by George Kourous

George Kourous is editor of the monthly border environment bulletin borderlines, published by the U.S.-Mexico Border Program at the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC) in New Mexico. He can be reached at george@irc-online.org. The non-profit IRC has been providing activists and policymakers with progressive political analysis since 1979. 

Most media coverage of the border between Mexico and the United States paints a dark picture: female factory workers being strangled in the backstreet shadows of Ciudad Juárez, toxic sludge seeping north from Tijuana, fish-kills in the Rio Grande, lost immigrants dying in the harsh deserts of Arizona. Violence, drug wars, dusty "no-where" border towns.

But for all the problems facing it, the border is a place of hope. It is not a dividing line, but rather a community, a community that bridges the political division separating the two countries. It is home to a dynamic and rich multi-culture with a long tradition of political activism and extended experience in working across cultural and political barriers and differences in language.

Environment on the Edge

Home to a diverse yet fragile series of ecosystems, the border is an area of variable rainfall and extreme water scarcity, a zone of rapid industrialization, surging human populations, and frenzied international trade. The mix has proved to be a volatile one. For free trade advocates, this is a place of unlimited opportunity, the interface between the "developed" world and the "developing" one: manufacturing can take advantage of cheap labor in Mexico yet have immediate access to the consumer market to the north. For environmentalists, it is an example of how trade--if we are not careful--can destroy the environment, overtax natural resources, and jeopardize the health of human populations

Beginning in 1964, Mexico initiated the Border Industrialization Program, creating special shelters along its northern frontier where foreign owned manufacturers could base their operations, paying minimal taxes and utility costs, import materials from the U.S., assemble a product, and export it back north only paying tariffs on the value added. The idea was to bring jobs to the region, spur the development of infrastructure, earn some foreign capital, and encourage skills and technology transfer to Mexico.

25 years later, the results are obvious: Mexico's northern border cities are boomtowns. Growth in some areas of Tijuana has been running as high as 10 percent in recent years. In all of Mexico, 2,500+ maquiladoras employ over one million workers--mostly in the border states. And wages (anywhere from $3 to 9$ a day, generally) and opportunities are probably better in northern Mexico than most places in the country. Women on the border have become breadwinners, earning themselves new freedoms in the process. Opposition politics has made some significant inroads, challenging the long-help political monopoly enjoyed by Mexico's ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI).

But these advance have come at a steep cost.

The explosive growth of industry in the region has utterly outstripped the capacity of local governments (control of state finances in Mexico remains housed in the capital) to provide infrastructure capable of handling the tons of wastes and byproducts generated each day. Mexico's need for jobs and foreign currency means that infrastructure which encourages investment in industrial parks--new roads, power lines, water feeds is prioritized while infrastructure that makes industry safe--output treatment plans, air scrubbers, recycling facilities--is back-burnered. In all of Mexico, there are only two hazardous waste facilities deemed "fully operational," and even that assessment is questionable. Neither of them are located in the border region.

U.S. owned maquiladoras based in Mexico are ostensibly obligated to return any wastes produced using imported products to their country of origin, but lax enforcement by Mexican environmental authorities and the bottom-line-at-any-cost mentality of many maquila owners means that toxins are disposed of on the sides of roads, in abandoned desert lots, or simply left to collect on-site.

There is no way to know for certain how much waste is disposed of improperly on the border. (Figures provided by both the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Mexico's environmental ministry, SEMARNAP, render it obvious that improper disposal is occurring. Reported disposal is just too low.) It's also difficult to explain to people who don't live in the area how bad the problem is. First-time visitors to places like the abandoned Metales y Derivados site in Tijuana are--invariably--shocked, outraged, and disoriented. There, open piles of lead sulfates have been sitting for years, exposed to the rain and wind. They've now eaten through the cinder wall surrounding the abandoned batter-recycling plant and leached into the ground of the Otay Mesa, which sits some 200 yards above a sprawling residential area known as Colonia Chilpancingo. When a strong wind blows, the windows of Chilpancingo are dusted with a light patina of toxic dust blown down off the mesa.

This is only one prominent example among many such sites along the entire length of the border. 

But industrial pollution is not the only problem. As manufacturing and service/support jobs have pulled thousands from both sides to the borderlands, the area's skyrocketing population has surpassed local capacities to provide running water, electricity, and sewage to many neighborhoods. Cuidad Juárez, a city of some 2 million (or more) people, has only recently taken the first significant step toward building its first wastewater sewage treatment system.

Where services do exist, costs to plug in may be prohibitive, or lax-enforcement means that change is slow in coming. In Nuevo Laredo, for example, activists recently counted 11 sites where raw sewage or industrial output was being pumped directly into the river despite the fact that the city constructed a new wastewater treatment plant in 1996.

The result: not only is water in short supply on the border, the quality of what water there is is severely compromised, from the New River to the Colorado to the length of the Rio Grande.

Another effect of the border's economic and demographic boom has been urban sprawl which has seen subdivisions bury arid desert ecosystems under watered lawns, cutting off wildlife corridors and fragmenting plant and animal populations. The area's streams--already damaged by cattle grazing--are being sucked dry by growing cities, wildlife is disappearing at an alarming rate, erosion and the destruction of ground cover are problems as well.

Borderlanders are tough, hardworking, determined people. They start with just a little piece of something and never stop working to make it better. The colonias of the region, those semi-rural, unincorporated and infrastructure-poor settlements so frequently decried as miserable "shantytowns" may indeed be substandard in terms of quality of life, but they do enable low-income residents to buy a plot of land of their own, slowly building their equity over time. But even if nearby cities have extended services like water and electricity to the colonias, residents may not be able to afford the hook-up fees and monthly bills. Instead, they buy their water from piperos who truck in water, and dispose of household wastes in pit toilets or septic tanks prone to seepage, with obvious health implications.

Going Beyond Mutual Recrimination

Traveling along the border one soon realizes that assigning blame for the environmental crisis is an exercise in futility. Who is the culprit? The Mexican government for not enforcing strict environmental controls, or the U.S.-owned maquiladoras that set lower environmental and occupational health standards than at plants based in the United States? Is it a cultural issue, or perhaps a problem rooted in the different levels of economic developing found on either side of the border?

In the end, the question is moot: there is enough blame to go around. Studies linking Texas industry to haze problems in Big Bend National Park (until recently blamed primarily on two coal power plans south of the line) are just one example of how the U.S. is as much to blame for environmental degradation on the border as Mexico. (Let's not forget who owns and operates the lion's share of the maquilas, either.)

Whatever its origins, water- and airborne pollution pays no attention to the political boundary separating Mexico and the U.S. Ultimately, these are shared problems, and much better than pointing fingers is creative problem solving, since both sides--the entire, shared border community--stand to benefit.

The technological solution is simple--build environmental infrastructure capable of handling the industrial and urban waste--but for economic reasons, many cities may not be able to apply the solution. Money is only part of the solution. Mexico, for instance, lacks representative governments and legal systems in which citizens can exert pressure on government officials. Access to government is extremely limited, the right of citizens to know what substances are being used in manufacturing or released in their communities is non-existent, and because one party has virtually monopolized power for 70 years, political accountability is virtually nil. On the U.S. side, the low-incomes and ethnic background of many residents means they are excluded from the political process. On both sides, important decisions are made in each nation's capital, far away from the day to day reality of border life, and funding for cleanups is hard to come by.

The picture is in many ways decidedly grim, but despite all the region's problems, the border is a place of hope. In Spanish, the verb for hope and wait is the same word (esperanza), depending on context, or perspective. Borderlanders are certainly patient. They have been plugging away for decades, working on the same problem over and over again, always looking for solutions, never once wavering in their commitment to their children and their communities.

In Tijuana and San Diego, for example, the U.S.-based Environmental Health Coalition works closely with activists on the Mexican side on a wide range of issues. Recently they submitted a complaint to the North American Commission on Environmental Cooperation--created by NAFTA to oversee enforcement of environmental law by member nations--charging Mexico negligence in its handling of the Metales y Derivados dump site. In turn, the EHC has learned from its Mexican partners, implementing a community health program for poor Latino neighborhoods in San Diego based on Mexico's promotora model of health care.

Similar crossborder alliances can be found along the whole border. There are succeeding in helping communities where government--too frequently--does not. The experience they are gaining in the process holds great promise for a future in which communities will be increasingly multicultural and ethnic conflict more likely, and in which laisse-faire, trade-based capitalism is the governing economic model.

Free Trade: Solution or Problem?

For each country, the border is the gateway to the other. Nothing takes precedence here for government as much as free trade. In the U.S., illegal immigration comes close as a policy issue, but now even that controversial topic has taken a backseat to commerce: many congressmen are complaining that customs searches for illicit migrants and drugs are slowing down the flow of goods across the border.

On the line where the two economies merge, the result is something like watching a tidal bore, that wave of permanent turbulence where a river crashes into the sea. Economic activity on the border runs at a fever pitch, and the result is more cars, more buildings, more people, more manufacturing, more garbage, more exhaust fumes, more litter, higher water consumption, and so on, ad infinitum. This has always been true; but after NAFTA, the intensity level of economic exchange on the border is greater than ever.

NAFTA was, according to the Bush and Clinton administrations, the greenest trade treaty ever. Most critics of the agreement would probably agree, if pressed, with that assessment--simply because previous trade pacts had wholly ignored the issue of trade's environmental impacts. And while even NAFTA's harshest critics might concede that it did break ground by incorporating environmental considerations, they would surely point out the many shortcomings of the NAFTA's environmental side-accords and the severe impacts that expanded commerce under NAFTA has had on the border environment.

But by and large, NAFTA has done little more than give the idea of including labor and environmental clauses in trade agreements some degree of legitimacy and, after 6 years, provides us with a case study in the difficulties in significantly implementing and institutionalizing such agreements. This lesson, while valuable, must be seen in light of the accelerated environmental damage which NAFTA's framework does not effectively address.

Although NAFTA listed the promotion of sustainable development as one of its objectives, calling it a legitimate purpose for environmental regulation, it did not explicitly establish a relationship between trade and environmental impacts. Free traders lobbying the environmental community during the NAFTA debates argued that expanded economic well-being that NAFTA would bring Mexico would ultimately mean more federal funds to be assigned to the protection and restoration of the environment. However, if the experience of northern Mexico since the passage of the 1964 Border Industrialization Project, which ushered in the age of the maquiladora, tells us anything, it is that economic growth may put more money in worker's pockets, but if inequitable and irrational (as it has been so far on the border), brings with it a whole series of social and environmental impacts.

Nor has the maquiladora industry even sold itself as a very effective national development plan, environmental concerns aside. The maquiladoras in Cuidad Juárez spend about $9 billion a year on raw materials, but only 2% of that comes from Mexican sources ("Juárez: A Perspective," Twin Plant News, March 1999).

Poorer countries like Mexico have learned the harsh lesson that the capital and jobs that transnational corporations promise will flock to where enforcement of environmental regulations is weakest, where labor standards are most lax, and where national governments cultivate a "investor friendly environment" (which too frequently can be translated as "polluter friendly environment.") Because while free-trade advocates may be right in that there is money to be made, the fact is that in the very best of circumstances free trade without proper safeguards protecting people and the environment, funding for social and environmental infrastructure, and guidelines covering corporate behavior may generate short-term economic gain for both trading partners but will not result in long term or sustainable growth.

And most activists agree that the NAFTA side accord which created the North American Commission on Environmental Cooperation (CEC) and a process by which member-nations can be charged with not enforcing their own environmental legislation lacks muscle. If free trade is to become something more than just a corporate bill of rights, strong and enforceable international norms that guarantee that countries like Mexico can protect workers from exploitation and prosecute transnational corporations who pollute without shooting themselves in the foot are needed. The CEC process, by taking enforcement to the international level, could circumvent that problem altogether. Unfortunately, binational politics and concerns tied to sovereignty issues mean that CEC environmental complaints do not see fines levied or trade sanctions emplaced. When instances of environmental lawbreaking are verified by the CEC, consultations are convened, and nothing more.

How long will it take before NAFTA prompts the growth of a broader Mexican middle class, with the financial security and leisure time to acquire an environmental consciousness and demand enforcement? How long will it take before trade brings Mexico the revenues it needs to move beyond day-to-day survival and tackle enforcement of its admittedly (on paper) progressive environmental legislation? Based on the experience of the last six years, the simple truth is that we have no way of knowing.

What we do know is that environmental degradation on the border hasn't gotten any better. If there has been one positive development in terms of the environment in the post-NAFTA era, it has been the strengthening of ties between Mexican and U.S. environmentalists, the transnationalization of political organizing alongside the transnationalization of capital flows and productive processes. That collaboration, the establishment of shared mutual concern over the health of communities--rather than the strange bedfellow coalitions of the NAFTA debate--holds the promise for the future. The free market paradigm isn't going to go away any time soon. But only with continued, multinational, and creative activism like that so common to the border region will the rhetoric of a kinder, gentler free market be given any meaning.