JUAREZ, Mexico - A rickety wood plank bridge separates the world of Teresa Martinez from the sparkling, walled-in factory where surgical garments are stitched assembly-line fashion.
The Martinez family, 10 of them, live in a single-room shack made of cardboard and wood in Juarez, on the sun-splashed shore of a blackened canal oozing with the waste of slums and industrial parks across the border from El Paso, Texas.
"It is the worst smell you can imagine,'' said Martinez, 46. "At night, it is stronger. And gas rises out of the black waters. You wonder what it will do to your health over time. You know it will never be cleaned up.''
More than two years after the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, making available billions of dollars for toxic cleanup along the border with Mexico, not one environmental project has been launched with those funds, according to U.S. and Mexican officials.
Meanwhile, mostly foreign-owned factories, called maquiladoras, continue to multiply along the environmentally besieged frontier, although the landmark trade pact between the United States, Canada and Mexico was supposed to push industry into the Mexican interior.
In Juarez, a proposal for the city's first sewage treatment plants - at a cost of $40 million - has been shelved because of Mexico's economic troubles. As a result, six open canals such as the one outside the Martinez home absorb the raw sewage of this city of 1.2 million and its more than 350 maquiladoras.
About 55 million gallons of untreated waste are dumped into the Rio Grande here every day; the river is so contaminated with human waste that, experts said, skin contact threatens exposure to cholera, hepatitis and dysentery. Hepatitis rates on the border are two to five times the U.S. national average.
"It's really hard to say that the environment in Mexico or in the U.S. along the border has improved,'' said Chris McGinn, deputy director of Global Trade Watch, the environmental arm of the Washington-based consumer group Public Citizen. "It hasn't. The water's dirtier. The air's dirtier. There's increased improper disposal of hazardous waste.''
NAFTA essentially broke down trade barriers between the three countries and, during heated negotiations on the accord, the Clinton administration maintained that $8 billion would be spent over the next decade to clean up the increasingly industrialized border.
The Mexican government would not say how much it had spent on its own environmental projects in the last two years. But it admits that cleanup and environmental regulation in Mexico's north were set back by the recession.
Of 44 cleanup projects reviewed by the Border Environment Cooperation Commission, a binational organization created after NAFTA came into being, only six have been certified and referred for financing, officials said. Over the next four years, the Texas-based North American Development Bank, the lending organization that works with the commission, expects to hand out about $3 billion in loans for such projects, but the sources for the rest of the funds remain unclear.
During the NAFTA debate, the Sierra Club estimated that at least $20 billion was needed to effectively clean up the border.
Twenty-eight months after the trade pact took effect, the cleanup hasn't started. "Projects have been developed, which is progress in itself, but they have not begun operating,'' said Tracy Williams, a spokeswoman for the Juarez-based commission.
Meanwhile, the number of maquiladora workers increased more than 25 percent during NAFTA's first two years, from 546,000 in 1993 to 689,000 in September. The majority were employed in factories along the frontier. In the first 11 months of last year, nearly 400 new factories opened, according to Global Trade Watch.
"One of the ways to determine if NAFTA is working or not is to examine the water, air and public health in the U.S./Mexico border area,'' said McGinn, whose organization issued a scathing report on border cleanup in January. "By any objective analysis, NAFTA has failed to deliver on the promises of its backers.''
The majority of the pollution along the 2,000-mile border from California to Texas is generated by 2,000 maquiladoras, according to experts. While officials on both sides began monitoring the air quality last year, they agreed to keep the results a secret.
For Martinez and her family, however, the maquiladoras are a godsend.
"We feed our family because of the maquilas,'' she said. In the shanty where they live, there is no running water or electricity. Residents dispose of their trash by dumping it in the canal or incinerating it. The acrid chemicals and sewage burn a long time.
Although neighbors have been afflicted by stomach viruses and skin rashes, the Martinezes have been fortunate. "We have not gotten sick yet,'' said her 22-year-old son Geraldo, who stitches medical garments in the factory across the canal.
"You don't think about the black waters,'' Teresa Martinez said. "For now, we are fine here,'' said Teresa Martinez. "You only think about the work.''
Article from Newsday, May 5, 1996