Frontera NorteSur

Fear of Rain, Love of Money 

In a region defined by drought, you might consider it odd that many people cringe with fear when rain clouds hover overhead. But that’s a common reaction in
the Paso del Norte borderlands during the summer rainy reason. And for good reason.

On the morning of July 28, Mexican authorities evacuated hundreds of families from the El Barreal section of Ciudad Juarez . It was the second time this month El Barreal’s residents watched their homes get flooded.

A collection of subdivisions, El Barreal was settled by maquiladora industry workers, many of whom uprooted their lives in southern Mexico in the perpetual search for a better life on the border. Now, some have lost practically everything.

El Barreal was not a natural disaster, per se. Incredibly, its houses were built on a depressed piece of land, known locally as “Duck Lake,” that indeed turns into a lake when the rain clouds explode in fury, as they dutifully did when the “remnants” of Hurricane Dolly swept through the region last weekend.  

Even before Dolly’s dastardly encore, the local press abounded with stories about alleged improprieties between housing developers and state and local officials, inadequate storm water controls and substandard construction. In the bigger scheme of things, El Barreal, was part of a national housing boom that put low-income working families into tract-style housing built by private developers. Credit, available for the first time to many, underwrote the boom. It was Mexico’s version of the Homeownership Society.  

Quoted in the Norte daily, Jose Luis Rodriguez, a former Ciudad Juarez municipal official, explained the system:  

“This all has a political background, aside from the real estate profiting, the pay-offs to political campaigns. There are landowners who invest heavily in candidates for governor and municipal president and later cash in, putting their own people in key government positions, where they become operators for the benefit of individuals…”

Outraged by their losses and crying fraud, a group of El Barreal’s residents has filed a complaint with the official Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission, which will probe possible influence trafficking and turn over its findings to the state attorney general’s office for legally possible but politically tricky prosecutions against culpable officials. No charges have been announced so far.

Commenting on the controversy, Chihuahua Governor Jose Reyes Baeza was quoted as saying responsible parties should pay for their “broken dishes” but it was more important to address the immediate needs of flood victims.

El Barreal is not unique. Across Ciudad Juarez, scores of neighborhoods suffer flooding every year, even though a plan is on file with the municipal planning department to properly channel the waters that frequently turn a landlocked desert city into a raging, debris-filled river. As news stories report, the city’s archaic storm and waste water drainage system is in a state of virtual collapse. Perhaps symbolically, the historic San Jose Mission, built in the 1700s, collapsed in the most recent storm.

Mexico’s federal government has declared Ciudad Juarez a disaster zone eligible for emergency assistance. But another quick fix begs an important question: What happened to the billions of dollars promised for improving border infrastructure when the North American Free Trade Agreement was negotiated?  

Fifteen years later, Ciudad Juarez’s crumbling basic infrastructure and washed-out neighborhoods stand in contrast with the state-of-the art maquiladora plants, upscale stores and ritzy new hotels that decorate a city pushing two million inhabitants; another reminder that economic growth is not always synonymous with social development.

The US side of the border is vulnerable too, as Dolly’s devilish tail demonstrated.Located northeast of Ciudad Juarez-El Paso, the New Mexico mountain resort of Ruidoso attracts many visitors from the borderlands. A July 26 weekend getaway, though, became a nightmare as fierce rains pounded the town, pushed the Ruidoso River over its banks, washed out bridges, trapped vacationers and killed one man. Preliminary property damages were conservatively estimated in the $15 million range.

More rain fell in Ruidoso in a 24-hour period than during any comparable time frame since 1963, according to press accounts.  Flooding was also reported around El Paso and Las Cruces, New Mexico, where the city received twice as much rain in one day than it had during the entire year. Similar events punctuated 2006, the year of “Little Katrina.”

Northern Mexico and the US Southwest are in a strange environmental predicament. Climate change scientists and other researchers predict long-term drought on the one hand and more violent weather disturbances on the other. In a cruelly ironic future, the region’s inhabitants could see months go by without any rain only to suffer super-flash floods caused by abnormal amounts of rainfall.

Are El Barreal and Ruidoso harbingers of more climatic destruction yet to come? Are governments on either side of the border seriously planning or budgeting for all the possible consequences?

-Kent Paterson