoras won't sell directly to him...
...Sanchez fears there may be countless clandestine dumps in the Mexican desert, and numerous city dumps in border towns being used unscrupulously...
...firms make a Mexican wasteland BY JANE jUFFER Acity dump in Ciudad Juarez, the Mexican city facing El Paso across the Rio Grande, smolders with burning plastics and industrial garbage from a nearby industrial park...
...However, Eduardo de la Garza Cruz, who reportedly assessed the fines when he was a SEDUE official, now denies their existence...
...companies hire a largely young, unorganized, female work force, at wages of $25 for a forty-eight-hour week...
...They call them tambos, and you see them in every border town, still stuck with labels such as copper cyanide Or zinc chromate epoxy—and bearing such brand names as Campion Chemicals, Cook Paint and Varnish, Exxon Chemical, DuPont...
...We know a number of maquilas who have literally hundreds of drums...
...Cano still talks with her former coworkers and invites them to her house to meet with reporters...
...Guadalupe Cano bore two Mallory babies who didn't survive...
...The Mallory employees are not sure what chemicals they were working with as they assembled the capacitors, which are small devices that hold charges in electronics gear...
...That price tag is hard to pin down, but available research shows a remarkable lack of accountability for toxic wastes and blatant disregard of the agreement signed by Presidents Miguel de la Madrid and Ronald Reagan requiring return of wastes to the United States: 11 Roberto Sanchez of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, a research institute in Tijuana, surveyed 772 maquiladoras in 1986 and found that only twenty had notified the U.S...
...Earlier this year, graduate students from Prescott College of Prescott, Arizona, tested a potable water tap adjacent to a maquiladora park that is used by surrounding communities...
...With Mexican officials rolling out the red carpet for the companies and the EPA reluctant to get involved in international issues, the onus falls on the U.S...
...Customs Service's director of the port of entry at Douglas, claims he has never seen a barrel of chemical wastes entering the United States...
...But the site is still under construction, and the barrels never arrived...
...Centers for Disease Control, the Pan American Health Organization, and the Mexican government's Institute of Nutrition sent doctors to Matamoros last year...
...Even though a 1987 agreement between the presidents of both countries requires U.S...
...Matamoros newspapers reported in January 1987 that twelve maquiladoras had been fined for dumping contaminated water into canals that lead to the Rio Grande and eventually the Gulf of Mexico...
...corporations, enamored of this land of cheap labor and spotty environmental regulation, have turned the border into an industrial haven...
...Although no one uses the river for drinking water, it cuts directly through the town of Calexico and the agricultural lands of the Imperial Valley...
...to 4:30 p.m.—at the Elamex maquiladora, a plant belonging to Advance Transformer Company of Chicago, Sanchez has been taking part in demonstrations staged by residents of her colonia at the Plaza de las Armas in downtown Juarez...
...These are no small quantities of chemicals...
...The doctors told me she wouldn't talk or walk, that if she died, to give thanks to God," remembers the young mother...
...They say they found no PCBs in either the mothers' or the children's blood and could uncover no similarity between the Mallory children and other cases of PCB exposure...
...Sodium Hydroxide Liquefied Formula 291...
...Research for this article was funded, in part, by the Fund for Investigative Journalism...
...But one advised her to try again...
...For some chemicals, there's no lab test that's been developed...
...Although some specialists originally thought Yazmin suffered from Down syndrome, they soon ruled that out and said the defects and mental retardation were inexplicable...
...Department of Commerce won't give us the names of the companies in Mexico," says Art Swajain, executive officer of the California Regional Water Quality Control Board...
...They never arrived at a hazardous-waste site near Monterrey...
...Fluorocarbons...
...The plants at the Gema Industrial Park in Juarez belong to a number of U.S...
...All but a few of the jobs are in Mexico, where U.S...
...11 The Border Ecology Project based in Naco, Arizona, surveyed the twenty-eight maquiladoras in Agua Prieta, across from Douglas, Arizona, and found that some claimed to have returned their wastes to the United States, but neither country had records of their wastes crossing the border...
...However, the U.S...
...It's not a big deal to properly dispose of a drum—we charge $4 to $ 15—but the consequences of not disposing of them are ominous...
...We know it's dangerous to use the tambos," says twenty-three-year-old Laura Sanchez, "but we don't have a choice...
...El Colegio's Roberto Sanchez stressed the need for a border-long inventory of toxic chemicals being transported and used by maquiladoras...
...The near-finished goods they assemble are then transported without import tax to the United States, where they are packaged and sold for huge profits...
...The river was formed around the turn of the century, when the flooding Colorado River dug a new channel that arched south of Mexicali and then north to the Salton Sea...
...An enterprising warehouse employee, seeing a chance to make a few bucks, will sell a few here and there...
...To Dr...
...When a Monterrey newspaper reporter discovered them, Multiquim claimed the desert site is actually a temporary open-air dump...
...Kamp says this Zenith plant admits to having 660 gallons of used chlo-roethane solvents on hand at any one time...
...the poison copper cyanide, a derivative of electroplating, increasingly a common activity of maquiladoras, and other toxic substances such as methylene chloride, epoxy, paint strippers and thinners, and PCP-contaminated wastes...
...Beaming and beckoning politicians in the border cities boast of 1,300 "twin plants," best known as maquiladoras, that they say boost the economy of both sides...
...J.J...
...I don't want to say the water is contaminated," says Gonzalo Escobedo, SEDUE engineer in Matamoros...
...The drinking water of Nogales, a town straddling the Arizona-Mexico border, is definitely contaminated...
...Empty, rusting chemical drums stand off to the side...
...Furthermore, says project director Richard Kamp, none of these maquiladoras had had any contact with the Mexican government's environmental agency, the Secre-taria de Desarrollo Urbano y Ecologia (SE-DUE...
...Nowhere is the impact of the maquiladoras' improper waste management more painfully obvious than in the hundreds of poor Mexican neighborhoods known as colonias...
...Exigimos Agua y Electricidad!—or Out with the Maquilas...
...While U.S...
...All must buy it when the water truck comes rumbling through...
...Several companies claimed they had shipped back ^^nything that's dumped in the drains goes straight into the canals, and that water is used to irrigate vegetables.' hazardous waste, and I have not been able to find any evidence that the waste did get back to the U.S...
...corporations, and no one knows which ones are polluting the neighborhood...
...Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that they were returning waste to this country, an action required by the EPA...
...The boom began with the 1982 devaluation of the peso, which made Mexican laborers among the cheapest in the world...
...If you listen to them, they don't have the money...
...Owner Oscar Munoz believes they come from the United States, because the labels are in English...
...Here, for nearly 2,000 miles, the Third World meets the First World, and economics and environment are clashing...
...Researchers from the Border Ecology Project in Arizona and El Colegio in Tijuana spoke at a joint conference of SEDUE and EPA officials at San Diego in June...
...It was properly disposed of...
...Lee Cottrell, health director of Imperial County, the issue is one of "cultural differences" between Mexico and the United States...
...We're bringing the same kind of equipment we use in the United States, with all the safety features...
...The one outside the Sanchez home reads "CORROSIVE...
...Where else are we going to put our water...
...Chicago New York Atlanta Dallas...
...Aren't there just about eleven maquiladoras along the border...
Vol. 52 • October 1988 • No. 10
