"Love Canals in the Making"

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

In many places, you can smell the border before you see it. Some days an acrid brown cloud hangs over the city of El Paso in the U.S. and nearby Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, blotting out office buildings and the surrounding mountains. A fetid creek called the Nogales Wash carries raw sewage from shantytowns south of the border to Nogales, Ariz. In Matamoros, just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, children and dogs play along ditches that are coated with an iridescent slick of aromatic chemicals, many of which are known or suspected carcinogens. "These are Love Canals in the making," says Guillermina Valdes-Villalva, director of a research institute in Tijuana.

Over the past 10 years nearly 2,000 foreign-owned factories -- most of them the property of U.S. corporations -- have sprung up along the Mexican side of the 3,200-km (2,000-mile) border. Attracted by low wages and lax pollution laws, these assembly plants, or maquiladoras, have drawn thousands of Mexicans into already crowded border cities, overwhelming meager municipal services and turning much of the region into a cesspool -- and a major foreign policy headache for the Bush Administration.

The key to the border region's explosive growth is an experimental free- trade zone created in the 1960s for foreign-owned companies wishing to assemble products for the U.S. market. Parts brought into the zone are exempt from Mexican duties, and finished products sent back to the U.S. are taxed only on the value added by cut-rate Mexican labor. Now the Administration is asking Congress for free rein in negotiating a landmark agreement that would extend the duty-free zone to all of Mexico. The issue, which is set for a crucial vote by June 1, has run into fierce opposition from American labor unions, which fear it will cost their members thousands of high-paying jobs.

The opponents of the free-trade pact have embraced the concerns of environmental groups, who say that without strict safeguards, the measure would be an invitation for U.S. companies to export their most polluting factories to Mexico. That is just what's happening now in the border region, according to a report issued last week by the National Toxic Campaign Fund, a Boston-based environmental organization. In spot samples taken near Mexican industrial parks, scientists found evidence that 75% of the sites were discharging toxic chemicals directly into public waterways. Measurements taken near one plant owned by General Motors showed concentrations of xylene, a toxic solvent, 6,300 times as high as the standard for U.S. drinking water. An employee told the N.T.C.F. that the company regularly pours untreated solvents right down the drain. GM disputes the findings.

The American and Mexican governments are working hard to assuage environmentalists' fears. Mexico has closed nine maquiladoras since mid-March, and President Bush last month promised to pursue high-level environmental initiatives with President Carlos Salinas. But both administrations have a record of passing tough pollution laws and then failing to enforce them. If they want their promises to protect the rest of Mexico's environment taken seriously, they should begin by cleaning up the mess that has already been made.

With reporting by Richard Woodbury/El Paso