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Cleaning Up Lead Contamination Along Mexican-U.S. Border |
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By Katherine Stapp*
The
inter-governmental program Border 2012 has begun to clean up toxic
industrial waste that for a decade have been a presence in the lives
of 10,000 people near the Mexican border city of Tijuana.
NEW YORK - For more than a decade, the residents
of Colonia Chilpancingo, a desperately poor squatters' camp east
of the Mexican city of Tijuana, have lived in the shadow of a toxic
dump called Metales y Derivados, which no one would take responsibility
for.
The children of Chilpancingo, located near the U.S. border and the
Pacific coast, were poisoned with lead or born with terrible defects,
including anencephaly (without a brain).
An abandoned lead smelter, Metales y Derivados lies just 130 meters
from Chilpancingo, home to more than 10,000 people. The site contains
almost 24,000 tons of hazardous waste, including 7,000 metric tons
of lead slag.
In 2002, a report by the environmental oversight commission of the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) confirmed community
health concerns about the toxic contamination from the smelter.
The Commission for Environmental Cooperation was created to monitor
environmental problems related to NAFTA, a 10-year-old accord between
Canada, Mexico and the United States.
But no action was taken on the Chilpancingo until this year, when
a joint U.S.-Mexico program called Border 2012 began funding a comprehensive
clean-up of the site to be completed in 2009.
''This year, thanks at least in part to the 2012 program, clean-up
has begun at the Metales y Derivados site, where we've been working
for 10 years to get action,'' said Amelia Simpson, director of the
Border Environmental Justice Campaign in San Diego, California,
located across the border from Tijuana.
''The community has really benefited from the opportunity to participate
in decisions on the project,'' she added. ''Our experience has really
been positive.''
One of the advantages of Border 2012 over previous binational initiatives
is the participation of indigenous groups, said activist Carlos
Rincón, director of the Mexican project of the group Environmental
Defense, based in the U.S. border city of El Paso, Texas.
Launched in September 2002, the Border 2012 program sets a deadline
of 10 years to achieve cleaner air and water throughout the region,
address problems created by hazardous waste dumps, and tackle the
numerous health problems faced by border communities as a result
of environmental degradation, primarily water-borne and respiratory
illnesses.
To date, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has contributed
some 475 million dollars to over 50 water and wastewater projects
along the U.S.-Mexico border, providing access to potable water
and sanitary treatment systems for 6.5 million border area residents.
The two countries also signed a binational air monitoring agreement
in late June, and the EPA committed up to 13 million dollars toward
the clean-up of a wastewater treatment plant in the northwestern
city of Mexicali, Mexico.
''It's a small program, but it has the potential to do great things,''
said Nancy Woo, an official with the EPA who works primarily on
Border 2012 projects in the U.S. states of California and Arizona.
''All of these problems are so closely tied to socio-economic issues,
and the huge population growth in the border region. It is challenging,
because we're playing catch-up with the environmental infrastructure,''
she said.
According to Woo, the Border 2012 priorities are the shared U.S.-Mexican
watersheds, like the Rio Grande (known in Mexico as Rio Bravo),
and the areas suffering from high levels of air pollution, like
the sister cities of Mexicali and Imperial.
The area encompassed by the program extends 100 km to each side
of the U.S.-Mexico border, which runs more than 3,100 km from the
Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. Over the last 20 years, population
in the border region has swelled to more than 12 million people.
Much of this growth has been in urban areas. From 1990 to 2000,
the population of Ciudad Juarez (across the border from El Paso)
grew 50 percent, in large part due to the explosion of maquiladoras
-- factories assembling products for export, emblematic of the production
shift from the United States to Mexico.
This boom has overwhelmed existing wastewater treatment, drinking
water supply, and solid waste disposal facilities, experts say.
But some activists complain that Border 2012 doesn't have enough
resources to meet its own goals.
''Environmental activists forced elected officials to recognize
what NAFTA would do to the border when it took effect a decade ago,''
said Talli Nauman, an associate in the Americas Program of the New
Mexico-based Interhemispheric Resource Center.
''At that time, they convinced the U.S. Congress to allot 15 million
dollars a year to run Border 2012's predecessor, called the Border
21 Program. But now that NAFTA has become a fact of life and is
taken for granted, legislators have only designated three million
dollars a year to Border 2012,'' she said.
''The bottom line is the bottom line,'' said Nauman. ''Unless Border
2012 receives more funding and uses it strategically, sustainable
development will remain a mere principle. It will not become a reality...
clean-up and prevention measures will be inadequate relative to
the growing demand.''
* Katherine Stapp is a Tierramérica contributor.
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