LOST IN THE HAZE
From farms to factories, industrial transformation brings population, pollution
Luz Maria Ortega Villa, who grew up here in the 1960s and ’70s, remembered seeing unspoiled vistas of mountains in the distance. To the west and south, the rugged peaks of the Sierra Cucapah towered over farmlands beyond the city. To the north stood the Chocolate Mountains in California. This majestic backdrop began to fade into a smoggy haze in the mid-1980s as factories proliferated and the city’s population swelled. Mexicali has kept expanding ever since. In her lifetime, maquiladoras have transformed what was once a farming town into an industrial city that is one of Mexico’s main manufacturing hubs on the border. Mexicali’s popula-
tion has more than doubled since 1980 to more than 750,000. Including other nearby towns and rural communities, the area is home to more than 1 million people.
Ortega, a professor at the Autonomous University of Baja California, saw this transformation bring her city some of the worst air pollution in Mexico. On especially bad days, air-quality alerts describe the pollution as “unhealthy.”
The particles in the air lead to high rates of asthma and deaths from respiratory illnesses.
“It’s very sad,” Ortega said. “As someone who was born here in Mexicali, it makes me feel very sad – and also mad, furious – to see that this is happening and there’s nobody putting the brakes on the environmental degradation.”
Fighting pollution is not a priority for Mexican government agencies in the border region.
Raw sewage regularly spills into the New River, which flows across the border into Calexico. The streets of Mexicali are filled with trucks belching exhaust. Brown clouds of smoke billow from factories.
An investigation by the Palm Springs Desert Sun found that inadequate oversight of industrial plants allows pollution to continue unabated, endangering lives and public health. State and federal environmental regulatory agencies are perpetually underfunded and understaffed, and records show their enforcement efforts have been minimal.
The unchecked pollution has generated questions and debate in Mexicali and neighboring communities about whether looser environmental controls helped attract the businesses that set up factories near the border.
Advocacy groups that studied the growth of maquiladoras said that weak oversight has made the border a pollution haven and that just as companies outsourced jobs across the border to cut costs, some chose Mexico as a permissive zone for their polluting industries.
“U.S. companies have exploited the lax enforcement in Mexico of environmental rules, and the very low wages, to basically dump on the environment and on society their externalities, to put it in economics terms,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.
Lower wages have been the biggest factor leading companies to outsource jobs to Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement, Wallach said, “but for some particularly heavily polluting industries, I’m sure the environmental costs are a higher factor.”
The maquiladora boom
Mexicali emerged as a major manufacturing center decades ago when American companies arrived looking to benefit from cheap labor and government incentives.
The factories began appearing in the
1960s, when thousands of Mexican men returned home after working on farms in the USA. The United States had just eliminated the Bracero Program, which had brought Mexican laborers for more than two decades to work temporarily on U.S. farms, allowing them to send money home.
The Mexican government wanted U.S. support in creating jobs that would absorb these workers, so it launched the Border Industrialization Program, and maquiladoras were born.
Under the system, U.S. companies were exempt from import duties on the raw materials and manufacturing equipment they brought into Mexico, as long as they sent the finished products back across the border to sell. The United States charged duties only on a fraction of the value of those exports created in the manufacturing process.
The city has about 180 maquiladoras. They employ more than 75,000 people and fuel the border economy. Entry-level maquiladoras workers usually make
$2.50 to $3 an hour, while employees with more technical training often earn
$4 to $5 an hour.
The factories churn out a wide variety of products that are shipped across the border and sold in the USA, including airplane parts, printer cartridges, water heaters, air conditioners, medical supplies, tools, roofing materials and electronic products.
The products are sold under brands including Rheem, Bosch, Honeywell and Panasonic, among others. LG Electronics assembles televisions. Newell Brands’ Rubbermaid makes pens and markers. Aqua Lung makes scuba diving equipment.
A majority of Mexicali’s factories are run by U.S. companies, followed by Mexican companies and businesses from South Korea, Japan and Europe.
For years, Mexicali subsisted on agriculture, its farmers growing crops like their counterparts in the Imperial Valley of California. The maquiladoras changed the city.
The countryside around Mexicali still has many farms that produce crops such as wheat and alfalfa. But for decades, the local and state governments have focused more on attracting industries. Since the 1990s, efforts by businesspeople to promote the city’s as “Mexicali, Ciudad Industrial” have further fed the growth of manufacturing plants – and the lines of cars and trucks clogging the streets.
“Mexicali is a very poorly planned city,” Ortega said.
“I was born in a Mexicali where in the morning, we could see all the way to the mountains,” she said. “I saw all the mountains around the valley. Now that’s no longer possible.”
She said it never made sense to promote Mexicali as a center for polluting industries for simple reasons of geography: The city sits in a desert air basin where bad air is naturally trapped and accumulates.
Judging from the smoke around factories and the complaints she hears, Ortega said, some of the biggest polluters appear to include Mexican-owned factories that produce goods such as glass and roofing materials.
She said Mexican government authorities should enforce the environmental laws that are on the books, but they often don’t. “Mexican legislation is very advanced and it’s very strict, but it’s not obeyed – because everything gets solved with bribes,” Ortega said.
Even though she suspects corruption is part of the problem, she doubts big multinationals would try to bribe government officials. Foreign companies have official channels to report any requests for bribes, she said, and any complaints would probably lead to discussions between government representatives.
Lax regulation, max profits
The industrial expansion prompted questions about whether some companies are drawn to Mexico because weaker environmental oversight makes it easier to pollute than in the USA.
Sara Grineski, a sociology professor at the University of Utah, has studied the issue and said lax regulation is one of several factors, along with cheap labor costs and weak labor rules, that attract polluting factories to Mexico.
She cited the construction of a U.S.owned, gas-fired power plant near Mexicali in 2003 built to generate power primarily for Southern California. Grineski and fellow researcher Timothy Collins wrote that the case showed how “the combination of lower production costs and lax environmental policies and enforcement attracts industry.”
“The reduced environmental controls are one part of a broader decision that’s based on maximizing profits,” she said. “I don’t think the regulations are so different, but the actual enforcement of the regulations is very different.”
Mexican government officials denied companies come to the border to pollute. They said Mexico’s environmental regulations are in many cases similar to those in the USA.
When companies decide to open a plant in Mexicali, executives publicly cite reasons such as the savings in labor costs, the closeness to the USA and economical real estate.
“I don’t think they would choose Mexico because they can pollute here more than they can do in the States,” said Alfonso Blancafort Camarena, the top official of the federal Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources in Baja California. “The law in Mexico is pretty strict, and they understand that before they come here.”
Jesus Roman Calleros, a water expert in Mexicali, said big companies seldom face fines or sanctions for pollution violations. When a company is penalized, he said, the fine is usually so small, it’s not an effective deterrent.
“That’s been our message, the wrong message,” Roman Calleros said.
He said the companies “see the government isn’t going to tell them anything, and that shouldn’t be.”
In parts of Mexicali, factories and neighborhoods were built right next to each other, without any space to separate them.
The smokestacks of the Fabrica de Envases de Vidrio (Fevisa) factory tower above rows of homes and unpaved roads in Ejido el Choropo, just south of the city, where children ride bikes past barking dogs and chain-link fences.
The Mexicali-based company makes glass bottles, and the sounds of clinking glass ring out from the plant and drift into the yards of homes next to its outer wall.
Living downwind
Standing in front of her house, Domitila Razo ran two fingers across the dusty windshield of an old Nissan pickup.
“This is a little bit, but it ends up looking white, white, this dust,” Razo said. She pointed out that if one looks closely at the dust on the windshield, it sparkles in the sun.
“We don’t know what it is,” she said. “But we wake up to this.”
She and her family have lived in the house for 22 years.
Her mother, Sara Mendoza, died years ago of a brain tumor. Razo lives with her 13-year-old son, her husband, who works in another factory, and her 86-year-old father.
She said she wants to talk with people at the plant about the dust, which she suspects comes from the factory and settles in her yard. She said the dust is irritating, and she wondered whether it’s harming her family’s health.
Martin Cueva, the company’s director of operations, responded to questions from the Desert Sun by email. He said Fevisa maintains a close relationship with residents in the neighborhood, and “there is no complaint about the company’s operations, much less of health effects.”
Cueva said the company, which produces bottles for soft drinks, beer, wine and food products, uses natural gas as fuel, gets its power from geothermal energy and doesn’t discharge any industrial wastewater. He said the company complies with Mexico’s federal environmental regulations and fulfills “the industry’s most demanding requirements of quality and environmental care.”
When asked about the white dust and the concerns expressed by some neighbors, Cueva said the company’s personnel have spoken with people in the area about that. He said samples of dust were taken and sent to a certified laboratory for analysis.
“The conclusion was that the dust was made up of the elements of the desert,” Cueva wrote. “The streets in the town are loose dirt, and it rises when vehicles pass, or the same phenomenon also occurs when the wind blows strongly.”
Some residents said they view the Fevisa plant as a good neighbor.
“I don’t have any problem. I live calmly. I breathe clean air,” said Maria Susana Ramos, a hair stylist who lives a few blocks from the plant. She said she’s talked with many neighbors and visited the primary school, and “there’s no complaint about health.”
Razo remained concerned.
“The dust is always unpleasant,” Razo said. “I hope they do something.”