Mexicans trapped by foreign-made messes

Factories flout laws, leave toxic dumps
By KEVIN SULLIVAN The Washington Post Feb. 18, 2003

   TIJUANA, Mexico Andrea's monster lives up here. It breathes lead dust that coats her windows and her baby toys. It sweats rivers of arsenic and cadmium and antimony that seep into her water and the soil where her children play. It squats on a hilltop above her home, horrible and poisonous.
"There it is," says Andrea Pedro Aguilar, breathing heavily from the hike up the hill. She is standing in front of the derelict remains of a lead smelter that everyone here calls Metales.
For more than a decade, an American owned company, Metales y Derivados, took in thousands of U.S. car and boat batteries, cracked them open to extract their lead, melted it into bricks and shipped the bricks back to the United States.
Mexico closed the plant in 1994 and the next year its owner, a U.S. citizen named Jose Kahn, crossed the border back into San Diego. Mexican arrest warrants charged him with gross environmental pollution. According to the Mexican government, Kahn left behind an estimated 8,500 tons of toxins from battery guts that lie strewn over three acres, in open piles, rusted barrels and in rotted bales. Every time the wind blows or the rain falls, more of the toxins end up in Colonia Chilpancingo, a worker's village of 10,000 people directly below the plant.
According to Mexican environmental officials and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the toxic dump here exemplifies how much of the border area is a no-man's land, a place where international companies have polluted the environment. The Mexican government has been reluctant to clean up foreign made messes, and when the foreigners return home they are beyond the reach of Mexico's laws.
When the Metales furnaces were still burning in 1990, a Mexican university study found levels of lead more than 3,000 times higher than U.S. standards and levels of cadmium more than 1,000 times higher in a stream that runs through the community and eventually flows north over the border into the United States. A 1999 study by the enforcement division of Mexico's environment ministry found lead concentrations in the soil near the plant 50 times higher than the limit set by Mexican law. That report called the Metales site a "major health risk." A cleanup of the site could cost $6 million or more.
Two months ago, the state of Baja California and Kahn filed a joint loan request for $800,000 from the North American Development Bank, which was created as part of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). A bank official said the unusual request coming amid rising demands from residents for a cleanup is being reviewed. He said one concern is that the loan might not cover the cost of the cleanup.
Reached by telephone, Kahn, who is in his late 80s, said, "We are negotiating a loan to clean up the place. I really can't tell you anything more than that."   In an interview published in December in the San Diego Union Tribune, Kahn said the loan request shows that he is serious about cleaning up Metales: "We all want a solution. No one wants to walk about without a cleanup."
In the meantime, the toxins bake in the sun and blow in the wind. The pollution keeps flowing into Chilpancingo, from Metales and from some of the other 130 factories, known as maquiladoras, in the huge industrial park where it sits. It hasn't rained in Chilpancingo for nearly two months, but dirty water still runs down the middle of Aguilar's street. It starts in a gaping drainage pipe emerging just beneath the industrial park that emits a milky white substance made of who knows what that flows downhill to Aguilar's neighborhood.
Factories there are required by law to treat their own hazardous waste, but state environmental officials say many still dump illegally.
   People like Aguilar's kids. Lupita is 4 and Ivan is 6. They ride scooters in their living room and watch "Monsters Inc." and “Rugrats” for hours on end. Aguilar thinks it's safer for them to be inside even though her lead testing kits have turned up elevated levels of the toxin on her dishes and on the sill of her kitchen window.
Outside, the fruit trees and grass that her mother planted 20 years ago have all died.
Just before Christmas, 20 Chilpancingo children under the age of 6 were tested for lead. Officials from the Environmental Health Coalition, a San Diego based organization, said that all the results showed significant and potentially dangerous levels of lead in their bloodstreams.
Lupita's blood had the highest level, 9 micrograms of lead per deciliter, just under the level of 10 micrograms per deciliter, classified as elevated for children by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
   Lead, especially in children, can damage organs and severely retard mental development, and studies suggest it may cause cancer and birth defects.
Lupita's hair slips out by the brush full every day, and she has suffered spontaneous bleeding in her nose and throat for the past couple of years. It got so bad in November that Aguilar and her husband slept with Lupita, out of fear that she might drown in her own blood. Aguilar says they did not know what was causing her problems. Then her lead test came back positive.
Wenceslao Martinez, a physician, runs a health clinic a few blocks from Aguilar's house. He says he constantly sees patients with suspicious diseases, from chronic rashes to cancers to fatal birth defects. "For a colonia of only 10,000 people, what we see here is very strange," he said. "There is definitely a link to the maquiladoras. But it's hard to prove. So who gets the blame? Nobody."
He treated Margarita Jaimes’ 3-year old son, Serafin Vidrio, who turned up one day last July with swelling in his neck and eyes. He was diagnosed with acute leukemia on Aug. 6. He died Aug. 24. Jaimes, like the others, is frustrated no one has spent the money to study whether the illnesses around these factories are linked to the toxins they have dumped. As she talks, her daughter, Eva Paulette, 6, sits on her lap. Eva Paulette has been having nosebleeds. Her hair is falling out in clumps. The doctors cannot explain it.
Carmen Garcia used to walk to work every day past Aguilar's house, past the open piles of sludge at Metales to a factory where she assembled stereo speakers. When she became pregnant two years ago, she knew her factory was not the best environment, because in the previous two years three of her co workers had delivered stillborn babies.
Then on Nov. 3, 2000 Carmen delivered Miguel Angel, who suffered from anencephaly, a fatal defect in which babies are born with, little or no brain or skull. Miguel Angel's empty skull was open wide like a tulip. He survived for two months.
"It's like a trap here," Carmen said. She's pregnant again. "I'm so scared."