Frontera NorteSur

Carefully observing the changing demographics of US society, Mexico's federal government is wagering that the graying of Gringolandia will give a strong impulse to medical tourism. "A million baby boomers, as they are called in the US, could come to live in Mexico in the coming years," said Mexican Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova Villalobos at an event held earlier this month in Mexico to mark National Nursing Day. An opportunity exists, Cordova said, for tourism promoters to sell not only sun and sand but also "treatments or surgeries."

In coordination with other federal agencies, the Health Ministry plans to build up the medical tourism infrastructure during the next two years. Important components of the initiative include training a corps of bilingual Spanish-English nurses, and increasing the number of private Mexican hospitals accredited by a joint US-Mexico commission already at work. According to Cordova, eight such private institutions have been certified under the commission's standards.

Although regional initiatives to promote medical tourism are underway in the northern border states of Chihuahua, Baja California and Nuevo Leon, Cordova said greater coordination at the federal level is needed to tap a global market enjoyed by nations including Thailand, India, Costa Rica and Brazil. Mexico's leading health official stressed the new program will benefit the private sector.

"This is going to be an incentive for the private market," Cordova said. Cordova acknowledged that training bilingual nurses risks a bigger brain drain to the US, where some localities are already recruiting Mexican nurses for much higher pay than they receive at home, but was careful to add the envisioned training will focus on elite sectors of Mexican health care delivery like cosmetic surgery and other specialized treatments. Pilot programs to train bilingual nurses are in the stage of preparation, Cordova added.

Whether medical tourism booms in Mexico will depend on a variety of social, economic, political and security trends north and south of the border. Continued violence in parts of the border region is likely to hamper potential growth in the short-term. A big factor will be the outcome of so-called health care reform in the US, especially if legislation is passed that increases rather than lower costs as the Obama administration proposes.

A former head of the Puerto Vallarta Medical Association who currently serves on the municipal health committee, Dr. Jorge Roberto Cortes, or "Doctor Jorge" as he likes to be called, is skeptical that health care will be a bigger reason for people to come to Mexico than it is now.

Still, coincidental visits to the doctor or dentist are increasingly important in tourist destinations like Puerto Vallarta. For instance, Cortes estimated his patient load consists of 50 percent foreigners and 50 percent Mexican nationals. In Puerto Vallarta and elsewhere in Mexico, sick tourists from the US, will discover that medical costs are far cheaper than at home. According to Cortes, office visits hover around $40, while x-rays costing as little as $40 can be turned around in less than 45 minutes.

After several years in the US that included a stint at Mt. Sinai, Cortes speaks English with barely a hint of an accent. And he is not the only local, bilingual health care provider. A city of more than 300,000 people, Puerto Vallarta has a plethora of public and private hospitals, hundreds of doctors, modern medical labs and ready medical evacuation services.

"It´s a lot, but Vallarta is growing up," the general practicioner said. "We have all the specialties. You die if you want to. We have everything here."

A local medical services guide distributed in Puerto Vallarta contains 10 pages advertising specialists, family doctors and even psychologists. On its website, the Guadalajara-headquartered San Javier Hospital lists foreign insurance companies from which it will accept payments.

The companies include Cigna, Aetna, Tricare and International Health Insurance of Denmark, among others. The hospital advertises birth delivery for about $700 and hysterectomies for approximately $1,000. The prices include one and two night hospital stays, respectively.

Another local facility, Medasist Hospital, charges less than $30 for a short emergency room visit, between $20-$30 for urgent care and from $90 to $120 per night for hospital rooms. Doctor's fees are extra.

Dr. Cortes is among physicians who prefer to deal on a cash basis. Echoing complaints familiar in the US, Cortes said bureaucratic delays and nay-saying can make private insurers troublesome. Typically, insurance companies take months to pay Mexican health care providers.

In tropical areas like Puerto Vallarta, new residents and tourists should be aware of the possibility of contracting unfamiliar illnesses like dengue. The State of Jalisco operates a spraying program to erradicate mosquitoes in in Puerto Vallarta, but at least 13 people have contracted the disease in January so far, according to a state health department report cited in the press.

Hailing from a nurse's family in California's San Joaquin Valley, Pamela Thompson once treated Mexican farmworkers in the emergency room. Nowadays, Thompson's HeathCare Resources Puerto Vallarta company networks US expatriates and tourists with Mexican healthcare providers. Thompson said interest in Mexican medical care is growing among both US consumers and private insurers.

Interviewed on a busy high season day, the consultant said the recession had not singificantly slowed visits from foreigners, especially gay men, seeking operations like plastic surgery. According to HealthCare Resources Puerto Vallarta's website, several specialized surgical packages are 30-40 percent cheaper in Mexico than in the US and Canada.

Thompson said she had received recent inquiries from US-based insurance companies about sending patients to Mexico. "I think that's going to happen soon," Thompson said. "(Private insurers) are staring to think about it, talk about it."

According to Thompson, four basic types of insurance are available to foreign tourists and residents in Mexico-international, travel, private Mexican, and state-run Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) coverage. For short-term or winter season visitors to Mexico known as "snowbirds," travel insurance is the most practical option, Thomspon asserted.

The former nurse said many US citizens are surprised to learn that private health insurance in Mexico costs as low as $1,500 per year, though a huge drawback for many is that companies will not cover anyone over 62 years of age. Fulltime residents of Mexico who hold FM-3 visas can now qualify for IMSS coverage, Thomspon said, cautioning the public system is overloaded and quality far from desirable. Still, she said, IMSS insurance is "absolutely better than nothing." For the truly destitute foreigner, regional public hospitals will accept an admission.

Given the aging of many US residents of Mexico, the inability to use Medicare to pay for health-related expenses south of the border is problematic for many expatriates and potential immigrants-at least until now. Meantime, the growing size of the US retiree population in places like Puerto Vallarta has attracted the notice of hospitals north of the border, which offer free health clinics in Mexico during the high season to court potential patients. In conjunction with hospitals, Thompson said she had facililated transfers of US retirees from Puerto Vallarta to institutions back in the old country.

Yet increasingly, Thompson said she had been witness to another tendency: younger US citizens relocating with their families to Puerto Vallarta. The possibility of working at home via the Internet favors this trend, the longtime resident of Puerto Vallarta added. "I've had more calls for pediatricians here during the last 6 months," Thompson said.

Intimately familiar with the local scene, Thompson acknowledged there were "quacks" around "just like everywhere else." But the health care professional stood by the overall quality of doctors and services available in the Pacific port city.

"We have great physicans in the area. The doctors here spend time with you," Thompson said. "You can call them on a cell-phone and you don't have to go through 20 people to get an appointment. All the doctors I work with are like that."

In Mexico, getting personal recommendations from knowledeable locals is a good way of rooting out the frauds.

Back in the US, meanwhile, the issue of dental treatment has been virtually absent from the so-called health care reform debate. But a glance at rates charged by Mexican dentists quickly reveals a continued, major attraction for both tourists and prospective immigrants.

Not far from Cortes' office and just off a bridge that crosses the Rio Cuale River with its tropical denizens of darting birds and fighting iguanas, dentists Jessica Portuguez and Gloria Carrillo staff an Old Town Vallarta branch of Solu/Dent, a privately-owned business. Recently, the clinic offered two cleanings for $12 and extractions for $9 per tooth. According to Carrillo, five porcelain teeth for a bridge cost approximately $500.

After three years in business at the site, Portuguez and Carrillo estimate that 40 percent of their patients are foreigners during the tourist high season which spans the months from October to March. Local expatriates, who include customers from the nearby, old hippie settlement of Yelapa, spread Solu/Dent's name by word-of-mouth and bring in family members and friends. "They like how we attend them here," Carrillo contended.

A graduate of the University of Veracruz, Portuguez came to Puerto Vallarta two years ago after hearing how the large floating and resident foreign population created ample work opportunities for new dentists. According to the relocated southerner, Mexican denists must complete five years of studies and one year of social service to obtain basic licensure. "We have very accessible prices and good quality," Portuguez said. "We have trained doctors. We studied for this. All work is guaranteed."

In Puerto Vallarta, "English-speaking" signs are visibly posted outside many dentist's offices. Portuguez, who said she studies English in her spare time, assured that a bilingual receptionist was available to help the office's dentists translate with patients. Solu/Dent recently opened a third branch in Bucerias, a community just north of Puerto Vallarta where many US-born immigrants have moved. "We hope nothing changes and we stay here," Portuguez said.

Editor's Note: The following story is another special contribution to our series that examines changes and trends in southern New Mexico agriculture since statehood in 1912. This piece looks at the recent displacement of farmworkers in the border counties of Dona Ana, Luna and Hidalgo. Support for this series was provided by the McCune Charitable Foundation and the New Mexico Humanities Council.

As unusually cold weather chilled the borderland late last year, a group of men huddled inside the Border Agricultural Workers Center in El Paso, Texas. Laid out on mats or sitting upright in chairs, the men watched a soccer game liven up the main room. In the back kitchen, Oscar Barela and Jose Rocha were chowing down after a day in the red chile fields of nearby southern New Mexico and west Texas. From the standpoint of the two men, the bounty wasn't good. For a full day's worth of picking, Barela said he came back with only $40 after deductions.

Originally from Buenaventura, Chihuahua, Barela said working conditions have deteriorated in the three years since he started picking chile. A former resident of Colorado, Barela said his job at a restaurant in the Rocky Mountain state once provided him with a decent living and even a small car. Currently living in El Paso, the chile picker asserted that he "can't even afford a bicycle now." A fellow migrant recently ribbed Barela for even bothering to pick chile, the El Paso resident said. "'What are you doing? What kind of job are you doing'?" Barela recalled the man saying. "'Not even illegals want to do this'."

Counting 37 years in southwestern agriculture, Rocha has witnessed even bigger changes in the chile industry than Barela. A native of Durango, Mexico, Rocha said 20 buses once picked up workers gathered on the streets surrounding the farm worker shelter for early morning forays into the chile fields situated an hour or two from El Paso. After the green chile harvest, workers would then move into the red chile picking that lasted until February, Rocha recalled.

Nowadays, only four buses transport a reduced number of pickers during a season that ends well before February, Rocha said, adding that some workers come back with just $10 in their pockets after taxes, a $5.00 transportation fee and charges for burritos that cost between $1.50 and $2.00 are deducted from their pay.

Today's chile picking is a far cry from yesteryear- what might have passed as the "Golden Age" of New Mexico chile in the 1980s and early 1990s- when workers could earn up to $100 per day, according to Rocha.

Perhaps the biggest change both Rocha and Barela have experienced is physical. In the days of Cesar Chavez, farmworker activists pushed for the banning of the short-handled hoe that had laborers stooped over in the field. Today, however, Rocha and Barela often find themselves literally on their knees.

Much of the work remaining in the red chile harvest, they explained, consists of kneeling down to scoop up the loose red chiles scattered by the harvesting machines that suck up entire rows of plants but leave some pods on the ground.

Showing off a pair of stained paints, "the work of a Mexican," as he called it, Barela complained his knees hurt. "You have to get on your knees all day long," the El Paso-based farmworker said, comparing "La Pepena" to the bustle of small children crawling after toys on the ground.

As the 21st century advances, Barela and Rocha are among the thinning ranks of a labor force that has undergone historic changes since mid-1980s, when some estimates calculated that upwards of 15,000 seasonal pickers, mostly undocumented Mexican workers, were employed in the regional chile harvest.

While a harvesting machine still eludes the tricky green chile plant, between 70-80 percent of New Mexico's red chile crop is now mechanically harvested, according to New Mexico State University (NMSU) agricultural economist Terry Crawford.

Sold by the Boese Harvester Company of Saginaw, Michigan, one of the expensive red chile harvesting machines was visible this past harvest season at a field located just north of Hatch, New Mexico. In systematic fashion, the noisy invention plucked four rows of chile at a time, shooting up the plants to the top of the machine where a small crew of workers quickly cleaned the "trash" before sending the pods onto a conveyor chute that emptied into crates hauled on a truck which moved slowly alongside the harvester.

In total, two drivers and seven processors replace the need for 200 workers, said farm foreman Justin Bennett. "It's really beneficial for us," the young man said.

Many growers consider mechanization a must-do in order to remain competivive in an industry that was transformed by the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other international trade pacts.

Contrary to postcard mythology, few of the peppers grown in New Mexico wind up as the spicy, flavorful green or red chile that makes the local cuisine so renowned. According to the New Mexico Chile Association, a trade industry group, only four percent of statewide chile production in 2007 was destined for the fresh, green market.

More than half of the chile produced, or 56 percent, was for three segments of the industry that are heavily impacted by cheap foreign imports from Mexico, China, India, Peru, and other nations-red spice, red oleoresin and cayenne mash. Citing United States Department of Agriculture statistics, the New Mexico Business Weekly reported last September that US chile imports exploded from 417 million pounds in 1999 to more than one billion pounds by 2008.

From 1980 to 2007, US per capita consumption of fresh and processed peppers more than doubled from 3 pounds to 6.7 pounds, according to the newspaper. But New Mexico did not benefit in large measure from the boom, and chile production plummeted statewide from 34,500 acres in 1992 to 11,000 in 2008.

Factors including plant diseases and urbanization contributed to the decline, but many analysts point the finger at foreign imports as the primary cause for the historic bust of the New Mexico chile industry.

To regain a lost market, the New Mexico Chile Association is promoting domestic consumption of locally-grown chile. Diners at restaurants in Socorro and Albuquerque might recently have noticed waitresses sporting t-shirts promoting the new campaign. On the production side, chile producers look to NMSU to help successfully develop a mechanical harvester for green chile similar to the one that already exist for red chile. Periodically, New Mexico media report on attempts to mechanize chile harvesting.

While growers are beginning to get public recognition of their issues, very little attention has been placed on the issue of farm workers displaced by free trade and mechanization. The issue of displacement was addressed at a June 2007 Las Cruces forum organized by Friends and Advocates of Farmworkers, a loose coalition of state agencies, grassroots community organizations and the local Roman Catholic Diocese.

"The majority of testimonies coincided in that part of the displacement of employment comes from NAFTA, and not only between Mexico and the US but also, for example, from chile that is coming from China," said Veronica Carmona, forum co-organizer and staff member of the Las Cruces-based Colonias Development Council (CDC), a non-profit group that works in low-income rural communities.

Nobody really knows the exact number of farmworkers displaced in the chile industry. A centralized system to track the comings and goings of farm workers does not exist in New Mexico, and whatever information is available comes in scattered chunks and from different sources. Irene Laguna, state monitor advocate and migrant seasonal program manager for the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions, said in an interview last fall that her agency's client load had dropped from about 5,000 five or ten years ago to 1,700 in 2009.

According to farmworker Barela, about 40 workers typically labor in "La Pepena" as opposed to the 200 or so who would be employed for a full day's picking at a typical farm. A 2007 study by NMSU sociologist Lois Stanford estimated the number of field hands employed full-time in chile harvesting for three months of the year fell from 7,653 workers in 1990 to 3,120 in 2007. Stanford calculated that the complete mechanization of the chile industry, in both its green and red segments, could result in the elimination of another 1,974 jobs.

Labor displacement in the chile fields coincides with a similar phenomenon in the southern New Mexico onion industry, which also has seen the introduction of harvesting machines during the last 15 years. Since many local workers found jobs in both crops, the double displacement is turning a largely invisible work force upside down.

A CDC survey of 123 farmworkers in New Mexico's Dona Ana County and neighboring El Paso County, Texas, found that more than half, or 54 percent, reported having an annual household income of less than $9,999. The survey was conducted from April 2006 to February 2007, a time when foreign imports, declining chile acreage and mechanization characterized local agriculture. According to Carmona, reduced income from farm work is driving some workers into the informal economy.

Since the farmworker population is not tracked on a systematic basis, anectodal reports proliferate about displaced laborers. According to Irene Laguna, the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions provides new job training for farmworkers, and some workers were able to move into higher-paid construction and truck driving jobs in recent years. But when the construction industry tanked, some former farmworkers returned to the fields to seek work at precisely the time far less was available.

In 2009, farmers had little difficulty finding willing workers, Laguna said. "They had an abundance of harvest workers which, compared to last year, they had a shortage of harvest workers," she added.

Farmworker advocates report that truncated harvest seasons mean that more workers are requesting unemployment benefits on earlier dates than in previous years. And because benefits are based on earnings, less farm work translates into a smaller check.

"What we've seen is that the season has shortened," said Olga Alvara, a farmworker program manager for the New Mexico Division of Vocational Rehabilitation. "So that shrinks their unemployment too."

For veteran chile picker Jose Rocha, unemployment can be hard to collect because of labor contractors who purportedly do not report workers' earnings to proper authorities. The practice has been a long-time irregularity of the seasonal labor contract system.

The New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions encourages and helps train displaced farmworkers to move into non-agricultural occupations, but the CDC's Veronica Carmona said efforts also should be made to keep "those workers who want to stay in the countryside" in agriculture, perhaps by means of collectively-owned plots of land or production cooperatives aimed at the growing organic foods market.

Maintaining workers in agriculture, Carmona said, could be a realistic solution for non English-speaking men between the ages of 50-70 who might find it very diffcult to transition to new careers. The 2006-2007 CDC survey reported that 80 percent of the respondents had not received any training outside agriculture.

Meantime, Carmona and others are working with the office of New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman to secure support from the USDA and US Department of Labor for better data collection on the state's farmworker population.

In a letter to Bingaman last May, Las Cruces Bishop Ricardo Ramirez and other farmworker advocates stressed that adequately supporting farmworker services, as well as accurately assessing the possible need for foreign guestworkers in the H2A program, was dependent on having reliable statistics for New Mexico's farmworkers.

Mulling over their options, both Rocha and Barela contended that finding non-farm work in El Paso, where the official unemployment rate nudges 10 percent, was very difficult for men in their shoes. They said an urgent need exists to bring manufacturing back to the US side of the border or create an emergency jobs program for farmworkers.

"We're going to have to ask President Obama to do something for the farmworkers, and become aware of us," Barela said. "We work so everyone can eat. The hand we utilize to work is so people can eat red and green chile."

Editor’s Note: The following story is another installment in Frontera NorteSur’s Centennial series that examines the development of the rural New Mexico borderlands since statehood in 1912. Support for this story was provided by the McCune Charitable Foundation and the New Mexico Humanities Council.

Around the bend from a southern New Mexico horse ranch where bison stand sentry, a visitor might think he has stumbled onto the set of a sci-fi flick in production. Donning a respirator mask that presses his goggled eyes as he zooms in and out of gnarled trees, Todd Harper commandeers a noisy contraption. Perhaps resembling a “moon rover,” the harvesting machine’s mechanical arms grab hold of a thick tree trunk and furiously shake the prey.

Watching intently, mother Sally Harper admits she’s been “bopped” by falling branches more than a few times in her career, which is actually not cranking out B-grade Hollywood fantasies. After all, the Harpers, are serious pecan growers and early winter is harvest time in the Mesilla Valley where they live just north of the US-Mexico border.

Pecans changed Sally Harper’s life 23 years ago when she and her late husband, an agricultural economist at nearby New Mexico State University, acquired a small pecan orchard. “We needed a change of lifestyle and discovered it was more work than we expected,” Harper recalls.

A no-nonsense businesswoman whose small stature conceals a reservoir of energy, Harper is a certified organic grower who produces high-quality pecans in orchards scattered on 31 acres. Harper and son also contract out their fleet of harvest machinery and small crew of workers to other growers.

Dashing around pecan-canopied back roads in a big pick-up, Harper oversees a ten-man mobile work force while finding time to inspect harvested nuts and deliver them to a cleaning plant. In between runs, she pours through crates for sticks, rocks, golf balls, baseballs and even the occasional dead chicken that might get sucked up along with nuts by the harvesting machines that scour and scoop the ground. Then there are the “stick-nuts,” pecans which are stuck to the shell and sent to Mexico for painstaking hand shelling, Harper must watch out for. “You have to be pretty well organized to be efficient,” Harper insists, “because if you aren’t efficient you aren’t going to make any money.”

To see the harvest through completion, Harper and fellow farmers must first repel the onslaught of uninvited nut-craving guests-hungry skunks, snacking dogs, hoarding ground squirrels and, in the opinion of Harper, the terror of the pecan orchard: marauding flocks of crows which descend on the trees in such numbers they darken the light inside Harper’s home as they swoop in for the feast, according to the Mesilla Valley grower.

Now in charge of the harvesting equipment, 30-year-old Todd Harper stands out in a profession which attracts few youths these days. College-educated, Harper nonetheless says he likes working on the farm. Besides the outdoors, the younger Harper cites the varied tasks of pecan growing-prepping the machinery, pruning the trees, mowing the ground and harvesting the nuts, among other chores. Will he continue in the farming business?

“I enjoy farming, but you know with the economy and development pressures and water, time will tell,” he ventures. “But I thoroughly enjoy it.”

The Harpers are among border-area pecan producers who’ve carved out an important niche in national and international markets. Locally, pecan growing got a huge boost in the early 1930s when Dean Stahmann traipsed across the state line from neighboring El Paso County, Texas, and began planting 4,000 acres of trees.

Nowadays, more than 37,000 acres of pecans cover the New Mexican landscape, mostly in southern New Mexico, says James Ditmore, international trade specialist for the New Mexico Department of Agriculture (NMDA). Ditmore’s up-to-date numbers are more than 4,000 acres higher than the 2002 agricultural census which counted nearly 33,000 acres of pecans statewide.

Projected by NMDA to reach 76 million pounds, this year’s harvest will be a biennial bumper crop. New Mexico maintains its number two status for national pecan production, only behind Georgia, Ditmore says. Every year, the crop brings in about $180 million for the state economy, he adds. That’s far more than the farm gate value of New Mexico’s vaunted green chile, which fetched $42.3 million in 2008.

Ditmore attributes the pecan boom to higher commodity prices and vastly expanded international exports, especially to China. Soaring from 500,000 pounds a few years ago to 15 million last year, fully one-third of New Mexico’s pecan crop was shipped to China in 2009, according to Ditmore.

“It’s considered an exotic nut. It's consumed during Chinese New Year,” Ditmore says. “It’s considered very lucky and a prosperous New Year.” Other emerging markets include India, Turkey and the Middle East. “It’s something new for them, like the macadamia nut was for us- a similar process,” he adds.

Barely tapped in New Mexico, the value-added potential of pecans is on display inside the Stahmann Farms Country Store located south of Las Cruces. On a busy holiday shopping day, visitors could select from an assortment of pecan candy, cinnamon spice pecans, 100% pure virgin pecan oil, chile roasted pecans, pecan cappuchino and, of course, the indomitable pecan pie.

Once entirely hand harvested, today’s pecan harvesting is highly mechanized. Though some hand crews still travel from Mexico to work smaller orchards, different, costly machines are employed in the various stages of the harvesting process-cleaning and sweeping the ground, shaking the trees and harvesting the nuts. From the orchard, pecans first go to a cleaning plant and then later to a shelling facility, both of which require some human labor.

In previous years, Harper insists she’s had trouble finding “competent workers” to fill out a 10-person crew that complements the machine-driven chores. Not this year. Usually running an ad for seasonal employees, Harper was instead deluged by applicants who showed up solely by word-of-mouth.

“I’ve had guys who want to bring their buddy. Everybody wants a job,” she says. “It’s a sign of the times.”

A landscaper by trade who needed the work, Frank Marquez of the nearby community of Anthony was connected to Harper through a friend and got a job machine-blowing nuts scattered alongside a dirt road back into the orchard. “I like it. It’s interesting. It’s fun,” Marquez says.

Even though the contemporary talk of regional economic development centers around space-age and high-tech endeavors, Marquez says agriculture remains “part of the economics” of the Mesilla Valley, and a source of seasonal or longer-term employment.

For Sally Harper, the new economics of pecans means she gets a premium price for organically-grown nuts produced for the retail market. Visually, organic and conventional orchards, the latter defined as operations which utilize chemical pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, don’t look much different, Harper acknowledges, but adds that growing pecans without chemicals carries environmental benefits like keeping precious groundwater supplies free of contamination. Going organic, Harper insists, is “greener all the way around.”

Like countless generations of New Mexican farmers, modern pecan growers are dependent on the waters of the Rio Grande for their livelihoods. And as in the past, Harper and her neighbors warily watch the snow pack far to the north in the Sangre de Cristo mountains, where melting hillsides in the spring send vital run-off tumbling into the Rio Grande. Drier years translate not only into less available irrigation water from the river, but extra environmental and economic costs related to the pumping of groundwater.

In late 2009, an unusual “snow pack” in the Mesilla Valley left wet ground and delayed harvesting by the Harpers and many other growers for at least two weeks.

Aesthetically and environmentally, pecans have transformed the landscape of the Mesilla Valley during the last century. From the desert approaches to the patch of greenery that snakes along the Rio Grande, visitors quickly notice the forest-like enclaves which stand sandwiched between the awkwardly-merging cities of Las Cruces and El Paso. At times the urban and the rural come together, evidenced by the trendy home buyers who seek a house in the valley with its own little pecan orchard.

As a long-term investment that requires 12 or 15 years before young trees start producing, according to NMDA’s James Ditmore, pecans are not subject to shorter-term market fluctuations like cotton or even chile. Absent greater urban development and water usage pressures, pecans are likely to hold their ground in the Mesilla Valley. For now, the stately trees have maintained and expanded their presence as rural signposts.

“Visitors never forget when they’ve been to Las Cruces,” Sally Harper says. “They always talk about all the pecan orchards.”

Editor’s Note: The following story is an update of a piece run by Frontera NorteSur last September that covered the struggles of an El Paso group representing displaced factory workers, La Mujer Obrera, to chart a new economic future for low-income women workers. The story was made possible in part by a grant from the McCune Charitable Foundation of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The following story is an update of a piece run by Frontera NorteSur last September that covered the struggles of an El Paso group representing displaced factory workers, La Mujer Obrera, to chart a new economic future for low-income women workers. The story was made possible in part by a grant from the McCune Charitable Foundation of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

From a corner of a converted garment industry plant, poetry and prose pierced walls long sealed with sweat and struggle as the cool, late fall borderland evening set in. In an eclectic performance, cosmic artwork exhibited by Gabriel Gaytan, Veracruz-style tunes strummed by musician Francisco Rodriguez and readings by local writers Nancy Lechuga and Griselda Rodriguez helped inaugurate Cafe Mayachen, the latest project of El Paso’s La Mujer Obrera (LMO) and the El Puente Development Corporation.

Housed in the sprawling quarters of Mercado Mayapan in the Texas border city’s old garment district, the cafe is planned as a showcase for grassroots literary, artistic and musical talent. Between events, visitors can browse books and check out videos on topics like Mexico’s Zapatista National Liberation Army, while sipping Chiapas-grown coffee also available by the pound.

“We decided to open this space to have it close to this community that has been abandoned for years, after NAFTA,” said Maria Lopez, director of the Mayachen Museum which sits next to the new cafe. For Lopez, the cafe and other facilities tucked into Mercado Mayapan represent the stirrings of an economic and cultural revival in a city which suffered tens of thousands of manufacturing job losses during the years surrounding the negotiation and implementation of NAFTA and other free trade agreements.

In a unique display, the history of El Paso’s garment workers, who at one time sewed together the threads which festooned the latest fashion rages sweeping the US and the world, is detailed in the Mayachen Museum. Rounding out the tribute to border working-class history, an exhibition outside the museum’s doors is dedicated to the Mexican farm and rail workers who came to the US during the 1942-64 Bracero Program.

“We thought that it was important to show the community how the Mexican community has contributed not only to the economy but to the culture and to the values of the American society,” Lopez said.

Besides regular multi-media cultural events, Lopez and other organizers of the museum/cafe intend to involve local youths in mural and oral history projects. In between events, community members may even pass the time away with domino games.

Cafe Mayachen’s opening is a noteworthy development in light of local controversies over the viability of La Mujer Obrera’s alternative economic development initiative which, if successful, could be a model for other low-income communities in the US/Mexico borderlands and far beyond.

In a briefing paper to the Obama White House this fall, LMO contended that its project means not only jobs, but also education and empowerment for Latina women workers. El Paso’s Latina workers, who average about half the income of Anglo women’s median income, are in particularly dire straits and largely left out of the loop of federal stimulus spending, according to LMO.

Much of the stimulus funding has been directed at construction and other industries primarily dominated by men, the group said.

According to LMO: “Mercado Mayapan is a path out of this endemic structural poverty for women, not only workers who lost their jobs when factories closed, but also for the younger women whose only option for their families has been public assistance or the underground economy….”

The struggle to emancipate and empower border working women has been far from easy.

Earlier this fall, a funding crisis prompted members of LMO to stage a noisy occupation of El Paso Mayor John Cook’s office. In justifying the action, LMO charged that start-up monies for its projects pledged by a variety of government agencies were slow in coming.

Rankled by the protest, and noting that La Mujer Obrera was in default of an earlier city loan, Mayor Cook told Frontera NorteSur he would nevertheless recommend the El Paso City Council approve an additional $400,000 in Empowerment Zone monies for the worker/community group. By a 4-3 vote margin on September 22, however, the City Council turned down the funding until LMO’s finances were “in order” and “not running a deficit.”

Sponsored by Representative Eddie Holguin Jr., the City Council action also stipulated that the Empowerment Zone Advisory Committee give the City Council a recommendation as to where to allocate business development funds in the zone.

Denial of the Empowerment Zone money, LMO Executive Director Irma Montoya said, set back plans by some community members to launch new businesses that could tap into Mercado Mayapan’s emerging nexus. “More than affecting us in the organization,” Montoya said, “it affected the community itself.”

Yet LMO has since preserved and expanded its project, partly through the volunteerism of more than 100 workers who agreed to work without pay for a period of time until new monies began flowing. Most recently, a $25,000 grant from Bank of America has helped plug the budget hole, according to a statement from LMO. Another $250,000 in stimulus funds and a pending $1,000,000 grant from the North American Development Bank will help the Mercado survive, Montoya added in an interview with Frontera NorteSur.

On other fronts, LMO and its 40,000 square-foot center have fared well in the public spotlight. For the second year in a row, large crowds flocked to Mercado Mayapan to celebrate the annual Days of the Dead festivities in early November. In 2009 LMO has been the recipient of an award from Texas State Senator Eliot Shapleigh (D-El Paso), and has been invited to participate in projects sponsored by the Smithsonian Latino Center and Leveraging Investments in Creativity’s Artography Project.

Each month, a new theme permeates the walls and halls of Mercado Mayapan. In October, for example, photos and treaties informed visitors of the struggle surrounding a cultural staple and symbol of Mexico and indigenous America-corn.

Distributed to the public, the recent Corn Declaration issued by a coalition of rural Mexican organizations and allies criticized the impact of free trade on small growers, the loss of food self-sufficiency and the epidemic of malnutrition afflicting Mexican society.

“Today, now more than ever, the demand for independence, land and freedom vibrates in our hearts and in our stomachs,” the statement read. “We convoke the people of Mexico to join efforts to defend what our peoples have created, reproduced and defended for centuries.”

Like the younger Maria Lopez, El Paso writer Joe Olvera considers the Mercado and its satellite institutions as essential for the future of south-central El Paso. The museum/cafe, he said, are vital linkages between previous generations of El Pasoans and newer ones, especially recent Mexican immigrants who might be unaware of the long history of working-class and community struggles in El Chucho, as El Paso is colloquially known.

The first Chicano television news reporter in El Paso back in 1971, Olvera is from an older generation that struggled for cultural recognition and equality in the media, academy and other institutions. Although Olvera has lost both legs from “that devil diabetes," the former staff writer for the now-defunct El Paso Herald-Post and El Paso Times was on hand for Cafe Mayachen’s opening to read from his book Chicano Sin Fin.

“It’s just a start, eventually we’ll fill it up,” Olvera said, adding that he and his wife had long collaborated with LMO’s project. “We need something literary, because we’ve have some real giant Chicano writers like Ricardo Sanchez, Abelardo Delgado, Rudy Anaya, of course.”

In today’s challenging times, both older and newer voices must be heard, Olvera insisted.

“We need to promote them, push their works, let people know about those types of works so they can begin to understand who they are,” he said. “Many of our people haven’t been given that opportunity to say ‘I am a Chicano and proud of it.’ They don’t know who they are, and we need to remedy it.”

While Cafe Mayachen gears up, the staff at Mercado Mayapan plans for a busy holiday season. Besides a wide assortment of gifts such as traditional Mexican handicrafts and attire, visitors to the complex can dine on holiday tamales and other seasonal foods. According to Montoya, upcoming December activities include piñata-busting, Christmas plays and more.

Editor’s Note: The following story is the second and last report on the US War on Drugs conference held in El Paso, Texas, on September 21 and 22 of this year. The event was initiated by faculty from the University of Texas at El Paso and supported by a host of local organizations and agencies.

The struggling corn fields of northern Chihuahua and the shuttered textile plants of North Philadelphia might seem worlds apart. Although nationhood, language and culture separate the two places, a history of globalization, deindustrialization and drug culture shape both entities.

As part of the landmark US War on Drugs Conference held in El Paso late last month, speakers examined the complex political economy that underlies the production, distribution and use of illegal drugs.

In a presentation at the University of Texas at El Paso, Chihuahua state lawmaker Victor Quintana delved into the socio-economic backdrop to the extreme violence raging away in northwestern Chihuahua, where rival cartels have turned entire zones into battlefields. Quintana took the audience back to 1982, when Mexico’s ruling PRI party began instituting what later became known as a neo-liberal, or free market, economic policy.

In line with the project popularized by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics, as well as the International Monetary Fund, state subsidies and supports for farmers were steadily eliminated, pressuring small growers off the land and into the migrant stream stirred up by the North American Free Trade Agreement and (NAFTA) and Mexico’s 1994-95 economic crisis.

An economic vacuum in the countryside was then filled by an illegal and profitable drug economy, which was marked by three stages, Quintana said. First, migrants returning from the US helped implant a drug culture that was initially controlled by locals who were well-known in their own communities and shared the proceeds of their illicit trade.

Later, outsiders with an eye on northwestern Chihuahua’s fertile lands and strategic highways leading to the US border moved in and replaced the “community narcos.” The result was the bloody orgy of violence that now destabilizes Chihuahua, Quintana said, adding that drug gangs have consolidated so much control that local police warn only air operations can penetrate certain zones.

Though the particulars were different, urban historian Dr. Eric Schneider separately told a similar story about North Philadelphia, a place he described as “the badlands” of the City of Brotherly Love. For Schneider, the closing of Philadelphia’s Stetson Hat Company, which once produced the emblematic hat of the American West, was a watershed for a community with a once-thriving industrial base.

A University of Pennsylvania professor interested in globalization, Schneider recounted how he asked his students to examine the labels where their clothing was made, and then took the pupils on a tour of largely African-American North Philadelphia.

Like Chihuahua, an illegal business filled an economic void in de-industrialized Philadelphia, according to Schneider. High unemployment, marginalization of communities of color, a landscape of abandoned homes and plants and easy highway access all create a “perfect place” for a drug market, he said.

In the post-industrial US, North Philadelphia represents the prototype of an urban drug market. Such urban markets, or “drug enterprise zones,” in the words of Schneider, acquire a life of their own, providing employment not only for marginalized youths but for police, other agencies of the criminal justice system and even rehabilitation centers charged with suppressing or controlling illegal activities. Urban drug markets are conducive to graft, Schneider insisted, citing the case of the infamous “Gold Coast” of Harlem during the 1970s which inspired corruption within the ranks of the New York Police Department.

With the official US unemployment rate nudging 10 percent, and with some economists predicting a long, jobless “recovery” from the 2008 economic crash, the type of urban drug markets chronicled by Schneider could have new, urgent meaning.

Schneider later told Frontera NorteSur that he hadn’t studied the specific links between drug trafficking and free trade agreements like NAFTA, but he observed how both legal and illegal commodities often follow the same trade routes. “The pathways are the same and frequently the entrepreneurs are the same-at least on the underground side,” Schneider said.

Dr. Michael Agar, researcher for the Santa Fe-based Ethknoworks, detailed how the popularity of imported drugs like opium and heroin have waxed and waned over the decades, infiltrating different social classes and groups-from middle-class white women at the turn of the 20th century to working class immigrants in the 1940s and to suburban white youth at the end of the last century.

Despite decades of the drug war, the US market remains brisk. Even though some reductions in cocaine and methamphetamine use have been reported in recent years, large numbers of people still consume old drugs of fashion as well as newer ones like Ecstasy.

Also appearing at the El Paso conference, Dr. H. Westley Clark, director of the US Health and Human Services’ Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, the Center told a session at the historic Fox Theater in downtown El Paso that the 2008 National Drug Survey reported that there were at least 23 million US residents who needed treatment for alcohol and illicit drugs abuse. The huge population grouping, more or less the equivalent of the number of people residing in greater Mexico City, represents about seven percent of the US population, Clark said. In the United States, eight million children lived with a drug dependent parent last year, he stressed.

Carolyn Esparza, director of Community Solutions of El Paso, a border non-profit that helps children of imprisoned adults, expanded on Clark’s points. A six-year-old organization, Esparza’s organization has assisted 7,000 children of prisoners in El Paso. “We are just the tip of the iceberg,” Esparza said. The child advocate blamed much of the problem of families divided by the correctional system on lawbreakers who commit crimes due to drug and drinking habits but don’t receive treatment while incarcerated. One in seven school children in the US have a parent on probation, on parole or in jail, she said.

Mexico, meanwhile, is headed down the same path. Quoting sources from the federal attorney general’s office who participated in a national meeting at the beginning of October, Mexico’s La Jornada newspaper reported that drug consumption among youths has risen 127 percent since December 2006, with addictions beginning at 10 years of age instead of 12 years of age as was previously the case.

In Mexico, the number of people addicted to illegal drugs is variously estimated between 600,000-900,000 individuals, though the country’s 2008 National Drug Addiction Survey reported that an estimated 4.5 million Mexicans used some kind of illegal drug that year.

Straddling a common border, the binational metroplex of El Paso-Ciudad Juarez was an early laboratory where the multiple ingredients of war, trade, violence, drugs and vice were mixed together in a potent combination. An invited speaker at the El Paso conference, Dr. Oscar Martinez of the University of Arizona has written a classic book on the history of Ciudad Juarez.

“The destiny of Ciudad Juarez is tied to the destiny of the US,” Martinez said. “And it’s been that way for a long time.”

While much of the US media acts as if it has just discovered Mexico and its long-simmering social problems, Martinez’s research documents how contraband smuggling, vice, drugs, corruption and arms trafficking emerged as significant issues in El Paso-Ciudad Juarez and other border cities more than a century ago.

A careful reading of Martinez shows how much of the underworld activity moved from north to south, especially but not exclusively during the Prohibition Era, in contrast to the contemporary media stories of violence and mayhem threatening to spill across the US border from Mexico.

For example, the ABW company founded by North Americans was at the center of the liquor and gaming industries in Baja California, financing the Tijuana race track on property owned by US rail and sugar businessman John D. Spreckel in the early part of the 20th century. In a prelude to the runaway textile and electronics plants of latter years, two Kentucky distilleries as well as sectors of US bar business simply relocated to Ciudad Juarez during Prohibition.

Conversely, El Paso and other US border cities have benefited from turmoil south of the border then and now. For more than 100 years, the US city has served as the recipient of migrant waves and capital infusions during economic and political upheavals across the Rio Grande, Martinez’s research reveals. Today, a new group of middle-class migrants is fleeing the carnage of Ciudad Juarez and putting its resources to work in El Paso.

“El Paso is benefiting tremendously from all this,” Martinez maintained, “and it reminds me of what happened during the Mexican Revolution.”

The presenters of the El Paso conference expressed different opinions on how best to address the drug issue: many tended to agree that it is a complicated, multi-faceted phenomenon which eludes simple, one-size-fits all answers, whether it is blanket prohibition or outright legalization.

“I think people are beginning to see that we need to come up with some kind of complex balance and approach that takes all these things into consideration,” said Dr. Joe Heyman, UTEP professor of anthropology and conference co-organizer.

A fair bit of talk focused on community outreach and treatment programs. Federal official Clark insisted that the Obama administration is pursuing a different strategy than the “war on drugs” approach of the last 40 years, favoring instead a combination of strong public safety and strong treatment.

Ethnographer Agar spoke about grassroots-oriented, semi-spontaneous recovery movements in which communities discover the harm drugs do and begin breaking away from addiction cycles on their with little government-encouragement. An example of this has been witnessed with heroin in certain US communities, Agar said.

“We need to learn a lot more about when that happens and how to stimulate that, how to stimulate positive feedback processes in communities,” Agar added.

Both Quintana and Schneider contended that the state and society have to re-examine and change the economic roots of the drug crisis. Quintana advocated a new development policy for the Mexican countryside, which includes removing highly vulnerable basic grain crops from NAFTA, while Schneider proposed a new US urban economic policy as an alternative to the drug economy.

Without bigger changes, Schneider insisted, drug reform policies are practically “irrelevant.” Conceding that it’s difficult to reopen long-closed plants, Schneider nonetheless said, “We need to think about an economy of the 21st century that will employ people.”

UTEP Professor Heyman said that he hoped the intellectual sparks flying at the conference would ignite broader interest in the drug reform issue. For borderlands historian Oscar Martinez, El Paso represented an opportunity to consider the formation of a new organization that could take the conference on the road to other cities.

Addressing a crowd, Martinez called on people to show more empathy for the residents of Ciudad Juarez, reiterating that the city’s inhabitants are bound together with our own lives in myriad ways. Martinez received hardy applause when he urged people to take a stand. “We need to reach into our hearts and say: I too am from Juarez,” Martinez proclaimed.

Editor’s Note: The following story is the first in two reports from the Global Public Policy Forum on the US War on Drugs held September 21 and 22 in El Paso, Texas. The event was organized by faculty from the University of Texas at El Paso with support from the El Paso City Council and other individuals and organizations.

El Paso was the scene this month as academics, students, journalists, community members, and a smattering of government officials from the United States, Mexico and other parts of the world gathered to analyze and debate the 40-year war on drugs. Located next door to blood-soaked Ciudad Juarez, the event took place at a time when a sense of urgency literally prevailed just outside the conference doors.

Even as conference attendees rolled up their sleeves to discuss and debate the burning issues of the day, drug-fanned violence flared only miles from the meeting sites. Among the numerous stories carried in Ciudad Juarez press dispatches, a man was found beheaded near a ditch, four young people were gunned down in a motel and a woman was slain in the Felipe Angeles neighborhood visible from the UTEP campus.

In the hours after the meeting ended, an additional 17 people were slaughtered in Ciudad Juarez.

“I see the current period as the worst thing that has ever happened to Ciudad Juarez,” declared Dr. Oscar Martinez of the University of Arizona to a conference panel. And Martinez should know. The author of perhaps the definitive history of Ciudad Juarez up until the 1970s, Martinez was born in a small Chihuahua town and reared in Ciudad Juarez. As a child, the pioneer borderlands historian sold newspapers, shined shoes and crossed “illegally” into neighboring E1 Paso. Crime, Martinez told Frontera NorteSur, was present but not an overriding concern in the city of his youth.

“I spent a lot of time on the streets, and yes we weren’t concerned about these things,” Martinez said. “I can’t imagine any 12-year-old kid nowadays doing the same thing that I did back in those days because it’s become extremely dangerous.”

According to the latest body counts compiled by New Mexico State University researcher Molly Molloy more than 1700 people have been murdered in the unprecedented wave of violence hitting neighboring Ciudad Juarez this year so far.

Historian Martinez said the level of violence experienced by the Mexican border city during the past two years exceeds the killings registered during the 1910-20 Revolution, when Ciudad Juarez was the scene of periodic battles between warring factions

How and why the current violence has reached such an extreme was a topic dissected by scholars and others in El Paso.

In one session, presenters cited government crackdowns, generational shifts within the narco hierarchy, growing Mexican domestic drug consumption, US-based arms trafficking, institutional corruption on both sides of the border, and the failure of political, social and economic structures.

Dr. David Shirk, professor of political science and lead researcher for the Justice in Mexico Project at the University of San Diego, said the desertion of 120,000 Mexican soldiers during the presidency of Vicente Fox (2000-2006), or roughly one-third of the armed forces, provided drug cartels with a huge pool of new recruits trained to engage in types of combat that went beyond the sort of violence long practiced by the traditional gun-for-hire, or pistolero.

“In some ways, we’re seeing the military defect to the other side,” Shirk said.

Showing graphic slides of murder victims, Shirk reminded the audience that behind the statistics of execution victims routinely reported in the Mexican and US press are real human beings, however sketchy their personal histories. Putting the carnage in a longer-range perspective normally considered by the media, Shirk reported that there were 19,287 and “counting” cartel-related killings in Mexico from 2001 until the present.

A former national security adviser to Mexican President Felipe Calderon, Sigrid Arzt said a combination of factors was behind the contemporary bloodletting, including a generational change in narco leadership since the Zedillo presidency, the breakdown of old criminal criminal codes and the ready availability of weapons from the United States. Once employed by Mexico’s national security agency CISEN and now a scholar at the Washington, D.C.-based Mexico Institute, Arzt also pointed to broader social indicators including the breakdown of the traditional Mexican family structure and the growth of domestic drug use in the country.

Mexican political structures, in which municipal governments change every three years and state governments every six, likewise provide lucrative openings for criminal organizations that thrive on weak and chaotic local administrations, according to Arzt. “We’re reinventing every six years with no accountability or transparency,” she said.

Chihuahua state lawmaker and longtime rural activist Victor Quintana compared the violence in his state to a Cormac McCarthy novel-only worse. To illustrate his point, Quintana detailed the evolution of the narco war in the northwestern part of rural Chihuahua into a scorched earth campaign. Quintana recounted torched homes, threatened families, raped women and entire communities under siege. Freedom of movement is now curtailed, community festivals and social life severely disrupted and out migration on a steady rise. People are fleeing a land already battered by economic crisis, Quintana said.

“Due to the situation of terror, people head where they have family networks,” Quintana later said in an interview. “Phoenix, Denver, Albuquerque are the three cities that have networks from the northwestern part of Chihuahua.” Many of the new refugees are in a difficult situation, forced to rely on part-time jobs, dwindling savings and relatives’ generosity, the Chihuahua legislator said.

In the current conflict, human rights are getting tossed out the window. To underscore the point, a new scandal erupted in Ciudad Juarez even as the El Paso conference was meeting. In a letter to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission investigator Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson said that he was threatened for his denunciations of human rights abuses allegedly committed by the Mexican army during the course of Operation Joint Chihuahua. De la Rosa appealed on the Organization of American States’ official human rights body to issue protective orders for himself and his family.

In his letter posted on the Ciudad Juarez news site Lapolaka.com, De la Rosa disclosed that the state human rights agency received 154 complaints related to anti-drug military activities in Ciudad Juarez from January 2008 to September 2009, including allegations of illegal searches, improper detentions, torture, forced disappearance, and homicide. Due to his investigative work, De la Rosa charged that he had been subjected to harassment at army checkpoints, telephoned threats, surveillance, and insults.

According to De la Rosa, an already-violent climate has worsened since the middle of August when the Sinaloa cartel redoubled an offensive against the long dominant Juarez cartel. The intensified violence, De La Rosa contended, consisted of a virtual war of extermination against anyone connected in any way to the Juarez cartel in the strategic Juarez Valley outside the city. The targets include practically everyone, the human rights investigator asserted, because of the prevalence of a narco economy in a region long afflicted by the decline of traditional agriculture.

De la Rosa wrote: “My work as a human rights defender makes me a field investigator of crimes committed by soldiers, because the National Human Rights Commission has abandoned the zone and the Chihuahua state attorney general’s office as well as the federal attorney general’s office declares themselves incompetent and turns over the cases to military justice.”

Lapolaka later reported that De la Rosa fled to El Paso after his letter was published.

Maria Isabel Rivero, spokeswoman for the IACHR, told Frontera NorteSur that the Washington-based commission had not issued a request for precautionary measures in the case of De la Rosa as of Friday, September 25. Rivero said that the IACHR follows procedures that include contacting the relevant parties. For a request to be granted, Rivero added, “It has be an urgent situation that threatens to have irreversible consequences.”

Interviewed at the El Paso conference, US human rights advocate Joy Olson, executive director of the Washington Office on Latin America, said that she was concerned about US security assistance to Mexico in light of human rights abuses in the drug war south of the border. In particular, Olson cited a lack of transparency in the military system of justice that makes it impossible to know whether soldiers are punished for crimes or not.

In response to criticisms that human rights activists provide cover for dangerous criminals, Olson said nobody should be above the law. “If you’re going to arrest drug traffickers committing horrendous murders, you have to have functioning police and justice systems,” Olson asserted. “It’s having the rule of law. It’s having a standard that has to be applied across the board.”

Speculation about what it will take to end Mexico’s drug violence was rife at the El Paso conference.

Anthony Placido, director of intelligence for the US Drug Enforcement Administration, told a group of reporters that violence was likely as long as the Calderon administration cracked down on cartels. Asked by a reporter about a story that accused Gulf cartel kingpin Ossiel Cardenas, now imprisoned in the US, had reached a pact with the Calderon government, Placido chuckled and said, “Even if it was true, you know I wouldn’t answer that question.”

Other talk centered around questions of “equilibrium,” or cartel balance-of-power in a given market, and the existence of an underworld “parallel state” with more power to negotiate and influence the course of events than the official one.

The University of San Diego’s David Shirk said a relative reduction of violence in Tijuana during recent months happened more because of cartel decisions than actions by government. “This is worrisome,” Shirk said. The cross-border affairs expert reported that a recent poll conducted by a Mexican polling organization found that 57 percent of respondents did not believe the government was winning the so-called narco war.

Public policy analyst Sigrid Arzt also addressed the question of a parallel state, but stated in an interview that the Mexican government would not negotiate with outlaw organizations. Arzt contrasted Mexico with Italy, where the Mafia did not disappear but lowered its profile because of a massive wave of public revulsion to its most outrageously violent activities. “If (organized criminals) are sharp, intelligent businessmen, at some point they go into the learning curve and keep it quiet,” Arzt said.

Brought to the New World in the Spanish conquest, cattle soon became an emblematic fixture of Mexican culture. The bullfight, trade fairs, cowboy attire and national cuisine all embrace the body and image of the cow. After quickly crossing the Rio Grande, cattle trails extended from north to south and then south to north.

Today, Mexico imports US-raised cattle breeding stock and exports young animals to the US for fattening and slaughter. The two nations participate in binational working groups to prevent animal diseases and to assure sanitary conditions in corals on both sides of the border.

A secure and profitable cattle trade is on the agenda of the free-trade inspired Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America.

But times are tough in Mexico’s cattle country. High prices for production inputs, low prices for milk, expanding drought, and thirsty, dying cattle all form part of the contemporary ranching landscape.

“We are in a difficult situation and I am not exaggerating,” Alejandro Gil Flores, president of the Tamaulipas Regional Ranchers Union, told the Enlineadirecta online news service. “I have never went through anything like this in the 30 years I’ve devoted to ranching,” Flores added.

In 2009 the Calderon administration plans to spend a record $5 billion in Government subsidies and credits on the countryside, according to Agriculture Secretary Alberto Cardenas.

Surviving a tumultuous market was of deep concern to ranchers who gathered earlier this summer in the central Mexican city of Aguascalientes for the annual meeting of the National Ranchers Confederation. Lack of credit, slow delivery of government assistance, high transportation and energy costs, and depressed commodity prices were among the issues raised by livestock producers from throughout Mexico.

In an interview with Frontera NorteSur, a ranchers’ representative from the Yucatan Peninsula blamed scant investment, costly credit and US beef imports for hampering the futures of thousands of small cattlemen.

Luis Alberto Zepeda Cruz, president of the eastern region of the Yucatan Ranchers Union, said 92 percent of small producers are excluded from the credit system, with private banks demanding 10 percent down payments and ranch mortgages on loans that charge 18-20 percent annual interest rates; the rate is higher than the 12-14 percent normally charged for other enterprises, according to Zepeda.

“These banks have created financial lending institutions that approve credit much faster but at a higher rate which the small producer can’t pay off,” Zepeda said.

The rancher spokesman said his group represents 4,500 producers who have about 450,000 head of cattle.

Constrained by poor access to credit, Yucatan’s producers are stuck shipping young cattle to feed lots in Tamaulipas at the rate of 2,000 animals per month. No local fattening pens or meat processing plants that would add product value serve his members, Zepeda said.

“If there were feed lots in Yucatan, we could be supplying Yucatan and the Caribbean zone of Chetumal, Cozumel and Quintana Roo, where there is a lot of tourism, with a lot of meat,” Zepeda asserted.

Overall, the Yucatan cattle industry is mired in a classical colonial situation of producing raw materials for consumption elsewhere, while importing basic commodities. For Zepeda, the result is practically “no integral development of the state of Yucatan.”

The “dumping” of US produced beef in Mexico is another big problem keeping Yucatan cattle growers down, Zepeda contended.

In recent years, Mexico became the biggest market for US beef exports. According to the US Meat Export Federation, a trade industry group funded by the United States Department of Agriculture, sales of US-produced beef to Mexico accounted for 27 percent of all sector exports in 2007. Two years ago, 359,442 metric tons of beef netted one billion dollars. Exports continued their upward spiral in 2008, topping 400,000 metric tons before declining 19 percent during the recession-plagued months of January-May 2009 in comparison with the same period of time one year earlier.

Although the retail sector scooped up 70 percent of all US exports, analysts consider Mexican supermarkets a still largely untapped opportunity.

“Long term Mexico should remain a large, growing market for US beef as local production will most likely not be able to keep pace with future demand,” noted the trade industry journal Mexico Beef in October 2008.

The Aguascalientes convention came at a time when Mexicos’ federal Secretariat of Agricultural, Livestock and Fisheries (Sagarpa) has unveiled a strategic shift in assistance programs to ranchers and other rural producers.

In a presentation to the Aguascalientes gathering, Jeffrey Jones, Sagarpa under-secretary, mapped out a 5-point planning strategy to boost the farm and livestock sector. The central tenets include combining public and private resources with a consumer-driven marketplace.

A big difference between the new approach and past ones is that the federal government will shift away from subsidizing individual producers to financing projects like roads that collectively support the industry. A former senator from Chihuahua and one-time president of the Senate’s border affairs commission, Jones conceded that previous policies tended to benefit an organized, privileged few.

Acknowledging that the North American Free Trade agreement market created distortions that had hurt industry sectors, the federal official urged producers to get better organized, conduct market-driven planning and participate in government decision-making. Only one Mexican state, Nuevo Leon across from the Texas border, has a real handle on local market analysis, Jones said.

“Public policy should be inclusive, focused and diversified,” he added. “My role is not to tell you what to do…if a product doesn’t have a market, it is doomed to fail from the beginning.”

In response to rancher complaints of dry credit, Jones later told Frontera NorteSur and Ganadero magazine that his department was in touch with private banks and working on the issue a step at a time. He reemphasized Sagarpa’s new message that producers must get organized.

“It’s difficult for governments to support unorganized groups and the first thing people have to do is organize,” Jones said. “The real issue is not between rich and poor, but between the organized and unorganized. The organized are rich and the unorganized poor.”

Asked about prospects for an alternative livestock industry-buffalo ranching- in his home state of Chihuahua, Jones said consumer interest would kindle or extinguish a nascent business. “Everything depends on the market, whether it is buffalo or any other kind of agricultural or livestock product,” asserted the high federal official. “The first thing we want to do in planning is make sure the producers and states have a market mapped out.”

During his Aguascalientes speech, Jones also discussed unofficial commodity price projections in the hands of Sagarpa. Although prices for basic grains have declined internationally, Mexican ranchers haven’t benefited because the devaluation of the peso has made imports more expensive, Jones said. Based on expected price trends, dairy producers could see an increase beginning in the middle of next year. Jones said that the price paid for milk to Mexican dairy farmers fell from 4.5 pesos
per liter in 2008 to less than 4 pesos by the summer of 2009.

August 2009

Editor’s Note:

The following article is the latest piece in the Centennial Series sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Border Studies at New Mexico State University. In collaboration with scholars from NMSU and the University of Texas at El Paso, the reports will document, analyze and disseminate community histories and trends in the southern New Mexico border region since the Land of Enchantment became a US state in 1912.

FNS Feature

Migrants Lead Human Rights Movement, Change in New Mexico

Getting doused with pesticides is the first memory Sebastian Coral has of the United States. Crossing the border as a young bracero, or contract farmworker, in the 1950s, Coral made the obligatory stop at a reception center near El Paso, Texas, where he and other guest workers were subjected to delousing and blood-sampling. The experience has never left the mind of Coral, who wonders why farmworkers were treated in such a way.“It was a very ugly form of discrimination,” said the Chihuahua-born ex-farm worker.

Once past the US inspectors, Coral was hustled off to work cotton in New Mexico, cucumbers in Colorado and sugar beets in Wyoming. A grower employer later helped the Mexican national obtain US residency papers. With his immigration status settled, Coral landed steady work in the dairies that line Interstate 10 in New Mexico’s southern Dona Ana County, just up the road from the US-Mexico border. Now retired, Coral spends his days in the rural Mesilla Valley communities
of Vado and El Cerro, where he gets by on social security. Agricultural workers, Coral stressed, do not enjoy the benefits of employer-based pensions.

Coral’s story held the undivided attention of youth and elders alike at the El Cerro Community Center earlier this month. Organized by the non-profit, Las Cruces-based Colonias Development Council (CDC) and other community groups, the gathering discussed living and working conditions in underdeveloped border-area communities known as colonias. Often lacking paved roads or even basic utility services, southern New Mexico colonias are heavily populated by recent immigrants from Mexico who labor in the agricultural and service industries for low wages.

The El Cerro meeting was the last of several held this summer in southern New Mexico colonias that analyzed border realities through the lens of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations back in 1948.

While many of the issues discussed at the meetings are familiar ones across the US and globe, the New Mexico initiative stands out from many other community organizing campaigns by its reference to the Universal Declaration as a fundamental framework for understanding and solving social problems. At a time when the US is debating whether health care is a collective right or personal responsibility, promoting the primacy of human rights could expand the social agenda of the nation beyond its current political boundaries and media frames.

Discussion of human rights in the US usually focuses on political and religious freedoms. However, the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration also include guarantees of health care, education, employment, and housing.

Reviewing the history of the human rights movement, CDC Executive Director Dr. Diana Bustamante traced the emergence of the Universal Declaration to the genocidal horrors of World War Two and the Nuremburg trials of Nazi war criminals.

More than 50 years later, residents of Mesilla Valley colonias are recognizing the Universal Declaration as a relevant statement that defines their own aspirations.

A 35-year resident of Vado and co-founder of the El Cerro Community Center, Dora Dorado said unemployment, drug abuse, gang activity, environmental justice, housing, and Border Patrol checkpoints are among the top concerns in her community.

Located between Las Cruces and El Paso, the political geography of Vado/El Cerro readily exhibits the contrasts of the fast-growing region. Tidy, tract-style homes and dilapidated trailers share the same streets. A park sprawls next to the community center but lacks shade and a water fountain. Paved roads dissolve into dirt ones, kicking up dust in the breezy Chihuahuan Desert. A possible expansion of a cement plant could bring new employment but environmental problems too. Future subdivisions could provide construction jobs but swallow what is left of fertile farm land.

“We want more jobs and factories to come to the community, but we want them to be workplaces that are safe for both workers and communities,” Dorado said. “We want Vado/El Cerro to develop in a healthy way, and its development to serve as an example for other communities, as an example of delivering better services.”

Dorado’s concerns were shared by Olga Hernandez of Sunland Park, New Mexico, a growing community situated smack dab on the US-Mexico border. Like Vado/El Cerro, Sunland Park also vividly displays the contradictory impulses of border development.

Perched on a hill, the gold-colored dome of the Sunland Park Racetrack and Casino with its $200,000 Thursday Extravaganza overlooks a community challenged by environmental contamination, employment problems, drug abuse, and domestic violence. Residents needing help are faced with going to the county seat 45 minutes away in Las Cruces, Hernandez said. “We’ve heard of various women being raped,” Hernandez said, “but there are no programs either.”

The landscape described by Dorado and Hernandez was documented in a five-minute video produced by about two dozen young people from the colonias who formed the Youth Media Project in the summer of 2009. Organized by NMSU students, the CDC and other community groups, the youths fanned out in the colonias to capture images of daily life.

“The biggest concern seemed to be violence,” said NMSU graduate student Jacobo Varela, who assisted in the effort. “It’s something that is prevalent in their lives.” Armed with cameras, teenagers in three different communities discovered common themes. “They were coming up with the same problems. A lot of police presence in the neighborhoods, but again, a lot of violence,” Varela told Frontera NorteSur.

Nonetheless, the tone of the video was upbeat and forward-looking, said NMSU undergraduate Clarissa Ulibarri, who also collaborated with the project. Ulibarri called the endeavor a “great experience” that resulted in a tangible product which the youths are “really proud of” making. In the course of the production, Ulibarri said, young people began inquiring about the university and showing interest in higher education. “We wanted them to feel like they have goals and can do stuff,” said the NMSU government major.

A work in progress, the video should be finished in the coming weeks, Ulibarri said. The young producers plan to present the production to the Dona Ana County Commission and enter it into the 2010 White Sands Film Festival, she added.

Far from passive observers, immigrant communities in New Mexico are mobilizing to change their lives. In a presentation at El Cerro Community Center, the director a statewide immigrant advocacy group outlined how newer residents were instrumental in the passage of HB 489 in the 2009 state legislative session. Marcela Diaz, executive director of the Santa Fe-based Somos un Pueblo Unido, said members of her 1600 member-plus organization took an active lead in convincing lawmakers to pass a law that stiffens penalties for wage theft and outlaws employer retaliation against workers who file complaints for back wages due.

“The best thing is that this isn’t only for immigrant workers but all workers,” Diaz said.

State Representative Nathan Cote (D-Las Cruces) credited Diaz and other pro-immigrant activists for playing a major role in winning the passage of recent state legislation outlawing racial profiling in law enforcement. The lawmaker encouraged people to organize in order to be “strong together and not powerless alone.”

Joining Representative Cote in attendance at the El Cerro/Vado event were State Senator Steve Fischmann and Dona Ana County commissioners Oscar Vasquez-Butler and Dolores Saldana-Caviness. Representatives of New Mexico senators Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall also listened intently to residents.

The recent colonia meetings could wind up serving as springboards for promoting a new human rights agenda in Dona Ana County, as well as making additional changes when the New Mexico State Legislature convenes next January in Santa Fe.

“This is like a pot that is boiling,” said CDC organizer Veronica Carmona. “People want to do something.”

-Kent Paterson

The following article is the first in what is hoped will be a series of pieces exploring the history, culture, economy, and environment of the New Mexico-Mexico borderlands in the era after New Mexico gained statehood in 1912. The series is meant to be part of the Centennial commemoration that is gradually getting off the ground in New Mexico. Partial support for this article was provided by a grant from the Centennial of New Mexico Steering Committee.

It’s springtime and the fields of southern New Mexico’s Dona Ana County are showing new life, sprouting the familiar patches of onions, corn and green chile, of course. The source of food and fiber for centuries, this patch of irrigated desert that runs along the Rio Grande has undergone periodic, qualitative transformations through the years.

A watershed moment came in 1915-16, when the completion of the Elephant Butte Dam to the north heralded a new era of large-scale irrigation and commercial agriculture. King Cotton became the big cash crop, followed by the royal quests of lettuce, onions, chile, pecans, and dairy, among others.

“This area keeps searching for the most profitable commodity,” says Terry Crawford, professor of agricultural economics and agricultural business at New Mexico State University.

Environmental alterations, in-migrations, technological innovations, land ownership patterns, changing market demand, and international trade agreements all underlay shifts in crop production since the advent of the Elephant Butte project.

Take, for instance, the changed fortunes of a successor to the throne of King Cotton, Queen Chile. Twenty years ago, when chile production was on a fast upswing, the spicy New Mexican staple was the pride of politicians and the rave of the media.

Centered in the border counties of Dona Ana and neighboring Luna but cultivated elsewhere in the state too, chile production achieved its contemporary historical zenith in 1992, the 500th anniversary of the Columbus expedition, when about 34,500 acres were harvested statewide.

Sixteen years later, in 2008, only 11,100 acres and 60,140 tons of chile were harvested in New Mexico, again most of it in Luna and Dona Ana counties. The 2008 statewide crop amounted to less than the 12,500 acres produced in Luna County alone in 1992.

On a steady decline since the late 1990s, the farm-gate value of New Mexico’s most beloved crop dropped from approximately $41 million in 2003 to $28.7 million in 2007, according to reports from the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service.

Farmer income rebounded last year to $42.3 million, but the jump occurred amid a generalized inflationary burst in the prices of energy, food and commodities.

In 2009 the amount of chile planted was more or less the same as last year, says Stephanie Walker, extension vegetable specialist for the New Mexico State University Cooperative Extension Service. “Right now, we’re trying to hang in there,” Walker says.

A 2009 report prepared for the state Legislative Finance Committee claimed that the overall value of the New Mexico chile industry, which includes processing and other value-added revenues, plummeted from $400 million in 2006 to approximately $235 million three years later. Contributing “great economic and cultural values to the state,” the LFC said the chile industry employed 3,000 people full-time and 9,000 part-time.

During the heyday of the chile boom in the early 1990s, some growers warned that the soil was being exhausted by too many peppers being grown year-after-year. Today, however, it might be said the reverse extreme has taken hold. The decline is even more striking considering the national boom in chile-based hot foods, a phenomenon that occurred during the same time a good portion of the New Mexico crop literally went south across the border. State efforts to promote the special New Mexican green chile inside and outside the Land of Enchantment were not reflected in the fields.

Though newcomers fueled a population boom in New Mexico during the 1990s and early years of the 21st century, green chile production stayed fairly predictable in recent years, ranging from a high of 5,300 acres in 2004 to a low of 3,300 in 2007.

A 2005 story by Deming writer Marjorie Lilly, “New Mexico Chile-Facing Extinction,” perhaps overstated the prospects for New Mexico’s iconic crop, but the point was well taken.

Doomsday in Chile Land has yet to pass, but New Mexico consumers are beginning to feel the pinch. Once heaped generously on diners’ plates, seemingly ever-diminishing flakes of chile can almost be counted one-by-one by restaurant goers these days.In addition to plant diseases and pest infestations, big factors in Queen
Chile’s downfall included a flood of cheap chile imports from Mexico, China, India, and other nations.

“We lost heavily to the people in China and India,” Crawford muses. “The chile industry is not going to take off like it once did. It will probably stabilize, but it’s not going to go gangbusters like it once did.”

In recent years, the mundane onion has sometimes proven to be a better money-maker for farmers than chile. Producing the Grano, Granex, Sweet Spanish and Nu-Mex varieties, New Mexico dominates the US onion market during the months of May through July, according to Crawford.

New Mexico onion production, again heavily concentrated in Dona Ana and Luna counties, shot up from 4,000 acres in 1980 to 9,000 acres by the mid-1990s. The crop began declining during the last decade, but it began picking up again in recent years and reached more than 6,000 harvested acres by 2007. Two years ago, onions fetched more than $63 million for farmers-more than the double the amount of farmer money generated by the state chile harvest.

In monetary terms, row crops like chile and onions have proven no match for pecan orchards and dairy farms. In 2006, New Mexico ranked No. 1 nationally for pecan production before slipping down to second place-only behind Georgia- in 2007, when the Land of Enchantment produced 74 million pounds of the nuts, an amount more than double the 30 million pounds harvested in 1985.

Valued at $96.2 million in 2007, pecan production was dominated by Dona Ana County, which raked in more than 60 percent of the cash receipts for pecans. By the 2002 agricultural census, Dona Ana County counted 1,056 farms with 23,745 acres of pecan trees.

The tremendous expansion of the pecan industry transformed the landscape in parts of Dona Ana County, which nowadays resemble cultivated forests. Promoting pecans, the New Mexico Department of Agriculture secured an important export market for pecans in China, where the nuts were popular treats for the Chinese New Year celebration.

In the last three decades, dairy has emerged as the literal cash cow of Dona Ana County and the eastern section of the state. From 32,000 milk cows in 1975, the statewide herd increased to 342,000 in 2008. In Dona Ana County, 54,000 milk cows were counted last year. The dairy industry boom also encouraged the growth of a feeder crop-alfalfa.

>From 1980 to 2008, annual cash receipts for New Mexico-produced milk soared from about $84.3 million to $1.35 billion. In 2007, New Mexico was ranked No.8 for milk and cheese production in the United States. In 2007, for the sixth year in a row, milk was the top farm commodity in New Mexico, accounting for 44.3 percent of all the money earned from agricultural and livestock activities. In southern New Mexico, dairies are concentrated along the 1-10 corridor between Las Cruces and El Paso and in the Las Uvas Valley outside Hatch.

In virtually every crop, mechanization has been a constant as farmers attempt to make their tasks leaner and their bottom line fatter. Once done by local laborers, Dust Bowl “Oakies”, World War Two POWS, and then Mexican contract workers known as braceros, cotton harvesting was mechanized in southern New Mexico by the 1960s. More recently, machines have displaced workers in the onion and chile harvests, according to University of Texas at El Paso Professor Guillermina Gina Nunez-Mchiri.

An instructor in UTEP’s sociology and anthropology department, Nunez-Mchiri once lived in the Hatch Valley of northern Dona Ana County, where her father performed farm work. Returning years later to do her doctoral dissertation on the history of Hatch Valley settlements called colonias, Nunez-Mchiri found many farmwokers in the onion and chile industries on the verge of losing their livelihoods.

“Much like the braceros in the 1940s to 1960s who were displaced by mechanization, the present migrant and seasonal farmworkers in the region are also facing displacement,” Nunez-Mchiri writes. “In the race to survive in a global market, local area farmers turn to research and technology to maximize profits by reducing labor costs and increasing their reliance on farm machinery.”

Mechanization, Nunez-Mchiri contends, creates crisis situations for local farmworker populations residing in communities where employment alternatives are few and far between. “These circumstances contribute added stress to an aging and tired farm-working population,” the El Paso scholar writes.

According to NMSU’s Terry Crawford, industry sources report 70-80 percent of New Mexico’s red chile harvest is now done by machines. A mechanical chile thinner has been in the fields for at least two years, Crawford says, and engineers at NMSU continue working on a green chile machine harvester as well as a plant de-stemmer for the green crop, which is harder to machine pluck than red chile. The successful mechanization of green chile, Crawford stresses, depends on the breeding of suitable chile varieties, similar to the change in California tomatoes bred to fit machine harvesters years ago.

Cooperative Extension Service specialist Stephanie Walker expects the development of a field-ready green chile harvester within the next two or three years, but she says introduction of such a machine depends on the simultaneous invention of a viable de-stemmer, which is a trickier proposition.

According to both Walker and Crawford, foreign competition is driving the latest wave of mechanization in New Mexico agriculture. In the broad historical scheme of things, New Mexico farmers have ridden the waves of technological innovation, the Green Revolution, commodity booms and busts and globalization.

For NMSU Professor Connie Falk, a faculty member of the school’s agricultural economics and agricultural business department, the future of agriculture in New Mexico and elsewhere rests with a transition away from farming based on petrochemical-based fertilizers and pesticides to farming using organic and sustainable techniques. Falk is involved in a multi-year project growing organic flowers and herbs while teaching organic farming. The energy and environmental crises are pressuring a fundamental shift in agriculture, she says.

“No, we’re not going back to 100 years,” Falk says, pointing to advances in the plant sciences as well as production methods. Organic agriculture is on the rise, Falk says, citing, for example, the New Mexico Organic Conference that now draws 700 people.

In Dona Ana County, the number of New Mexico Organic Commodity Commission-certified farms increased from 17 in 2005 to 21 in 2008, Falk says, adding the real number of organic growers is actually higher since some do not choose to go through the lengthy, state-sponsored certification process.

Falk detects different motivations attracting producers to the organic school of production- not the least of which is burgeoning consumer demand- but she says many growers prefer to farm without chemicals “out of principle.”

The agricultural researcher insists that a shift away from the paradigm charted by the Green Revolution of the last century is inevitable. “Ultimately there is no choice but to farm organically, because (conventional farming) is based on petrochemicals, and we are in peak oil.”

Shifts in crop patterns and farm technology are changes visible to the naked eye, but less obvious transformations have shaped and defined New Mexico border farm culture since the formative years of the last century. NMSU Professor Lois Stanford calls foodways the untold story of agriculture. The Las Cruces anthropologist defines foodways as the system of “production, provisioning, consumption and exchange of food,”

Stanford says food is not only the “basic underpinning of all economies and societies,” but it is also a medium “through which people have often expressed solidarity, social linkages, relations of power and identity.”For much of the 20th century, agriculture provided the basis for family and community activities in southern New Mexico, says Stanford, who is researching foodways with New Mexico farm families. Hispano farmers, in particular, once gathered wild spinach and wild asparagus from the banks of acequias, the irrigation canals which themselves tied together communities and reinforced social bonds.

Historically, farm families practiced self-sufficiency by maintaining their own gardens while producing for an outside market. Sweet potatoes, corn, cantaloupe, pigs, chickens, and much more nourished a varied diet. Jointly slaughtering cows, neighbors strengthened bonds and community solidarity by dividing among several families the meat, which could then be consumed throughout the winter months.

In contemplating what agriculture could look like in the future, Stanford advises New Mexicans to take a cue from the past.“There’s something to be learned by understanding the relationship between the small scale food provisioning systems in socials and kin ties,” Stanford observes. “We may learn that there are lessons for today from the experiences of earlier farmers and the experience of our own local history and food production.”

The squeeze is on. Up and down Mexico’s Pacific Coast tourist resorts are feeling the pinch of the world economic melt-down. In Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, signs of the downturn are literally everywhere. “For Sale,” “For Rent” and “Business Available” are ubiquitous messages emblazoned in Spanish and in English on torefronts, on apartment buildings and on unfinished condominiums.

In January, the peak of the foreign tourism high season, local media reported hotel occupancy rates hovering around an anemic 60-65 percent nightly. One evening, the rate reportedly dropped to 36 percent.

On a pleasant winter day, Ruben Galaviz and Fernando Martinez sat chatting on Puerto Vallarta’s Malecon, a romantic place where pelicans dive-bomb off the beach and humpback whales occasionally leap from the waves. In good years the men might be too busy to talk, but not now.

“When there is no money in the US, there is no money here. There are no jobs and work is scarce for the people,” Galaviz sighed. “There are people who don’t speak English and who are just suited for construction work, and there are no jobs.”

Members of the Mexican Workers Confederation, Galaviz and Martinez try to hustle tourists into buying silver jewelry, t-shirts, blankets and trinkets. The tourist economy has been sluggish for some time, Martinez acknowledged, but the first weeks of 2009 have marked new lows.

“There are less sales, and everyone is seeing it-restaurants, hotels, stores, everyone,” said the 20-year resident of Puerto Vallarta.

Puerto Vallarta’s vibrantly diverse but chronically under-rated art scene is among the business sectors witnessing the shortage of tourist dollars.

Originally from Canada and now in her 26th year running the Galleria Dante, Claire Guarniere sells surrealistic paintings and sculptures produced by artists hailing from Mexico, France, Cuba, and the US. Last year was Guarniere’s “best year ever,” the gallery owner gushed, but business was down by 2009. Some affluent clients, Guarniere recalled, complained of losing up to “two million in the stock market.”

Not all the news bad. Some businesses, especially popular watering holes, report doing brisk sales this year, though fortunes go up and down depending on the day. And people are still trickling in from the north. A husky Canadian man who identified himself only as “Bob” gave a simple reason for making the trek to Mexico in the midst of uncertain economic times: “zero degrees and three feet of snow.”

Asked about splurging while an economic disaster unfolds, Iowan Scott Derby, who jetted to California with his wife Rhonda and then hopped aboard a cruise ship in Long Beach headed south, scoffed at the very notion of a crisis.

“There isn’t one,” Derby insisted. “It’s just those who over-extended their credit, over-extended, basically, their life-style who are having a problem. It’s those who live within their means who are doing great.”Down the street from Galleria Dante and just a crab’s crawl from popular Playa de Los Muertos, Audalio “Yeso” Aburto sells custom jewelry designed with precious stones, silver and gold. As the foreign tourist high season swung into high gear, Aburto calculated the customer flow was 25 percent less than in good years. “Last February was phenomenal,” Aburto said, a hint of nostalgia electrifying his voice.

“Beginning of this season has really dropped,” added US transplant and assistant Lisa Carkner. “It started slowly, every day is better but it’s a drop from last year.”Aburto said he had endured a struggling tourist economy before coming to Vallarta ten years ago. A native of Lazaro Cardenas, Michoacan, Aburto lived in the nearby international resort of Zihuatanejo, Guerrero, for many years before deciding employment prospects and educational opportunities for his children were better up the coast in Vallarta.

In Aburto’s old stomping ground, meanwhile, the economic picture is very similar to Vallarta’s.

A six-year resident of Zihuatanejo, former Oregonian Lawrence Marbut served as the 2009 chair of Sail Fest, an annual event featuring a sail parade and a chili cook-off that raises money for struggling schools and low-income students. “There are at least 500 children who are going to school in this city who wouldn’t be if it weren’t for Sail Fest,” Marbut said.

After hearing anecdotal reports that sail cruising was down 30-50 percent along the Pacific Coast this year, Marbut said he was pleasantly surprised people “came out of the wood work” to participate in activities, volunteer their time and donate goods and services to Sail Fest.

Although the festival was down significantly from a peak of 100 boats several years ago, Marbut still waxed confident organizers could raise $40,000 with matching funds to help the local educational system.Perhaps now more than ever, Mexican tourist-based economies must rely on repeat visitors, annual snowbirds and expatriate residents, who have grown in number over the years.

“A lot of tourists who come here for two or three months a year have long-term commitments to Zihuatanejo,” said Bill Day of Portland, Oregon.

Personal service, friendliness and fair prices are common traits that seem to attract the same people back to both Zihuatanejo and Puerto Vallarta year after year. In today’s economy, expensive, indifferent enterprises could have trouble keeping their heads above water.

For businesses, now could be the time of innovation. Puerto Vallarta’s Claire Guarniere, for example, said having her inventory posted on-line keeps sales buzzing year-round even when few foreign tourists are in town. And when business got bleak, Guarniere reduced prices.

“People are spending money.. The discount helped,” Guarniere affirmed. “It pushed them over whether they buy or not.”

To counter the tourist drop-off, Mexico’s federal government is making industry subsidies an important part of President Felipe Calderon’s economic rescue package announced last month.

In the latest round of subsidies, the Secretariat of Tourism (SECTUR) announced about $100 million will be made available to Mexico’s 32 states for tourism projects. It is still unclear how most of the money will be spent, but in the state of Michoacan plans exist to invest approximately $5 million in the “artistic illumination” of old buildings in the state capital of Morelia.

Monies will also be spent on improving the public look of the “Magic Towns” of Paztcuaro, Cuitzeo and Tlalpujahua, and on supporting the route of the imperiled Monarch butterfly.

”We will continue to decisively push domestic tourism as well as create routes and circuits that allow national and international tourists to experience and enjoy beach destinations, cultural destinations and nature on the same trip,” SECTUR Secretary Rodolfo Elizondo vowed in Michoacan this week.

In another initiative, the Tourist Promotion Council of Mexico is expected to spend about $90 million on promoting Mexico as a vacation getaway. More than half the money could go to the principal broadcast outlets in the US and Canada.

Favoring Mexican tourism is the high value of the US dollar, which fetches an average exchange rate of 14 pesos per dollar and buys more than it has in many years. However, highly favorable exchange rates mean nothing for millions of would-be tourists north of the border who have no money in their bank accounts or credit left on their plastic cards.

Many Mexican resorts face added challenges in attracting new foreign tourists. Public insecurity as well as the contamination of beach waters are negatives that have already driven off tourists in places like Acapulco and Zihuatanejo.

In Zihuatanejo, at least four shootouts involving automatic weapons were reported in the city and its outskirts between February 2 and February 9. Two Mexican nationals who were apparent targets of attacks were killed in the incidents. As in other regions of Mexico, the narco war is rearing its hydra-like head in a place with a once-quiet reputation. In the small but growing city’s old downtown area, LA-style gang graffiti now stands scrawled on several walls.

Multiple messages seemingly emanated from a recent scene outside a Banamex (Citigroup-owned) bank branch located across the street from a popular Zihuatanejo restaurant catering to foreigners. While visitors from a cruise ship enjoyed a mid-day meal amid a fun-filled, folkloric ambiance, a detachment of seven heavily armed Mexican soldiers stoically guarded the bank as a pair of armored car guards nervously toted shotguns and hustled big bags of cash into the building. A sign posted on the window exhibited the weak value of the peso in unmistakable numbers.

Zihuatanejo is still not Ciudad Juarez or Tijuana, but locals are very concerned about the future of their town.

Taking the long view, the current world economic crisis presents a unique opportunity for Mexico to seriously rethink and renovate a tourism industry that has failed to create enough decent-paying jobs to sustain a growing population while, at the same time, has also fallen short on balancing development with social service and public infrastructure needs.

For Zihuatanejo environmentalist and columnist Silvestre Pacheco, the cat is already out of the bag.

“There’s no better promotion than clean beaches, healthy food, an educated population, sufficient running water, and adequate sewerage,” Pacheco wrote in a recent column published in the daily El Sur.

Seven Years Later: Is the US-Mexico Border Prepared for Environmental Disaster?

The September 11 terrorist attacks sparked debate over the United States’ readiness to handle an attack involving weapons of mass destruction. In the days after the Twin Towers crumbled, concern was expressed about ocean ports and other border points of entry as possible avenues of assault.

Ample discussion was devoted to weapons manufactured for the explicit purposes of killing people, but little was said about the toxic and hazardous materials that regularly crisscross the US-Mexico border region. In 2002, a new focus on border security inspired the governments of the United States and Mexico to sign a 22-point “smart border plan” that proposed facilitating the flow of goods and business people while deterring terrorism.

The Bush-Fox plan did not specifically address commercially-used chemicals and other hazardous substances in the border region, but it did advocate employing “smart technologies” like radio frequency identification devices in trucks that could also be employed to monitor hazardous shipments.

In December 2008, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officially summed up the Bush administration’s record in terms of what the agency defined as protecting the US against “dangerous people” and “dangerous goods,” among other missions. As the report’s authors made clear, preempting terrorism, together with stopping the entrance of undocumented persons into the US, characterized the thrust of DHS’ work.

The DHS report claimed historic advances in scanning 100 percent of cargo containers crossing the southern border with radiation monitors, and in implementing national standards to “protect high-risk chemical facilities from attack and theft of chemicals that could be used as weapons.”

Although the DHS noted the delivery of a mobile chemical lab system to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), its report largely glossed over the issue of routine, commercial hazardous materials shipments.

A 2007 report from the Good Neighbor Environmental Board (GNEB), a 25-member body that advises the White House and Congress on US-Mexico border issues, estimated that about 43.3 million pounds of hazardous waste enter the US from Mexico every year, mostly from the assembly-for-export plants known as maquiladoras.

While the GNEB characterized the cross-border hazardous waste flow as relatively small, the advisory panel added that significant quantities of hazardous materials including petroleum, petroleum products, natural gas, sulfuric acid, and other substances with the potential to kill or sicken people move through a region booming in population growth.

Obtaining a precise figure on the amount of hazardous goods entering the US via the southern border is difficult, however, since US Customs and Border Protection (CPB) does not maintain data of such imports, according to spokesperson Jenny Burke.

To prepare for possible disaster, all CBP agents receive training in the identification and handling of hazardous materials, Burke said in an e-mail to Frontera NorteSur.

“CBP considers public health and public safety a top priority,” Burke said. “Officers at ports of entry undergo annual HAZMAT refresher training to protect them and the public against all hazards related to importations into the United States.”

Essentially, the Mexican and US governments rely on private industry to safely package, transport and distribute hazardous materials. Companies in both nations are required to comply with an array of environmental, transportation and customs rules and regulations.

Some border experts contend not enough manpower is available to inspect hazardous materials before they enter the US.

The GNEB has raised concerns about the “sheer volume” of cross-border trade, concluding it was impossible to conduct “a thorough physical inspection of each truck, rail car and container entering the United States.”

The pace of the traffic is readily visible in El Paso, Texas, where more than 69,000 trucks entered the United States at the Bridge of the Americas and Ysleta-Zaragoza crossings during July 2008 alone, according to Carlos Carmona, emergency management coordinator for the El Paso Fire Department.

In a phone interview with Frontera NorteSur earlier this year, Chris Brown, an associate professor of geography at New Mexico State University and a GNEB member, argued more “boots in the booth” were needed on the border.

In testimony to Congress this year, CBP Commissioner Ralph Basham said Washington had plans to have more than 20,000 Border Patrol agents in the field by September 2009, or more than double the number of agents employed in 2001. As 2008 drew to a close, the Border Patrol counted more than 18,000 officers.

On the other hand, the number of CBP officers at Southwestern ports of entry grew slightly from 4,990 employees during Fiscal Year 2004 to 5,160 by late October of this year, according to CBP.

In its 2007 report, the GNEB noted that fewer than 15 of the approximately 50 US-Mexico border ports of entry allow trucks and trains to cross into this country with hazardous materials. In El Paso, hazardous materials are only allowed to legally pass through the Ysleta-Zaragoza port of entry, thus offering some safeguards to the bulk of pedestrians and drivers who travel through two other ports of entry and could be exposed to accidents.

In El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, environmental activists and officials have long worried about large-scale shipments of hydrofluoric acid, a corrosive material, that is shipped by train through the downtowns of the sister cities. Produced at the Belgian-owned Solvay plant on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez, tons of hydrofluoric acid are exported to the US.

According to the US National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health, hydrofluoric acid is an “especially dangerous” substance that can cause severe burns and scarring. The acid is used in glass etching and in the manufacture of fluorescent bulbs, computer screens and high octane gasoline, among other products.

Former and current environmental officials from Mexico and the US worry a train accident could result in the release of toxic gas.

“It represents an important risk, because the center of the city is very densely populated,” said Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez biologist and researcher Alma Leticia Figueroa in an interview with Frontera NorteSur last year. “There is a lot of commerce and people cross the tracks to go to work or school.”

After 9-11, the specter of terrorism added another potential element to the equation. “There is a worry on the American and Mexican sides of a terrorist attack on the bridge when the chemical products go by,” added Figueroa, who twice served as chief of Ciudad Juarez’s municipal ecology department.

Local press stories periodically report train derailments and accidents in both Ciudad Juarez and El Paso. Until now, no major train accident involving hydrofluoric acid has impacted El Paso-Ciudad Juarez, but stories archived in the Frontera NorteSur website report serious health and safety issues at the plant site when it was under different ownership several years ago.

Hazardous material shipments on trains are an issue for other border communities, including the twin communities of Sunland Park, New Mexico and Anapra, Mexico, on the northwestern edge of Ciudad Juarez. Scores of trains, virtually all of them transporting some kind of hazardous substance according to Sunland Park Fire Chief Robert Monsivaiz, noisily transport the goods of international trade in close proximity to schools, residences and businesses every day.

According to Monsivaiz, his department is not provided with advance notification of hazardous shipments on trains, but the fire chief said he is aware of “commodity studies” that give a general idea of what the trains carry.

After arriving to the Sunland Park department in the 1990s, Monsivaiz quickly got a wake up call. A derailed train dumped not only large quantities of pet food, Monsivais recalled, but also paints and thinners, which are regarded as hazardous materials, The incident inspired the public servant to make changes.

“It moved us to think about hazardous materials as a team and get training as a team,” said Monsivaiz, who serves as a co-leader of an emergency response task force under the US-Mexico Border 2012 program.

No major train accidents involving hazardous substances have been registered in Sunland Park since the doggie food derailment, Monsivais added. The border fire chief said hazardous materials accidents are a concern for his small community since a toxic spill, for example, could contaminate water supplies in three states and two nations.

Recognizing the threat posed by trains hauling hazardous substances in populated centers, some elected officials in the Paso del Norte, especially in Ciudad Juarez, have demanded that trains be rerouted away from the urban core.

An important step towards this goal was achieved last September when the federal Mexican government, Chihuahua state government, Ciudad Juarez municipal administration, El Paso city government and New Mexico state government officially unveiled a joint plan to re-route trains from downtown Ciudad Juarez to the up-and-coming border development of Santa Teresa, New Mexico, by 2012.

Carlos Carmona welcomed the announcement. “It’s a great thing. It would be a wonderful thing to move these trains,” he said, adding the El Paso Fire Department maintains an evacuation plan for the city’s downtown in the event of a train-borne toxic disaster.

But moving trains on paper is much easier than moving them on land. Ensuring action requires negotiations among multiple public agencies and private entities in two countries, three states and several municipalities. In the Paso del Norte hub, three separate companies-Ferromex, Union Pacific and Burlington Northern-dominate the tracks, and an expensive new rail line and a new train terminal slated for Santa Teresa, could entail hundreds of millions of dollars.

Though the project is envisioned as a private-public partnership, it is unclear exactly how much dough cash-strapped Mexican governments and the deficit-plagued New Mexico state government will be willing or able to fork over for the train relocation.

It remains to be seen whether public safety or business as usual will be prevail in the Paso del Norte train relocation issue.

US and Mexican officials are well aware of the potential for catastrophic accidents and/or massive environmental contamination along their common border. A sampling of border-area incidents since the 1990s include leaks at hydrofluoric acid plants in Matamoros and Ciudad Juarez, sulfuric acid spills from a train in Nogales and tire fires in Baja California.

Consequently, preventing and preparing for such events has slowly but steadily emerged as a focus of joint cross-border environmental initiatives since the signing of the 1983 La Paz environmental agreement between Mexico and the US. By 2008, 15 local sister city agreements, with the support of Washington and Mexico City, were signed to provide mutual assistance in the event of hazardous materials emergencies.

According to Carlos Rincon, director of the EPA office in El Paso, the voluntary agreements call for “table-top” exercises, or simulated disasters, in which emergency responders on both sides of the border contact each other by phone in a predetermined chain of notification, as well as actual emergency drills involving first responders from both sides of the border. One such exercise was conducted last September 24 in Columbus, New Mexico, and Palomas, Chihuahua.

As part of the Border 2012 initiative, the EPA is helping train and equip Mexican personnel. Last September, for instance, EPA Region 9 participated in training 30 Mexican emergency responders from Mexicali, Tijuana and San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora. The sessions utilized California’s advanced hazardous materials response curriculum, said Lance Richman, border coordinator for EPA region 9.

Additional US-sponsored trainings of Mexican responders are planned for 2009, according to both Richman and Valmichael Leos, a Region 6 EPA official also involved in Mexican training. Leos said his office will conduct trainings next year in the “high risk” cities of Ciudad Juarez and Ciudad Acuna, Coahuila.

After getting wind of the EPA‘S Mexican training needs, the US Department of Defense’s Northern Command (NORTHCOM) agreed to help pay for protective suits, air tanks, masks, radiation monitors and other gear.

According to NORTHCOM spokesman Mike Kucherek, his agency budgeted $1,770,000 to cover the border training for fiscal years 2007, 2008 and 2009. Under the Security and Prosperity Partnership agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico, Northcom is viewed as an important player in emergency response scenarios.

Other examples exist of cross-border cooperation. For instance, federal US and Mexican officials conducted checkpoints in the Arizona-Sonora border region during 2006-07 to inspect hazardous waste shipments.

In September 2008, high-level US and Mexican environmental officials meeting in Ciudad Juarez signed an updated Joint Contingency Plan between the two nations aimed at improved bi-national collaboration in the event of a hazardous materials emergency. A year earlier, the annual US-Mexico Border Governor’s Conference resolved that states adopt a 5-year emergency response plan and develop memoranda of understanding for mutual help.

Overall, many US officials say significant progress is being made to prepare for potential catastrophe.

“To say everyone is prepared for a disaster is a fallacy,” said the EPA’S Valmichael Leos, a member the border emergency preparedness team. “We improve every day,” Leos said, “so when something happens we’re not trading phone numbers.”

Outstanding issues remain on the table. A September 2008 report by the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) criticized Border 2012 for lacking strategic planning, baseline data, accountability and oversight. The EPA’s leadership took exception to many of the criticisms, accusing the auditors of ignoring notable accomplishments like the Sister City agreements. Nonetheless, the EPA agreed to develop a strategic plan and program guidelines for Border 2012 by December 2009.

The EPA’S participation in the Border 2012 project, which tackles environmental issues ranging from hazardous materials emergency response to air and water pollution, received $6.4 million in funding during Fiscal Year 2004 but actually saw its budget slashed to less than five million for Fiscal Year 2009, according to the GNEB and the OIP. The budget did not include resources contributed to Border 2012 by local, state and tribal participants. Currently, the important Border 2012 member states of California and New Mexico are confronted with huge budgetary shortfalls.

In contrast, the price tag for the DHS’ unfinished border fencing project is conservatively estimated at more than two billion dollars and could ultimately cost as much as $49 billion to build and maintain, according to the Congressional Research Service.

In the post 9-11 years, “security trumped not only trade but environmental concerns” said Rick Van Schoik, director of the North American Center for Transborder Studies at Arizona State University in Tempe. Van Schoik’s staff is preparing a 2009 report on border issues for Washington policy-makers.

GNEB Chair Paul Ganster, who also serves as the director of for Institute for Regional Studies at San Diego State University, concurred with Van Schoik‘s assessment.

“In general, funding for border environmental issues has declined over eight years,” Ganster said.

On the emergency response front, unequal levels of training, funding and technological access are key considerations, Ganster asserted. “In order to properly protect US citizens, we need to make sure that Mexican communities have excellent training and equipment to deal with emergencies like chemical spills,” he said.

At its extreme, some first responders are virtually without resources. Firemen were among other municipal employees who reportedly did not receive paychecks for at least two months this fall in the border town of Palomas, Chihuahua.

Apart from funding, Ganster said responding to environmental emergencies in a border region presents other challenges like getting visas for response personnel or moving equipment across political borders.

“We felt there were some real issues with the movement of hazardous materials and the ability of first responders to move back and forth across the border in a fluid fashion,” the GNEB chair added.

For EPA’S Lance Richman, cash infusions are not necessarily silver bullets since communities, especially on the Mexican side, need to have existing management structures and capabilities to efficiently absorb new resources.

“It’s not something someone can really throw money at,” Richman said. “You have to think through your processes and coordinate with Mexican partners.”

Despite the economic crunch, many border experts agree that generous resources and attention are needed to assure that border communities are shielded from the hazards of chemicals and other potentially dangerous materials.

In its 2008 report, the GNEB recommended that the sister city model related to Border 2012 and other hazardous materials collaborations be formally expanded to include joint Mexican-US responses to natural disasters, which include wildfires, earthquakes, tornadoes and floods in the vast border region.

Episodes like the Paso del Norte flooding of 2006, when a natural disaster triggered a toxic spill from a retention pond at the American Smelting and Refining Company’s old site in El Paso, vividly illustrate how man-made disasters cannot always be neatly separated from natural ones.

A 3,000 year-old Mesoamerican cultural tradition continues gaining force in the US-Mexico borderlands and beyond. Declared an important world cultural heritage by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the Day of the Dead is a popular harvest season holiday rooted in an indigenous celebration that honors the memory of departed souls.

In El Paso, Texas, and many other US communities where the Day of the Dead is becoming a big celebration, Spanish Catholic and other influences are readily visible in the altars that are painstakingly constructed to commemorate loved ones. Political, social, spiritual and personal themes accompany festivities that get bigger with each passing year.

El Paso resident Frank Barela learned about the Day of the Dead from his grandmother.“It was something we were brought up with,” Barela recalled. Now delivering workshops and lectures on altar construction, Barela noted the surge in popularity of an old but evolving tradition. “More and more people are getting aware of what it means,” he said.

In El Paso, an estimated 3-4,000 people turned out November 1 for a Yucatan-style Day of the Dead event held at Centro Mayapan, a community center founded by former garment industry workers and activists affiliated with La Mujer Obrera. Food, music, dances and artistic exhibitions kept many people busy, while others strolled by altars honoring the legendary journalist Ruben Salazar, killed by Los Angeles police in 1970, and other Chicano movement activists of the 1960s and 1970s. A sign plastered on a center wall proclaimed, “Displace NAFTA, Not People.”

Seated next to a striking metal sculpture, El Paso-Ciudad Juarez artist “Conce” answered questions about a work that she assembled from scissors, forks and other kitchen utensils in honor the femicide victims of northern Mexico.

“It touches our hearts that so many innocent women have died,” the border artist declared.

At one end of the sprawling Centro Mayapan, a large exhibit relived the history of the braceros, Mexican guestworkers who labored on US farms and railroads from 1942 to 1964. Sponsored by El Paso’s Bracero Project, the exhibit included a short film, huge historical photos of the braceros, old employment contracts, and a model home that resembled the cramped quarters many braceros were housed in during their US work contracts. An altar was dedicated to a young Chihuahua City bracero who died while working in El Norte.

Javier Perez, a staff member of the Border Agricultural Workers Center, said many youths went through the exhibit amazed to find out that braceros once earned fifty cents an hour.

“They realize the injustices, and they ask about the current conditions of the farm workers, “Perez said. “Unfortunately, the situation hasn’t improved very much because agricultural workers continue being the lowest paid ones in this country.”

Honoring migrant workers and celebrating the Day of the Dead are crucial matters for Mexicans residing in the US, Perez contended. “It’s very important for us to not lose the culture to which we belong, and which motivates us to keep living,” the labor activist added.

In addition to the large event at Centro Mayapan, El Pasoans celebrated the first weekend of November with Day of the Dead parties, poetry readings and, of course, numerous altars. The local Mexican consulate dedicated an altar in remembrance of Carlos Marin and Arturo Herrera, the US and Mexican commissioners, respectively, of the International Boundary and Water Commission who were killed in a plane crash near Presidio-Ojinaga this year.

According to the Ciudad Juarez daily Norte, nearly 1,000 people attended an outdoor mass November 2 at the border fence between Anapra, Mexico, and Sunland Park, New Mexico. Held every year for the Day of the Dead, the mass remembers the more than 4,000 migrants who have perished attempting to cross the border during the last 15 years.

Other regional activities included altar installations and a procession in the historic town of Mesilla, New Mexico, just outside Las Cruces.

Day of the Dead celebrations have moved north from Mexico to the borderlands and to points beyond in recent years. Activities now occur throughout the United States. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, for instance, more than 2,000 people participated in the Duke City’s 16th annual Marigold Parade and Fiesta, according to organizers.

Led by floats carrying political and social messages, celebrants dressed or painted like skeletons danced through Albuquerque’s South Valley November 2 before arriving at a community center for musical presentations, food and arts and crafts displays with Day of the Dead images.

Organized by the Cambio and La Raza Unida Party activist groups, this year’s Marigold Parade was dubbed “The Recession Procession” in recognition of the economic crisis, said event organizer Vicente Quevedo. A flyer distributed by sponsoring groups proclaimed “Death to the Corporations” and called for a community-based economy as an alternative to the “corporate gluttony that has privatized war, water and air and threatens to devour us all.” Jangling to the incessant beat of drums and the insistent notes of a saxophone, one “skeleton” hoisted a sign that simply read, “Bail Out the Dead.”

Quevedo said organizers realize the growing mass appeal of their event, but are determined to keep the Marigold Parade a community-based, grassroots celebration that eschews outside appropriation or commercialism.

“It’s something we talk about on a regular basis, (which) is who controls the planning of the event,” Quevedo said, “because if that goes away it will look like a very different event.”

The 2008 Marigold Parade and Fiesta received coverage in New Mexico’s largest daily, but the Albuquerque Journal did not mention the sassy anti-corporate tone of the festivity.

Although the Day of Dead originated in Mexico and Central America, celebrations on the US side of the border are steadily attracting participants from many different ethnic groups. El Paso native Esteban Estrada, who helped his mother Griselda Flores staff an altar at Centro Mayapan, moved back to the Paso del Norte three years ago after a long stint in Los Angeles. While residing in the City of the Angels, Estrada watched the Day of the Dead become a big deal. In Estrada’s view, the Day of the Dead helps fill spiritual and scientific voids that afflict contemporary society.

“For some reason, we are going back to our ancient roots and reaching for something more than this Western society has given us,” Estrada mused.

By the third day of the Labor Day weekend march against the Department of Homeland Security’s border wall, protestors’ feet were feeling the long miles from Fort Hancock, Texas, to San Elizario, a semi-rural community south of El Paso. Resuming the march after a rest, Javier Perez, a staff member of El Paso’s Border Agricultural Workers Center, gave his take on action so far.

“Nobody said that the walk for justice was going to be a nice one,” Perez said, “so we’ ll keep on walking until we meet our objective, which is to destroy the wall before it is built.

An urgent tone energized the slogans, chants and songs that Perez and other marchers voiced. As the march was unfolding, crews were busy at work along the Border Highway up the road in El Paso constructing the local portion of the nearly 700-mile long wall. Unknown to protest participants, US District Judge Frank Montalvo, in an August 29 decision rendered only hours before workers emptied the El Paso federal court house for the upcoming holiday, had denied the County of El Paso and other plaintiffs a preliminary injunction against the fence’s construction until certain conditions were met.

In his ruling, Judge Montalvo concluded that the plaintiffs failed to prove their case that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff’s waiver of more than 30 federal environmental and other laws last April “outweighs the public’s interest in securing its borders.”

Anti- border wall protestors on the August 28-31 march were adamant against building a new wall anywhere on the border. They cited human rights, environmental, economic and other reasons for opposing the project. Many opponents contend the barrier will force desperate migrants from Mexico and Latin America into more deadly, remote crossings and increase the number of deaths on the border, which have reached into the thousands since the US government began clamping down on the border 15 years ago.

Although opposition to the wall is widespread in the borderlands, the federal project counts its share of local supporters. On September 1, an unscientific, online poll conducted by the El Paso Times showed 2400 respondents evenly split on the question of whether the city’s Public Service Board should have leased land for the wall. Proponents of a new fence argue it is necessary to control illegal immigration, curb drug trafficking and other crimes and deter terrorists.

Parading through the outskirts of semi-rural San Elizario, the group of about thirty marchers passed single-family homes, trailers and yards with farm animals. Border Patrol vehicles darted in and out of side streets. Halting at an irrigation canal almost on the US-Mexico border, the march paused to hear speakers. A portable Border Patrol observation tower equipped with a camera that one woman compared to a “deer (hunting) stand” faced the impromptu protest.

Eustolia Olivas introduced herself as a relative and neighbor of former Mexican guestworkers known as braceros. An activist with the Bracero Project, an El Paso-based organization seeking justice for the elderly former contract laborers and their families, Olivas chronicled the role of Mexican and Chicano workers in building up the United States since 1848. US racists, Olivas contended, view brown people as stoop laborers made for the work others will not do.

“We’re trying to gain recognition as human beings from them,” Olivas said. “We came to work. We didn’t come to set off explosions in buildings or on bridges. We’re not that kind of people..”

Several residents, including a group of men on horseback marchers invited to join them, spontaneously approached and applauded the demonstration on the canal bank. Later, as the group marched into the center of San Elizario to the welcoming beat of Aztec drummers and dancers, the men on horseback were now the rear guard of the march, carrying anti-border wall signs.

San Elizario was perhaps an appropriate place for a protest that embraces questions of land, freedom of movement and differing cultural visions. A local museum exhibits how the fertile lands that still sprout cotton here and there have been contested territory for hundreds of years in battles involving Spaniards, Apaches, Mexicans and Anglo-Americans. San Elizario was the scene of the famous 1877 Salt War, a conflict which erupted over attempts by Anglo businessman Charles Howard to gain control of salt lakes Spanish-speaking locals long considered communal property.

From San Elizario, the march halted in Socorro, Texas, for the evening. Picking up the protest pace the next day, the group stopped in Ysleta del Sur Pueblo for a ceremony before jumping into cars and trucks that headed to the border wall construction underway in El Paso.

The final act was a binational rally at the border between Sunland Park, New Mexico, and Anapra, Mexico, on the northwestern edge of Ciudad Juarez. More than 100 people turned out, including Anapra residents who remembered once freely moving back and forth across the border. At this spot, the Roman Catholic bishops of Ciudad Juarez, El Paso and Las Cruces conduct an annual mass in celebration of a binational, tri-state region that shares a common history, language, economy and culture.

Nowadays, a metal fence constructed during the Clinton era separates Sunland Park from Anapra, forcing march organizers to stay on either side of the divide. Participants, however, reached out to each other across the fence and US marchers tossed gifts to children and adults in low-income Anapra. The creep of the new, bigger wall was visible on the mesa above the community.

Standing in Mexico, Father Peter Hinde, who is a US military veteran, was audibly distraught by the new wall, which sits under the gaze of the Christ statue on nearby Mount Cristo Rey.

“Now we have the scandal of the fence right up underneath that symbol of unity on top of the mountain,” Father Hinde sighed. “I don’t know when we’re going to learn that our best security is creating friendship instead of creating insecurity through antagonism that is created by a fence.”

In an interview with Frontera Norte Sur, Texas state Senator Eliot Shapleigh, a leading border wall critic, praised the march. Upholding his heritage as a 5th generation El Pasoan, Senator Shapleigh called the local people “borderlanders” who enjoy ties up and down the old Camino Real Highway. Besides a monumental waste of taxpayer money, the new border wall was an affront to a close neighbor and trading partner, he added.

“This era will be viewed as a dark passage in American history, and I hope we have the leaders at the national, state and local level that will stand up and fix this in generations to come,” Senator Shapleigh said. “We need to take this wall down. We need to do the right thing by our relationship with Mexico.”

In March 2008, Senator Shapleigh sent a letter to Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff.
Citing a US Congressional Research Service estimate of a $49 billion price tag for building and maintaining the wall, the El Paso Democrat insisted much cheaper means, including smart technology, are available to control the border.

In his letter, Senator Shapleigh wrote that “history has shown that anti-immigration sentiment almost always follows a threat to national security.” Nonetheless, he continued, “despite the fact that none of the 9/11 terrorists have arrived in the United States through Mexico, the focus over the past several years has been on our southwestern border.”

Referring to criticism of the project from world figures such as former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Senator Shapleigh warned Secretary Chertoff of the diplomatic consequences of the border wall.

“Already in churches and homes from Chihuahua to Buenos Aires, your walls are called ‘muros de odio, symbols of a new hatred for which America is now known,” he wrote.
“How long will it take for our great nation to repair the ill will that these walls have engendered around the world?”

Reported in the regional media, news of the march and the border wall set off renewed polemics in cyberspace over questions of national security, immigration and race. In particular, the El Paso Times was the repository of many sharp comments.

An e-mail from a person identified as “Mother” from El Paso laid out a case for the wall:
“If this fence would have been put up a long time ago, my son would still be alive,” read the message. “He was killed by a drug trafficker trying to get back to Mexico in his Hummer.”

Many e-mails were from out-of-state. Read one message: “The fence is needed. Illegal immigrants stress so much of our society, from the free education they receive, the free lunches, free health care, the list goes on. Build the fence higher.”

Another cyber writer suggested that the new wall should be electrified with observation towers protected by numerous guards armed with “REAL not rubber bullets.”

More than a few messages carried racial overtones, featuring insults like “nasty Mexicans.”

Although work proceeds to finish the border wall before the end of the year, debate is certain to intensify in the days ahead. El Paso-area opponents, as well as their allies in other sections of the border, plan more actions in a last-ditch effort to stop the wall before it is finished.

As El Paso Doctor Elaine Barron reminded the audience, what we produce, what we consume, what we discard, and what makes us sick are all ultimately connected. Speaking in Sunland Park, New Mexico, before an August meeting of the Joint Advisory Committee for the Improvement of Air Quality (JAC), a binational US-Mexico organization that advises environmental policy-makers on issues of concern in the Paso del Norte region, Dr. Barron sketched the links between toxins like arsenic and diseases such as diabetes. She emphasized how air pollution, for example, can trigger respiratory disorders in children.

“I see it everyday,” said the borderland physician, adding she notices a rise in children with irritated eyes visiting her hospital during the border city’s Ozone Action Days.

In rapid-fire sequence, Dr. Barron laid out the possible environmental health consequences of mounting pollution. Citing a recent study of 11.7 million cases of
seven chronic diseases in Texas in 2003, Dr. Barron said the economic toll topped more than $92.5 billion in losses from worker absenteeism and other impacts. If present disease trends continue, she warned, the economic costs to the state could reach $242 billion in 2023.

A major issue, Dr. Barron said, is the assault on public health from the combined effects of pollutants we live with every day-dust, chemicals, heavy metals and the like. Complicating the panorama, she added, are matters of life-style, genetics, topography, temperature, and climate change.

Dr. Barron urged decision makers to take a second look at utilizing cumulative risk assessment studies, a policy framework considered by the Clinton administration but abandoned in recent years, according to the environmental health advocate.

JAC co-chair, William Luthans, an official with Region 6 of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, agreed that modern times present tricky scenarios for environmental policy-makers who confront problems that can’t always be pegged into a simple square. That’s why the federal agency regards PM 2.5, for instance, as not a single pollutant but as a whole class of contaminants. “That’s the nature of the challenge we face,” Luthans said.

In the growing, cross-border Paso del Norte region, environmental challenges run a broad gamut from air pollution to clean water to toxic waste clean-up and more.

In Ciudad Juarez, a new organization made up of private businesses, environmental advocates and government officials, Ciudad Juarez Pro-Aire has emerged with a new proposal to help make the Mexican city’s air cleaner. At the JAC meeting, a representative of Baker & McKenzie, an international law firm active on climate change and other issues in 70 nations, unveiled the proposal on behalf of the Ciudad Juarez group.

Denisse Varela, a Ciudad Juarez attorney for Baker&McKenzie, said a major goal of Ciudad Juarez Pro-Aire is to set up an environmental trust fund that will provide money for a cleaner air basin. According to a Juarez Pro-Air document distributed at the Sunland Park meeting, financing for the fund could come in part from a new tax on gasoline and diesel approved by the Mexican Congress in September 2007. A small portion of the proceeds is earmarked for the Federal District and the states. According to Ciudad Juarez Pro-Aire, other sources of funding could flow from State of Chihuahua and municipal coffers.

Ciudad Juarez Pro-Aire seeks funding for cleaner taxis and buses, better air conditioning systems, vehicle upgrades, and renewable energy sources for maquiladora plants. The current, polluting urban transportation system results in “reductions in the quality of life of the inhabitants of Ciudad Juarez,” the group notes.

In an interview with Frontera NorteSur, Varela said Ciudad Juarez Pro-Aire is shooting for the signing of a collaborative agreement among the municipal, state and federal governments before the year ends. The next key step would be the creation of the trust fund, which is expected to be administered by a private bank. Varela said details about contracts, commissions and fees still need to be worked out, but trust fund proponents want loans kept in the three or five percent interest rate range- a figure far below what Mexican banks currently charge. Until now, no exact amount of how much money the trust fund will raise and disburse has been determined, Varela added.

“Unfortunately, the quantity that we are seeking for the trust fund might not resolve the problems 100 percent,” Varela said, “but it could be a good catalyst for a good percentage of these (environmental) problems to be tackled.”

In an important statement, the JAC took on the controversy over the mothballed Asarco smelter in El Paso. Responding to widespread public concerns, the JAC passed a resolution by a vote of 18-0 that calls on the co-chairs of the US Border 2012 Program Air Policy forum to encourage federal and state governments with jurisdictional authority over the old Asarco plant to take actions in favor of public health and the environment. Abstaining from the vote were the Texas Commission in Environmental Quality and the City of El Paso, both of which have pending legal issues with Asarco, and a representative of private industry.

The JAC recommended that regulators review air quality permit activities; assess whether legacy issues of lead, arsenic and other contamination pose continued environmental hazards; determine if a partial or full clean-up of the smelter site is warranted; and assure public oversight of air pollution emissions as well as air quality monitors the smelter will need to operate if it reopens. In the interest of public transparency, the JAC endorsed the creation of a binational Asarco citizen’s advisory committee to oversee the smelter’s operations.

Although the TCEQ granted Asarco a five-year air quality permit earlier this year, uncertainty prevails over whether the plant will actually reopen and begin smelting copper again. Asarco’s sale for $2.6 billion to Sterlite Industries, a subsidiary of the London-based Vedanta Resources company associated with Indian billionaire Anil Agarwal, was publicly announced last May.

Curiously, the deal did not include the El Paso property, which stayed in the hands of longtime owner Grupo Mexico. During the recent battle over corporate control of Asarco, Grupo Mexico said it did not intend to reopen its El Paso facility and would work with US officials to clean up the property. Since Asarco’s sale was announced, however,
the transnational mining and metals giant has not made any public statements about the plant’s fate

Commenting on Asarco’s smelting of military and other wastes in El Paso during the 1990s, the JAC recognized that “trust in future operations has been undermined by past findings of illegal hazardous waste processing and legacy effects of previous facility operations.”

Attending the meeting, Sierra Club activist Bill Guerra-Addington urged the JAC to stay on top of the hazardous waste issue, which local environmentalists are still trying to get to the bottom of after many years. “It needs to be acknowledged by every one of you what happened with Asarco,” Guerra-Addington said.

Long established on downtown Puerto Vallarta’s boardwalk, artist Rosa Elena Isidore paints and sells peaceful, soothing scenery on a street that’s not so tranquil anymore. As mid-day tropical sun starts to peel off the skin, cruise ship visitors swoop into downtown in air-conditioned buses equipped with video screens and ice-coolers. Navigating the cobblestone streets, which are still better suited for donkeys than autos, is a challenge amid the careening buses and the bulging waistlines of hundreds of parading foreigners.

Shepherded along by English-speaking guides, the tourists file past businesses, especially the silver and Cuban cigar stores that display logos of the cruise ship lines and discount offers.

In town for a quick look- and preferably a hefty purchase- the visitors don’t have time to chat with people like Isidore. Until the tour companies stepped in about 7 years ago, the circumstances were different, Isidore recalled. More cruise ship passengers wandered on their own, even taking time to talk with the street artist. Sitting across the street from a new Starbuck’s, Isidore said the changing nature of cruise ship tourism exemplifies Puerto Vallarta’s transformation from a fishing village into a booming international destination with high-rise condos, big box stores, traffic congestion and crime.

“It’s sad, but that’s the way things are in Puerto Vallarta,” Isidore lamented. “It used to be more of a Mexican town.”

A 34-year resident of Puerto Vallarta, California transplant R.C. Walker, along with his neighbors, has found a solution to the daily chaos that unfolds when the tour buses swamp the streets below his office. “We just don’t go downtown,” Walker said. “We try to skip it.”

Cruise ship dockings in Puerto Vallarta have soared from 144 ships carrying 164,967 passengers in 1994 to an anticipated 276 ships with 589,000 passengers in 2008, according to Mexico’s Secretariat of Communications and Transportation (SCT). The Puerto Vallarta cruise ship surge is part of an international boom. The Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA), a US-based trade industry group, reported in a 2008 market study that 9.57 million US residents traveled on cruise ships in 2007. Another 33.7 million were expected to sail the high seas on cruise lines in the next three years, CLIA projected.

Nowadays, more US citizens than ever form their impressions of foreign lands, peoples and cultures via a cruise ship experience that typically lasts only a few hours. And sometimes, as in Puerto Vallarta, what they encounter is not so much different from the landscape at home.

Completed in early 2007 with an estimated $41 million price tag, Puerto Vallarta’s new cruise ship terminal can simultaneously dock three ships. Symbolizing the importance of the project, President Felipe Calderon inaugurated a facility he said would benefit “many, many Mexicans.” According to the SCT’s projections, the expanded cruise ship tourism will generate $800 million for Puerto Vallarta during a 20-year period.

Resembling a complex of sea-faring skyscrapers protruding from Banderas Bay, the Puerto Vallarta terminal is a sprawling compound that’s shielded by fences topped with barbed wire. The Mexican navy is deployed nearby to respond to any possible terrorist attack, an issue which has grown since 9-11.

Descending onto the terminal grounds for a few hours in Paradise, cruise ship passengers quickly bump into curio shops, Internet cafes, organic coffee stands and $70 massage services. Preparing lattes at a small café, worker Karla Vianney said she is grateful for the employment opportunities Puerto Vallarta and its cruise ships offer.

Next to the terminal, Dr. Martha Rodriguez runs her dental clinic. Advertising $35 teeth cleanings, the dentist serves Filipino cruise ship workers and US tourists increasingly pressed by costs at home. After only four months on the job, receptionist Blanca Torres said she’d already become acquainted with return patients who sail down the coast for a dental tune-up. “It’s very expensive in the US,” observed the young worker .

Strategically located across the street, Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, Liverpool beckon the non-stop global shopper. For the intrepid, drugs and sex peek around the corner, and for the truly enthralled, a Remax real estate branch can literally procure a piece or two of Mexico.

Some locals complain tourists are spending less money. An energetic man with a lot to say about the history of his home town, independent guide Felipe Ibarra said tourists are reluctant to plop down even $25 or $35 for a personalized tour of Puerto Vallarta and its environs. Lately, the dialogue between Ibarra, who counts 40 years in the business, and penny-pinching visitors has become oddly strained for a Mexican port, he said.

“I want to see Wal-Mart,” is a common refrain Ibarra said he hears from cruise ship visitors.
“You don’t have Wal-Mart in the US?”
“I want to check prices.”

At the terminal, tour buses scoop up passengers for day excursions into town or the surrounding countryside. Closer to ship, a romp on a “pirate ship” is available.

Befitting the package tourism model, many passengers’ itineraries are scheduled before they leave ship. Bus companies, many controlled by outsiders, transport guests who purchase specialized day trips in advance. Based in Leon, Guanajuato, TTUR is a leading tour operator. The firm is owned by Flecha Amarilla, one of Mexico’s flagship mass transportation companies. Another company that operates in Puerto Vallarta, Arthur’s Adventures, has its home office several hours away in Guadalajara.

Parked alongside the terminal’s driveway, independent taxi drivers and tour guides compete with the sleek tour buses. Acknowledging that he and his men have benefited financially from the terminal expansion, taxi owner Alfredo Torres said they still must struggle with the tour companies he estimated snatch 70-80 percent of the passengers who get off ships.

Complaints that the bigger tour operators suck up a disproportionate share of the cruise ship business are far from confined to Puerto Vallarta.

Although her small store is not far from Acapulco’s cruise ship terminal, Marcelina Celestino Martinez, a seller of beach attire, meets few of the visiting passengers. “Tour buses take Americans to the other side (of the city). They don’t leave the Americans here with us,” she lamented. “That’s the problem. We can’t make money from the Americans because the same ones that take them elsewhere earn a commission.”

Whether in Acapulco or Puerto Vallarta, the cruise ship experience is an increasingly managed one: pre-purchased schedules, pre-selected shops and pre-planned departure times to the next port.

Even some cruise ship passengers are taken aback by the herd tourism. “You’re very limited in what you can do in a few hours,” said Minnesotan Chris Hanson after a quick-stop tour of Puerto Vallarta’s picturesque neighborhoods. “We haven’t seen the part where real people live.”

Once their day is finished, cruise ship travelers like Hanson are transported back to the terminal where they must run a post 9-11 gauntlet of private security guards who operate metal detectors, search bags and check ship-issued identifications before allowing the passengers back on board.

The scene in Puerto Vallarta is repeated across Mexico every day. Rated Numero Uno for cruise destinations in the world, the number of ship passengers visiting Mexican waters doubled from about 3.2 million people in 2000 to 6.4 million in 2007, according to numbers provided by the Florida Caribbean Cruise Association (FCCA), another trade industry group.

Mexico’s federal Secretariat of Tourism (Sectur), reported income from the industry rose from $201.3 million to $487.5 million in the same 7-year period. To court the tourism, the Mexican government is spending tens of millions of dollars in tax monies to construct terminals and maintain port infrastructure. Twenty two Mexican ports now host cruise ships, and federal officials have plans to make the cruise business even bigger. Politicians like Tamaulipas Governor Eugenio Hernandez want a new piece of the action.

For all the fuss, cash from cruise ships represents a very small portion of Mexico’s overall tourism earnings. Using bigger numbers than Mexico’s federal government, the FCCA estimated that cruise ships contributed $565 million and created 16,000 jobs in all of Mexico during 2006. Last year, however, Mexico earned $12.9 billion from international tourism and about $70 billion from national tourism, according to Sectur. Nationwide, the tourism industry as a whole employed about 2.4 million people, the federal agency reported.

Depending on the location, different studies have shown that cruise ship passengers spend $60-$80 per person on visits, though many residents of both Puerto Vallarta and another destination, Zihuatanejo, contend the real figure is much lower. This compares to Sectur’s estimate that the average, non-cruise ship international tourist spends $750 in Mexico.

In perhaps another example of sagging economic times, even the ubiquitous tour buses in Puerto Vallarta are witnessing a business downturn. According to SCT statistics, 9,518 bus tours with an average 60 passengers each were expected to run in 2008, compared with 8,569 tours with an average 72 passengers each in 2007.

Michele Paige, FCCA president, said the economic benefits of cruise tourism can’t be gauged by a single visit. A survey done for her organization reported that
86 percent of cruise ship passengers indicated they will return to Mexico for another visit, she said. Cruise ship visits should be viewed as a “viable opportunity” for an ongoing tourism that leaves money which goes “directly to the people,” Paige contended.

To date, however, no comprehensive evaluation of the public investment costs versus the overall economic benefits of cruise ship tourism has been made publicly available and widely debated. Besides the upfront-costs of infrastructure development and the ongoing costs associated with providing security, minimal information about the environmental impacts is available.

Currently, the Puerto Vallarta terminal receives between $9-10 million from the cruise ship lines for docking fees and water sales to ships, said Ivan Uriza, SCT marketing director. In 2007, the facility sold 170,284 cubic meters of water to the mammoth boats, Uriza added.

In Puerto Vallarta, the SCT maintains that it is careful to inspect boats, monitor cleanings, promote waste minimization, assure proper garbage disposal and practice waste separation for recycling.

For its part, the cruise ship industry publicly boasts of its adherence to green practices like wastewater recycling, but the big commercial ships consume scarce water resources and leave behind garbage.

Cruise ships burn fossil fuels, emit greenhouse gases and ultimately contribute to local traffic congestion. Like any big vessel, they carry invasive species that can ruin local ecosystems. And to make way for the big ships, bays are dredged.

Another down side is that the cruise business is far from a reliable source of income, operating almost like a floating runaway shop that changes schedules and routes depending on national and international market conditions. In an era of economic turmoil and escalating fuel costs, the industry’s ability to keep transporting record numbers of US passengers to Mexico could be challenged in 2008 and 2009.

In some Mexican communities, proposed cruise ship dock expansions have generated stiff opposition on both environmental and economic grounds. Opponents blocked a proposed homeport for the Mexican Caribbean island of Cozumel in 2004, and successfully halted a plan to put a large terminal in small Zihuatanejo Bay in 2008.

For Mexico’s federal government, though, the cruise ship industry is a winner. In April 2008, the Calderon administration signed an agreement with the governments of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua aimed at attracting even more cruise ships. A new pro-cruise ship organization uniting the countries could be launched later this year.

In a wider context, expanding the cruise industry fits into the rebirth of Plan Puebla Panama. Renamed the Mesoamerica Project at a June meeting in Mexico, the goal of the government-sponsored, multilateral plan is to hasten the economic integration of Central America and Mexico.

Meanwhile, tourism officials seek to “Mexicanize” the country’s cruise ship business, which until now has been virtually foreign. The new initiative will involve the construction of one or more home ports for Mexico-based ships. The SCT’s Ivan Uriza confirmed that his agency is studying the possibility of locating a home port in Puerto Vallarta. Frequently called “Arizona’s Beach” because of its proximity to Phoenix, Puerto Penasco on the Sea of Cortez is also mentioned as a possible site for a future home port.

In a jump start of the home port strategy, the Spain-based Pullmantur company, associated with Royal Caribbean International, is scheduled to begin sailing its “Ocean Dream” boat up and down the Mexican Pacific Riviera later this year. Promoters are specifically targeting Mexican customers, and have reportedly signed an agreement with Mexican travel agents to sell cruises.

Based in Acapulco, the 1,350 passenger ship will make a 7-day excursion with stops in Zihuatanejo, Manzanillo, Puerto Vallarta and Cabo San Lucas. Heaping praise on local officials and businessmen for landing “Ocean Dream,” Sectur Secretary Rodolfo Elizondo said the cruise ship will “strengthen the Mexican Pacific Circuit.”

Cruising on the “Ocean Dream,” passengers will have access to bars, restaurants, swimming pools, a tax-free store and a library. Mexican officials, however, downplayed the casino on the ship. Legally prohibited in Mexico, Las Vegas-style casinos are a controversial issue in the country because of fears the gaming enterprises will facilitate money-laundering and other forms of law-breaking. Since the 1990s, proposals to legalize casinos, opposed by the Roman Catholic Church and other sectors, have died in the Mexican Congress.

Nonetheless, a de-facto legalization of gaming is rapidly underway in Mexico. Issuing scores of permits in 2005, Mexico’s Interior Ministry, then headed by presidential hopeful and current Senate President Santiago Creel, eased the way for a plethora of new sports books, bingo parlors and slot machine palaces to open up across the country, though none of the new businesses approached a full-blown casino. Drawing Mexican tourists onto floating casinos would allow a new generation of gamblers to do something legally at sea they cannot do on land.

Norma Ledezma won’t let up in her quest to find out who killed her 16-year-old daughter. But more than 6 years after Paloma Angelica Escobar Ledezma’s body was discovered not far from state police headquarters outside Chihuahua City, Ledezma’s mission isn’t getting any easier. In a recent phone interview, Ledezma said key police officials who were involved in the “investigation”of Paloma’s March 2002 rape-murder died within the past year. Ledezma, coordinator of the Chihuahua City-based Justice for Our Daughters organization, named two former Chihuahua State Judicial Police commanders, Juan Jose Mayorga Solis and Gloria Cobos, as the now-deceased law enforcement officials who were responsible for mishandling Paloma’s still-unsolved case.

“The dead don’t talk. If they are dead, the investigations are closed,” Ledezma said. “This complicates it for us, but it makes it easier for the authorities to say, ‘This person is dead.’”

According to the Chihuahua City resident, death certificates show that Mayorga passed away in June 2007 and Cobos in May 2007. Diabetes was considered the cause of death for both individuals, Ledezma added.

Placed above Mayorga and Cobos in the police hierarchy was former Chihuahua State Judicial Police chief Vicente Gonzalez, who succumbed of a heart attack earlier this year, according to relatives quoted in the Mexican press. Gonzalez reportedly suffered from diabetes, too. The passings of Gonzalez and company throw more dust on a trail of femicide that stretches from Ciudad Juarez to Chihuahua City. Similar to many other victims in both cities, Paloma attended the ECCO computer school and was last reported seen at the privately-owned institution. Despite concrete leads, no credible arrests were ever made in any of the ECCO or other cases handled by Mayorga and Cobos. Indeed, a pattern of fabricating scapegoats emerged in several investigations.

In the Escobar affair, Cobos was quickly exposed planting evidence on an ex-boy friend of the murder victim in an unsuccessful attempt to frame the young man. Caught in the act, the police commander was then officially drummed off the force and charged with making false statements by the Chihuahua State Attorney General’s Office (PGJE), the same agency for which she worked. After making bail, Cobos cryptically threatened law enforcement officials with spilling the beans if she received any further trouble, according to a 2003 report by Ledezma’s group. The PGJE later informed the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) that Cobos served 11 months in prison for her misdeeds in the Escobar episode.

Prior to Paloma’s murder, Cobos was the field investigator in several other cases of disappeared or murdered young women in Chihuahua City. Not a single case assigned to Cobos was cleared up, according to Ledezma.

Ulises Perzabal, a former Chihuahua City resident who was once accused along his US born wife Cynthia Kiecker of one the Chihuahua City murders, remembered meeting Cobos. Now living in the US, Perzabal recalled an encounter with Cobos two years before he and his wife were charged in the March 2003 murder of 16-year-old Viviana Rayas. According to Perzabal, Cobos and her men showed up at a small café and bookstore he and Kiecker were running in downtown Chihuahua City in 2001. Cobos let it be known that the artistic couple was not welcome in a business zone that was favored for urban redevelopment by Governor Patricio Martinez, he said. A man Perzabal described as a state police officer later showed up at a new store Perzabal and Kiekcer started, the Templo Mayor, carrying a purported note from Governor Martinez that warned Perzabal to hightail it out of Dodge.

Digging in their heels, the Chihuahua City couple, whose artistic and political leanings elicited rejection from some conservative quarters, soon had another interesting visitor on their hands. A veteran police official who was brought out of retirement to oversee the PGJE’s field investigations of the Chihuahua City femicides during 2002-2003, Juan Jose Mayorga came to his new post with a reputation as a policeman whose career reportedly dated back to the days of the so-called White Brigade and the Mexican government’s campaign against dissidents and suspected leftist guerrillas in the 1970s. The use of torture and forced disappearance were hallmarks of the Dirty War. At first, Mayorga entered the Templo Mayor store as an apparent customer, Perzabal said, but later returned asking the merchant about disappeared women.

In June 2003, Perzabal and Kiecker were suddenly arrested and charged with the killing of 16-year-old Viviana Rayas. Publicly connecting the crime to a Satanic-like ritual, the PGJE claimed the couple made voluntary confessions. But the two distraught suspects soon told a different story the press: Chihuahua state policemen used electric shocks and other forms of torture to extract false murder confessions. The couple’s account was found credible by investigators from the US Department of State and Guadalupe Morfin, President Fox’s special femicide commissioner from 2003 to 2006. The PGJE produced no real evidence to prove its allegations, and a Chihuahua judge acquitted Kiecker and Perzabal of the Rayas murder in December 2004.

Perzabal identified Mayorga as the man who supervised the torture session that produced the “confessions” in the Rayas murder. In a virtual replay of Kiekcer-Perzabal, Mayorga was involved in the 2003 detention and torture of David Meza Argueta. Accused of killing his cousin Neyra Azucena Cervantes, a 19-year-old Chihuahua City computer school student and store clerk, Meza was finally acquitted of the charges but only after spending almost three years in prison.

During the nearly 18 months he spent in a Chihuahua City prison awaiting trial, Perzabal met “hundreds” of prisoners who blamed Mayorga, Cobos and other PGJE officers for torturing them, he added. A 2004 report by Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission recommended that criminal charges be filed against Mayorga for the 2002 arrest and torture of Daniel Armando Torres Felix in Chihuahua City.

“Everyone accused Mayorga, Cobos, Saenz (Rocio) and all the ones who tortured me and David,” said Perzabal, recalling his conversations with fellow inmates. Ironically, Mayorga, who was eventually charged with abuse of authority, reportedly died in the same Chihuahua prison where his alleged torture victims were housed.

The deaths of Mayorga, Cobos and Gonzalez came at time when the femicides were getting serious international scrutiny in the Organization of American States and the European Union. A report from the IACHR on the Paloma Escobar case is expected out this year. The findings will likely urge the federal Mexican government to finally deliver justice for Norma Ledezma’s daughter. If the Mexican government does not comply with the recommendations, the matter could wind up in the Inter-American Court for Human Rights in San Jose, Costa Rica, which has the power to issue mandatory orders to member states including Mexico. Already, three cases of femicide victims from Ciudad Juarez are pending in the Costa Rica-based court. The legal developments are shaping up as an important test of Mexico’s compliance to international treaties and agreements.

Mario Alberto Solorzano, an attorney for the Mexico City-based Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights who is assisting Paloma’s family in the IACHR, said the commissioners were struck by the similarities between the Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua femicides. The upcoming IACHR report indicates that the Mexican government did not provide satisfactory answers to the IACHR’s inquiries about Paloma’s slaying, Solorzano said. Stressing that trying and punishing officials for obstruction of justice is a “central part” of ending impunity in the femicides, Solorzano acknowledged that the possibilities for obtaining justice are waning with the passage of time.

“The people inside the institution charged with investigating , who in some way had an opportunity to give testimony about what went on with the commissions of the crimes or with the investigations, are dying or transferred to other offices,” Solorzano lamented.

Although three important police officials are dead, Perzabal contended that other, living authorities or ex-authorities with more decision-making authority than Vicente Gonzalez and his underlings were ultimately the ones responsible for the tortures, frame-ups and suspected cover-ups that characterized the femicide saga. Perhaps worse yet, the examples of law-breaking officials going unpunished sow fertile ground for similar abuses in the future, he added. Appealing to the global community, Perzabal urged an international “people’s trial” of former Governor Martinez and other high officials of his administration. “They should be tried,” he insisted.

For her part, Norma Ledezma vowed to continue pursuing justice for Paloma, the young woman Chihuahua City human rights activist Lucha Castro has called the symbol of the “broken wings of our movement.” In Spanish, “paloma” means dove. “God gave me this strength to continue. I owe it to my daughter,” Ledezma said. “I want to know the truth. I want to know who hurt her.”

Democratic Party activists Dee Dee Camhi and Larry Canady say enthusiasm is running high among the rank-and-file membership. Welcoming an infusion of new members, local chapter meetings draw between 30-60 people. What sets Camhi’s and Canady’s branch of the Democratic Party apart from many others is that it is located outside the United States, in Banderas Bay, Mexico, to be precise. First organized in November 2007, the Costa Banderas chapter of Mexico Democrats Abroad now counts more than 200 members. The chapter represents US citizens residing in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, as well as in the emerging, new gringo “colonies” located just to the north of the well-known tourist resort in the state of Nayarit.

“I think the same things that motivate (Democrats) here are the same things that motivate them in the States,” says Canady, a full-time resident of Puerto Vallarta who serves as the vice chairperson of the Costa Banderas organization. “I think they are probably a little tired of the last 8 years. I’ve seen more people enthusiastic and have more energy, more passion about this election than any other election that I remember.”

According to Costa Banderas Chairperson Camhi, immigration and Medicare stand out as two issues of particular concern for local Democrats. A Spanish teacher who is well-versed in Mexican culture, Camhi stresses that she and other US citizens living south of the border are surrounded by family-oriented neighbors who depend on remittances from family members working in the US to sustain them in a tough economy.

“We see the issue of what is supposedly immigration and illegals as not as significant as it seems to be played up in the press in the States,” Camhi says.

In Banderas Bay, many new immigrants are either retired or approaching retirement age. Camhi and Canady say US citizens are deeply concerned about the inability to tap into Medicare, a system they paid into all their lives, for payment of medical services in Mexico.

Mexico Democrats Abroad is working on a resolution for the August 2008 Democratic Party convention that would endorse Medicare coverage for US citizens living abroad. The backers of the resolution intend to have it approved as part of the party’s platform for the 2008 election, Camhi says.

Another issue of keen interest to the Mexico-based Democrats is the state of the cross-border economy, Canady adds. In the last decade, Puerto Vallarta and the surrounding region experienced a real estate sales boom as more and more US citizens moved into the area or purchased second homes for extended vacations or for income-producing rentals.

Literally, signs abound that the US housing market crisis is beginning to hit Banderas
Bay. For sale signs on existing properties are more common than in 2007, and the blonde-haired, English-speaking real estate agents who were once quite visible hustling potential clients on Puerto Vallarta’s streets are much harder to spot this year.

“The economy there is definitely going to spill over here, good or bad,” Canady contends. “I think it’s just the tip of the iceberg depending on what happens in the next year.”

Jumping into politics in late 2007, Canady and Camhi found themselves charged with the task of organizing the local version of the Democratic primary. Like other international Democrats, the new Costa Banderas members plugged into the Global Primary that commenced on Super Tuesday in February of this year. Barack Obama emerged as the favorite of Mexico Democrats victor by a close margin. In the Banderas Bay election, 126 Democrats voted. According to official figures posted on the Mexico Democrats website, Barack Obama got 68 votes, Hillary Clinton 56, Dennis Kucinich 1 and John Edwards 1.

In Mexico, registered Democrats were allowed to cast their ballots via an Internet voting system or at polling stations that were set up for Super Tuesday. The primary unfolded in areas with large populations of US immigrants, including San Miguel de Allende, Lake Chapala and Mexico City.

“Paris and London are the only two cities from abroad which had more voters than San Miguel de Allende,” Canady adds.

Writing for the Mexico Democrats website, Bruce Rossley, vice chairperson of the San Miguel de Allende chapter, describes the scene where 512 US citizens voted.

“It looked like any polling place in America,” Rossley writes, “but when you looked, more clearly, you realized that you weren’t in Kansas any more. The walls and concave ceiling of the polling place were covered in vibrant colors of red and orange, with figures of ancient Aztec warriors looking down on Americans casting their votes for the first time in a foreign land.”

Pre-election campaigning for the candidates and the Global Primary varied from place to place in Mexico. Camhi and Canady say they were prohibited from setting up a public literature table by local authorities in Puerto Vallarta, but that Democrats in San Miguel de Allende were able to promote the event in public with no trouble.

A milestone event, the Democrats’ 2008 Global Primary is perhaps the most salient example to date of what Miami University scholar Dr. Sheila Croucher calls “political transnationalism.”

With some estimates of the number of US citizens residing in Mexico exceeding one million (no exact census is publicly available), both the Democratic and Republican parties have an important stake south of the border for the 2008 and future elections.

Reports have circulated of efforts to organize Republicans in Puerto Vallarta, but several individuals who have been identified as part of the initiative could not be reached for comment or did not respond in time to a list of questions sent by e-mail.

Republicans Abroad celebrated its 30th anniversary this year with a Washington, D.C. event which featured Karl Rove, Republican National Committee Chair Robert “Mike” Duncan, Senator Tim DeMint, and scholars from the Heritage Foundation, among others. On its website, Republicans Abroad lists furthering anti-terrorism legislation, counting Americans overseas in the census and eliminating the double taxation US citizens working in foreign countries face as among prime issues of concern for the group. On Capitol Hill, Republican Senator DeMint is involved in a bi-partisan effort with Democratic Representative Gregory W. Meeks to provide tax relief for US citizens abroad.

In the Puerto Vallarta area, Republican candidate John McCain is getting positive comments from some US-born residents, according to Camhi and Canady. “I don’t think it’s going to be as easy as an election as we thought a few months ago,” Canady muses. “I see there are possibilities that nobody really considered, say, three or four months ago.”

The November general election will be very different from the Democrats’ Global Primary, which was organized for the sole purpose of selecting a Democratic presidential candidate. In addition to the presidential contest, Mexico-based Democrats will vote in congressional and local races as well. For November, the main task for the Costa Bandera Democrats will be to organize their supporters to complete and send absentee ballots to the US. According to Camhi, the ballots will be sent to the US in a diplomatic pouch via the US Consulate in Puerto Vallarta.

“What we’re looking at in the states in November is not only the president, but we’re looking at congressmen from each of the different states,” she says. “So each of us from a different state has to get a different ballot.” Much has been written about Latino immigrants in the US as being a potential swing vote this year, but could politicized US expatriates be the over-looked factor in close 2008 elections? Camhi says the impact of US citizens voting from Mexico and other places abroad will be difficult to assess because of the way absentee votes are compiled and counted in different places. “It could make a difference, but unfortunately, you’ll never know,” Camhi says.

For the fourth year in a row, New Mexico State University's Center for Latin American and Border Studies (CLABS) will sponsor the J. Paul Taylor Symposium. Scheduled for April 2-4 at the NMSU campus in Las Cruces, the theme of this year’s event is "Justice for Immigrants." Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America along with Cesar Chavez, is slated to be the opening speaker.

Dr. Neil Harvey, CLABS director, said the symposium will "offer a timely analysis of current challenges of ensuring fair treatment of immigrants." As Dr. Harvey underscored, the symposium will take place at a moment in history when "the lack of comprehensive immigration reform has created new problems and uncertainties."

Locally, the Las Cruces conference will convene at a time of controversies over an Immigration Customs and Enforcement raid last year in the southern New Mexico community of Chaparral, and the expansion of the US Border Patrol's "no tolerance" policy of incarcerating undocumented immigrants detained in the area between downtown El Paso and the Santa Teresa, New Mexico, border crossing.

Nationally and internationally, immigration remains a burning question in 2008. In Latin America, the US economic downturn is prompting concerns about the impact of slimming remittances, while in the United States immigrants could well prove a strategic swing vote in this year's elections. At the same time, connections between migration and the North American Free Trade Agreement are back on the public agendas in Mexico and the United States. Meanwhile, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants are closely scrutinizing US immigration policies.

The NMSU symposium will explore the immigration issue from broad national and international perspectives. The planned sessions will look at the many different dimensions of the migration phenomenon, with panels focusing on youth, women, indigenous peoples, agricultural workers, media, and law. A panel featuring Fernando Garcia of El Paso's Border Network for Human Rights and Ira Mehlman of the Washington, D.C.-based Federation for American Immigration Reform promises to be polemically hot.

Among the many speakers scheduled for the conference are: Oscar Chacon, National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities; Carlos Marentes, Border Agricultural Workers Union; Diana Bustamante, Colonias Development Council; Julienne Smreka, New Mexico Children's Cabinet; Alfredo Corchado, Dallas Morning News; Alfredo Quijano, Ciudad Juarez's Norte daily; Carlos Spector, El Paso immigration attorney; and Olga Pedroza, Centro Campesino Legal of Las Cruces.

Academic specialists from New Mexico State University, the University of Texas at El Paso, Arizona State University and the University of California-Berkeley will offer their analyses of historical and contemporary events, and cultural presentations will be delivered by Youth Poets on the Border, filmmaker Bill Jungels and photographers Diana Molina and Julian Cardona.

The symposium's events are free of charge and open to the public. For more information, interested persons can e-mail event coordinator Scott Anderson at scanders@nmsu.edu

On a day when the giant Mexican flag that usually flutters in the breeze over Ciudad Juarez's Chamizal Park was oddly absent, images of the Aztec eagle were still prominent among the Chihuahua farmers and their supporters who assembled across the street. Defying a fatally-frigid cold front that's left a slew of victims dead from hypothermia and carbon monoxide poisoning in the borderlands, a hardy group gathered on the morning of January 18 to begin a tractorcade to Mexico City. Organized as the Francisco Villa Campesino Resistance Movement (MRCFV), the northerners are moving south with a firm message for the administration of Mexican President Felipe Calderon: renegotiate the agricultural section of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to shield corn and beans from foreign competition.

“From Chamizal, a piece of national territory recuperated for the integrity and sovereignty of our country, we make a call to the nation, from the Mexican countryside and from the No Corn, No Country National Campaign, for the rescue of the nation, for the recuperation and clear exercise of our independence and popular and national sovereignty, and for the construction of a truly social, democratic and lawful state," proclaimed the MRCFV in a declaration.

"The government of Felipe Calderon has refused to protect corn and beans, basic foods for Mexicans and sources of employment, survival and cultural reproduction of three million farmers and their families as well as 56 ethnic groups in the country.”

Convened two years before the 100th anniversary of the 1910 Mexican Revolution and the 200th anniversary of the 1810 War for Independence, Mexico’s latest farmer protest is now gathering force with strong historical and political overtones.

Farmers intend to follow the same route that Pancho Villa took on his 1914 march into Mexico City, and on which an anti-NAFTA protest was conducted by protestors on horseback in 1999. Along the journey more farmers and tractors are expected to join the final push into the national capital for a massive anti-NAFTA demonstration. From the four directions of the old Aztec Empire, thousands of farmers plan to stream into Mexico City's Zocalo square on January 31.

“This action is historic...," said Victor Suarez, president of the National Agricultural Products Marketers Association. "Just like 100 years ago when the farmer organizations of Chihuahua played an important role in the Mexican Revolution with the Villistas and the Villista cavalry that went from the north to the south to liberate Mexico from the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. Today, the motorized cavalry departs to play a role in the liberation of Mexico from a right-wing government at the service of the monopolies."

In its Chamizal Declaration, the MRCFV urged groups including the National Workers Union, Zapatista National Liberation Army, National Democratic Convention and others to join forces and come up with an alternative to the “neo-liberal model” that has left “the institutions of the Republic held hostage."

Immediately galvanizing the modern farmers’ revolt was the New Year’s Day lifting of the remaining Mexican tariffs on corn, beans, powdered milk and sugar under the provisions of NAFTA. New Year’s Day was marked by anti-NAFTA border protests in Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana.

Recognizing the extreme disparities in agricultural development among the three future NAFTA states, the trade accord's negotiators gave Mexican growers of sensitive products like corn 15 years to achieve competitive status. But as the old Ford and John Deere tractors collected for the tractorcade made clear, Mexican farmers are still decades behind their counterparts in the US and Canada who use the latest, costly models to work their farms. Surveying the scene, Carlos Marentes, the veteran leader of El Paso’s Border Agricultural Workers Union and the Bracero Project, said the aging tractors on display were the cream of the crop in a countryside where oxen and mules still leave grooves in the land.

“If you go deep, south in Mexico, you will see that the situation is even worse,” Marentes said. “Here we are talking about some of the ejiditarios, campesinos and producers who at least by working in the US were able to make a little bit of money to buy their machinery.” Despite their efforts, small farmers are still left out in the cold by agricultural policies in the three NAFTA that benefit “the big entities involved in large-scale, industrial, commercial agricultural production,” Marentes contended.

Many farmers consider the January 1 tariff elimination the final curtain on their livelihoods. A recent report by Ana de Ita published by the Center for International Policy’s Americas Program, documented how Mexican corn farmers have been subjected to lower prices and US-grown corn imports well above NAFTA quotas almost every year since the implementation of the treaty in 1994. According to de Ita, many US-produced corn imports are encouraged by long-term “soft” loans from the US Commodity Credit Corporation

As the clock approached high noon on January 18, the MRCFV and its supporters marched from the edge of Chamizal Park to the Bridge of Americas between Ciudad Juarez and neighboring El Paso, Texas. Forming a "human wall," the demonstrators briefly stopped most traffic returning from the United States. Amid chants of “No Corn, No Country,” signs were hoisted that denounced NAFTA and opposed the importation of genetically-modified corn
.
After a final ceremony at the Mexican eagle statue that guards the entrance to the Bridge of Americas, an advance contingent of 14 old tractors entered the mid-day traffic of Ciudad Juarez and soon passed by the strip malls, fast food restaurants and maquiladoras built on lands which once marked by fields where world-famous cotton was planted.

The northern tractorcade is just one hot piece of the NAFTA pressure cooker building up in Mexico. In recent weeks, the Mexican press has carried numerous stories on the growing nationwide controversy around free trade. Many of the country’s main political actors are speaking out for or against revisiting the free trade agreement.

Key federal senators and deputies from the PRI and PRD parties verbally support the call by the MRCFV and its allies to renegotiate NAFTA'S agricultural clauses. Resolutions in support of farmers' demands have passed the Guerrero and Veracruz state legislatures, while a split has developed in the powerful Roman Catholic Church over the free trade treaty. Although the nine bishops of the Mexican Episcopal Conference urge a thorough reexamination of NAFTA’s agricultural sections, Mexico City Cardinal Norberto Rivera is against reopening a trade agreement he says is reaping benefits for his country. The old National Campesino Confederation (CNC), at one time the most influential force in the countryside, gave its blessing to NAFTA when it was approved during the Salinas de Gortari years but is now demanding the trade pact’s revision.

On the legal front, farmers in Guanajuato and other states are pursuing challenges against NAFTA on the basis that the accord violates sections of the Mexican Constitution which protect the economic well-being of citizens. Mexico's Supreme Court, which has ruled that international agreements cannot supersede the nation’s Constitution, could wind up reviewing the constitutionality of NAFTA.

Until now, the Calderon administration has remained steadfast in its stance that NAFTA will not be touched. While defending NAFTA, the Calderon administration is rolling out a rural development strategy that combines subsidies, technical assistance, yield improvement and crop substitution to create a "winning" countryside that’s firmly integrated into the global market. Far from viewing NAFTA as a drawback, the Mexican government sees the accord as an opportunity for entrepreneurial spirits to meet national and foreign demands for food and fiber. In comments to the press, federal government representatives stress how NAFTA has made Mexico the top supplier of winter fruit and vegetables to the United States

In 2008, the Calderon administration plans to subsidize almost three million corn, bean, sugarcane and milk producers to the tune of about $2 billion. "The programs and resources are designed to benefit those who have the least, and they are for those producers with the greatest needs of support," insisted Mexican Agriculture Minister Alberto Cardenas in a statement. US corn producers, who will benefit from the Mexican tariff tear-down, currently receive on average about $20,000 per grower in subsidies. Mexican farmers, whose yields are almost four times less than those of US producers, each get about $770 in subsidies.

In a public relations offensive, the Calderon administration is touting its farm policies on the airwaves. On the day of the Ciudad Juarez tractorcade protest, the local affiliate of the federal government's IMER radio network aired spots that boasted of a record budget for the embattled countryside.

Some farm leaders including members of the Mexican Council for Rural Sustainable Development and the CONSUCC organization back the Calderon administration's free trade gambit.

CONSUCC Director Guadalupe Martinez Cruz recently defended the Calderon administration from criticisms by long-standing agricultural organizations like the CNC.

“Those of us who have memories know that they did not know how to construct a better future for Mexicans,” Martinez said, “but our organization nevertheless figures that we have to continue making a call to all the farmer organizations that are truly interested in transforming the countryside and rural families.”

The Other Rural Mexico and Beyond

Free trade’s opponents paint a vastly different picture of NAFTA and its consequences on rural Mexico. Among the speakers at the January 18 Ciudad Juarez demonstration was Lucha Castro, a prominent Chihuahua City attorney and women's activist. Castro read off a litany of disasters she pinned on the free trade model.

Castro charged that NAFTA and related government policies are responsible for expelling five million people from Mexico’s countryside. Merely two percent of Mexico’s agricultural production units benefit from the treaty, while eighty percent of Mexican farm exports are controlled by foreign capital, Castro said. Now a net importer of food, Mexico is in serious danger of losing its food sovereignty, she added.

“To compete with the United States all these years, the forests and soils have been devastated, and our aquifers have been over-exploited,” Castro continued. “Mexican consumers haven’t benefited from better prices. In 1994, you could buy 20 kilos of tortillas and 8 kilos of beans with a minimum wage salary. Nowadays, you can only buy 6 kilos of tortillas and 3 kilos of beans.”

Farm labor activist Carlos Marentes slammed NAFTA for having adverse effects in the United States as well. According to Marentes, the average yearly earnings of chile pickers in New Mexico slid to about $5,500 by 2006. Up against a wave of chile imports from Mexico and other countries, US growers are mechanizing the cultivation and harvest of crops and leaving workers without jobs, Marentes said. Many small farmer and other rural organizations in the US and Canada support the Mexican anti-NAFTA protest, he added.
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In Mexico, the Pancho Villa tractorcade is just one of numerous "social insurgencies" breaking out all over the landscape in 2008, said Alma Gomez, a former Chihuahua state legislator and longtime women's activist. The protests involve miners, teachers, environmentalists and many others, she said.

Rambling south on the Pan-American Highway atop their old tractors, the northern farmers are already attracting significant support from labor groups, non-governmental organizations and ordinary citizens. Prior to he tractorcade’s departure from the border, Oscar Enriquez, director of the Ciudad Juarez’s Paso del Norte Human Rights Center, lauded the contributions of farmers and rural communities to Mexican life. Enriquez predicted that the Pancho Villa tractorcade will sow the long road south with seeds of dignity as well as with love for the family, land and countryside.

“I think the march is a way of defending the culture of the men and women of the countryside. I also think that it has another dimension,” Enriquez said. “When the farmers, the planters, are the transmitters of the right to food, the right to human dignity, the right to culture, the right to own land, it should be clear that the government has the obligation to protect these rights, to respect these rights and guarantee that they are complied with.”

In one way or another, Esther Chavez Cano has touched countless lives throughout the world. In the judgment of El Paso labor activist Victor Munoz, collaborating with the longtime Ciudad Juarez women's rights activist shaped "who I am."

Assigned to cover the Ciudad Juarez women's murders for CNN in the 1990s, journalist Brian Barger was amazed by the boxes of newspaper clippings about the femicides Chavez had collected. Long before few cared, the founder of the March 8 Feminist Group was methodically documenting and publicly denouncing the rape-murders of young women whose bodies were dumped on the desert outskirts of Ciudad Juarez.

Profoundly moved by the crimes, Barger quit the reporting beat and helped Chavez found Casa Amiga, Ciudad Juarez's rape crisis and domestic violence center, back in 1999. The experience, Barger said recently at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces (NMSU), "changed my life."

Suffering from cancer, Chavez was honored at a November 9 NMSU ceremony attended by Munoz, Barger and other friends who gathered to celebrate the life of a Mexican feminist whose legacy will endure in the university's library, which now contains the Esther Chavez Cano Papers 1990-2006. Personally donated by Chavez, the papers cover the history of the Ciudad Juarez femicides as well as other developments related to women's and labor issues in the Mexican border city.

"NMSU is profoundly honored to accept the donation of the Esther Chavez Papers to the Rio Grande Historical Collections of the library, said Dr. Waded Cruzado-Salas, NMSU executive vice-president and provost. Praising Chavez's leadership, Dr. Cruzado-Salas said the human rights advocate's work assured that the "voices of the silenced" wouldn't be forgotten.

In an interview with Frontera NorteSur after the emotional celebration, Chavez reflected on the long struggle of Ciudad Juarez's women to combat gender violence and win justice. Chavez's best-known accomplishment was the establishment of the non-profit Casa Amiga as an institution of survival and healing for violence-tormented women and children.

Struggling out of an old house near the city's downtown for many years, Casa Amiga now occupies a large, modern facility in the southern section of the city that serves thousands of clients every year. Casa Amiga has inspired the creation of similar centers in a city where battered and assaulted women once had nowhere to turn. Still not satisfied, Chavez said she would like to establish a second center.

"I don't know if I have time, but it's urgent for me to open another (Casa Amiga) where we were in the city before, Chavez affirmed, “because the distances are such and the poverty is so great that a woman from the (other) side of the city who wants to visit us has to spend half her salary in a day just to go, because she has to take three buses, which are expensive,"

Observing Ciudad Juarez grow from economic investment and the North American Free Trade Agreement, Chavez contended that the city's workers have not enjoyed the fruits of the boom. In Chavez's view, Ciudad Juarez is saddled with a deadly underdevelopment that results in bizarre tragedies like this year's street cave-ins which killed a young girl who was walking to school, Jazmin Garcia, as well as a man who tried to rescue the 12-year-old child. "We are in the 21st Century," Chavez said in an incredulous tone.

After weathering years of battles and negotiations with successive Chihuahua state and municipal governments, Chavez assessed the gains and shortcomings of the women's movement. The seasoned activist cited as positive steps forward the creation of special prosecutorial divisions for women's homicides and sexual crimes, a new domestic violence law, legal system reforms, and the involvement of national and international human rights organizations in the Ciudad Juarez women's struggle.

Still, Chavez conveyed skepticism. "I ask myself constantly: If the mentality of judges and prosecutors doesn't change, the law might be good but it won't change anything."

Crediting the present Chihuahua state government for not trying to undermine Casa Amiga, Chavez maintained the current authorities have a better understanding of the gender violence problem-to an extent. Chavez charged that a "lack of political will" or a "cover-up" means scores of rape-murders linger in impunity.

"We have a lot of corruption," Chavez said. "It's not because I say it. You can see it in any newspaper you open up: an ex-cop kills a woman or an ex-cop was seen kidnapping....there's a cop involved in many of the Juarez crimes. It's known there is a pact between the police and those that sell drugs. A lot remains to be done."

Just days prior to Chavez's appearance at NMSU, a young mother, 22-year-old Claudia Elizabeth Gallegos Serranos, was found strangled to death and her body burned in Ciudad Juarez, according to press accounts. Questioning official statistics of the crimes, Chavez openly pondered: "Who are the real victims? How many disappeared are there in the city?"

Among others who were on hand in Las Cruces to honor Chavez was Paula Bonilla Flores, the mother of 1998 murder victim Maria Sagrario Gonzalez Flores. In a separate public presentation sponsored by the NMSU student group Advocates to Stop Chihuahua Femicides, Bonilla Flores retold the history of her daughter's brutal slaying and the long struggle for justice that followed it.

In 2005, Sagrario's family encouraged Chihuahua state police to arrest a suspect in the crime, Jose Luis Hernandez, who was sentenced to 28 years in prison for the young woman's murder last year. But Bonilla Flores, who said she was only notified of the sentence after making a special trip to the state prosecutor’s office, quickly added that several other suspects in Sagrario's slaying were still free.

In May 2007, prompted by the numerous irregularities in the murder investigation of her daughter, Bonilla Flores filed a complaint against the Mexican government with the Washington, D.C.-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the official human rights agency of the Organization of American States. Closer to home, Bonilla Flores and other relatives of femicide victims recently painted emblematic pink-background crosses along Ciudad Juarez's new Camino Real highway and, inspired by the Argentine mothers of the disappeared, began holding regular protests on the first Thursday of every month outside the offices of the Office of the Chihuahua State Attorney.

Like Chavez, Bonilla Flores is appalled by the efforts of some to sweep the murder cases under the rug or portray them as a "myth" or "black legend" that have stained Ciudad Juarez's reputation.

"My daughter Sagrario is not a myth. I didn't make it up that I had a daughter named Sagrario. I didn't make it up that she was murdered in such a way," Bonilla Flores said in an interview after her well-attended talk. "My daughter existed, and I would tell you all to believe in the families and not in everything the authorities say. We have the truth in our hands and in the case files of the victims. There are no advances, nothing is resolved and there are no real investigations."

In Esther Chavez Cano’s worldview, justice for Sagrario Gonzalez and many other women is truly an issue that transcends borders. "There's a lot to do, but there many more voices demanding justice, demanding changes. I think this is important. In spite of everything, more discordant voices are being born that say, 'I don't agree with this, I don't want this'," Chavez said. "Although you are Americans and we are Mexicans, the murdered women are the world's murdered women, because women are killed all over the world. We have to join together to bring an end to this."

Visitors to the Pepper Pot restaurant in Hatch, New Mexico, might be startled to see the hallway photo exhibit that shows the town under water and young men in a boat on a mission to rescue trapped animals. Best known for its iconic green chile crop, arid Hatch, which is a farming community located about one hour north of the US-Mexico border, is among the last places one might expect a flood.

Yet residents of the southern New Mexican town of about 1,600 souls are having a hard time shaking the memories of August 2006, the month when the Placitas Arroyo overflowed and flooded the village's center. More than 400 homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed and 500 people displaced.

Hatch was once at the top of the evening newscast. Volunteers turned out to help the flood victims, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other government and non-profit organizations offered aid and the Governor swooped in with a $15,000 state check in hand for emergency school supplies. Classes eventually resumed, some people moved back into their homes and familiar businesses reopened. Everything was back to normal, right?

Helen Woodward is among residents who criticize both the speed and amount of flood relief. After her home was swamped in three feet of water, Woodward set out to rebuild her life. Woodward recalls how 9 people, including from different agencies, including one “adobe expert” with a malfunctioning camera, inspected her home. Months later, with a $5,000 FEMA check spent and the family savings gone, Woodward is still waiting for extra help that hasn’t materialized. "Nothing has been done right," she contends.

The Aid Game

Despite an initial infusion of private and public aid, many Hatch residents now find themselves on the short end of the disaster relief stick. According to Lupe Castillo of the Hatch Area Recovery Team (HART), 95 percent of residents did not have flood insurance. Averaging between $3-5,000 per emergency case, FEMA payments carried a top limit of $28,500, says Earl Armstrong, an agency spokesman The federal agency committed an additional $878, 252 for repairing public roads, bridges and buildings in Hatch, Armstrong adds.

Other communities in Dona Ana County including Leasburg and Sunland Park suffered significant flood damages last year. According to Armstrong, 1,220 people registered for help from FEMA. His agency obligated $1,632, 758 for housing and other individual assistance countywide, Armstrong says. A total of $3,909,862 was obligated for public works repairs in the county, he adds.

Martha Morales' 84-year-old mother fled her flood-damaged Hatch home for a temporary trailer. A $10,000 FEMA payment helped with structural repairs and some home furnishings, but there was plumbing left to do, Morales says. "I'm grateful for (FEMA) help but it's not enough," she says.

Simply put, FEMA does not fully compensate victims of natural disasters. FEMA's function, in essence, is to supplement any payments made by private insurers under the National Flood Insurance Program. In fact, claims paid by private insurers are made with tax dollars funneled to the companies by FEMA.

A non-profit group, HART was established to accept and channel donations to people who fell through the official cracks. Pecan farmer Shelly Hayner, for one, wonders how HART has spent the aid money.

In response, HART's Castillo counters that the group has public meetings every two weeks and manages a careful screening process to get aid to those who deserve it. The volunteer aid worker insists that about 20 families who were not impacted by the flood were denied aid, while others were likewise rejected because they received assistance from the Small Business Administration and other agencies. HART's purpose is to help the neediest, she says.

Acknowledging that HART's fundraising goal has fallen far short of its $230,000 target, Castillo reports that the group raised about $44,500 and spent more than $27,000 by the end of May. HART has assisted 154 cases, Castillo adds, with 98 others still pending. Castillo blames the fundraising short-fall on what could be a popular misperception.

“A lot of people think we’re okay now. You know it’s dry, we’re okay now,” she muses. “But we’re not. We still need a lot, a lot of help.”

About 40 families from the demolished Caballo Apartments, which once housed many low-income farmworkers, now live in a FEMA trailer park five miles south of Hatch in Rincon. The rent-free, three bedroom Morgan home trailers are roomy, feature a nice kitchen but lack closets. FEMA is offering residents like Valentin Morones an up-front trailer purchase option for between $12-13,000, but the restaurant worker, who earns the minimum wage for part-time work, lacks a credit history.

"I'm going to see if I can get a some credit, but I don't think we're going' to qualify for it," Morones says. "I don't know where we're going to go. We're going to have to rent."

According to Rene Rodriguez, a FEMA manager in Las Cruces, new mobile home park owners will have to pay transport costs any permit fees to place their trailers-if they can find available land.

Like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Hatch's real estate is increasingly a coveted commodity. The small town is close to the planned Spaceport America, a major state economic development project that is slated to be built with more than $100 million in state and county funds.

Due to a land shortage, Rodriguez confirms that FEMA is likely to request an extension of the planned 18-month life of the trailer park.

Meanwhile, some Rincon FEMA park dwellers complain the all-electric units spit out monthly bills of more than $100 from the privately-owned El Paso Electric Company. Onion packer Maria Ramos says that she could not pay a bill and had her electricity cut-off, forcing the worker to stay with a friend in Hatch. Ramos contends that the $2,500 FEMA payment for her husband’s flooded trailer wasn’t enough to get the unit back into order. “I wish they would fix that trailer so I can go there, or help me pay the electric bill here,” Ramos sighs.

Hatch Valley native Patricio Torres, whose family counts generations in this section of the Rio Grande Valley, insists that warnings of a pending flood disaster in Hatch were brushed aside by officials. Torres, who witnessed damage to one of his properties last summer, complains that it was the fourth time in 9 years that he was flooded. "Every time I've tried to make the people aware, make the county aware that this is a problem, it's fallen on deaf ears," Torres maintains.

Grower Shelly Hayner, who lives very close to one of the spots where the Placitas Arroyo overflowed, says that she observed water running off two bridges over the arroyo in the immediate weeks preceding the flood. Hayner says that she snapped photos of water pouring from the Canal Street Bridge, flowing into farm fields and ruining crops.

"For a month, we had warnings that the arroyo wasn't carrying the water where it needed to go and nothing was done about it," Hayner charges. "It seems that there is still nothing done about it, so that this won't happen again."

Gary Esslinger, treasurer-manager for the Elephant Butte Irrigation District (EBID), one of the agencies which shares maintenance responsibilities for the arroyo, says work crews repaired the arroyo breaks and “hopefully” got rid of the immediate problem. To stave off a repeat of last year’s calamity, Esslinger says the EBID will have personnel out in the field around the clock this summer. “We’re prepared. We’ve started a warning system within our own agency,” Esslinger adds.

Last year, Hayner's pecan orchard was soaked in water for three weeks. The farmer says that she made public information requests to Dona Ana County for copies of the Canal Street bridge plans and any hydrological studies which might have been done on the structure but received no immediate response.

In addition to possible flow blockage from the two narrow bridges, Hayner and other residents suspect that the arroyo wasn’t properly cleared of brush and debris.

Upkeep of the arroyo, which is divided among a patchwork of private and public lands, emerged as the hot issue in the wake of the flood.

"We did listen to them," says Dona Ana County Flood Commission Director Paul Dugie, in answer to Hatch residents' long-running concerns. Declining to comment on specific allegations regarding the Placitas Arroyo because of what he says is possible litigation, Dugie adds that the cost-benefit issue previously arose in considering flood control improvements.

Federal regulations that govern the participation of the Army Corps of Engineers in flood control projects mandate that every dollar spent needs to be matched with one dollar of economic value downstream, he says. Unfortunately, Hatch came up short when cost-benefit considerations for the Placitas Arroyo were calculated, Dugie laments. The federal formula is very difficult to meet in lightly-developed and sparsely-populated rural areas, he adds.

In a newsletter delivered to Hatch residents last fall, town Mayor Judd Nordyke said that he was attempting to work with other agencies to form flood control district with the power to obtain easements and levy taxes so the arroyo could be put under the authority of one entity. As a new rainy season quickly approaches, the plan is still on the drawing board.

Esslinger concurs with some expert conclusions that even under the best maintenance conditions, the volume of water from unusual, heavy rains which ran off from the Uvas Mountains and into the Placitas Arroyo made a flood all but inevitable. “I’ve been here 30 years and never have seen in my life so much water come down an arroyo,” Esslinger affirms.

In his message last year, Mayor Nordyke quoted the US Army Corps of Engineers and the EBID as estimating that 7.500-10,000 cubic feet of water per second flowed through a section of the Placitas Arroyo, an amount of water similar to the capacity of the Rio Grande in El Paso.

Chile farmer Pete Atencio, who sells dried chipotle peppers and other enticing hot stuff in his Hatch Chile Sales store on the village's main drag, urges officials to put cement lining on the Placitas Arroyo. As always the issue gets down to cold, hard cash.

Flood commission head Dugie says that the problem in Hatch is just a sampler of a larger one in Dona Ana County. Tens of thousands of people live near scores of aging dikes, earthen dams and levees in need of repair and upgrade. Like the Placitas Arroyo, ownership and maintenance responsibilities for various flood control structures reflect historical patterns of development and are divided among numerous private and public entities.

A wish-list of the comprehensive improvements needed to fully modernize and secure the border county's flood control systems was prepared by Dugie’s staff and arrived at a whopping $21 billion price tag.

Historically, flood control projects in southern New Mexico have received scattered attention. Dugie is cautiously optimistic the outlook could be changing. "I think this past year has really opened people's eyes." he says, "everybody's looking for information right now." Currently, the Dona Ana County Flood Commission has prepared a capital improvement plan to present to legislators, Dugie says.

Working against greater flood control investments is the very force that unleashed the Hatch flood in the first place-Mother Nature. Some observers compare last year's flood with a once-in-a-century event. If accurate, the assessment could well mean that people will soon forget the potential of Mother Nature's wrath. That is, until the next flood comes roaring into town.

Meanwhile, as the Hatch Valley gears up for another chile harvest, many residents say that they cringe when rain clouds begin gathering in the skies. "You see a lot of scared people, and a lot of people left," says public school worker Bonnie Duran. "Some people thought they didn't have any help so they just abandoned their homes. Others are trying to do something with what the little they have."

Nearly six years after the discovery of eight murdered young women in a Ciudad Juarez cotton field stunned the world, growing doubts surround Mexican authorities' accounts of the crimes. Two previous cases against alleged murderers unraveled amid revelations of tortured suspects, fabricated evidence, bizarre stories of organ trafficking, misidentified victims, the murders of two defense attorneys and the suspicious death of one suspect. Now, the Chihuahua Office of the State Attorney General (PGJE), the agency charged with the investigating the crimes, is moving ahead with legal charges against the third round of suspects in the cotton field case.

In an interview with Frontera NorteSur, Chihuahua State Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez contended that three young men from Ciudad Juarez, Francisco Granados, Alejandro Delgado and Edgar Alvarez, embarked on a drug and alcohol-splashed killing spree of young women that began in the 1990s.

While holding that satanic worship could have been a motive in the slayings, Gonzalez denied that the ECCO computer school, which some family members of victims from both Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City suspect of involvement in femicides, had anything to do with the Ciudad Juarez crimes.

"This case is more related to street-level drug dealing," Gonzalez said. "These young men worked for an individual who distributed drugs in small quantities in a sector of Ciudad Juarez." Gonzalez declined to name the shadowy drug dealer, adding that authorities are attempting to detain two more suspects in the crimes. Past PGJE spokespersons, including former Special Prosecutor Suly Ponce, denied that drug dealing had anything to do with the women's murders.

Gonzalez charged that the current suspects randomly offered rides to young women on the street, sexually attacking and then stabbing their victims to death before dumping the bodies in the cotton field located across the street from the headquarters of Ciudad Juarez’s Maquiladora Civil Association. Situated in the city’s so-called “Golden Zone,” the cotton field sits in a heavily-transited area.

In addition to the 2001 cotton field murders, Gonzalez' office is linking the latest suspects to the Lote Bravo, Lomas de Poleo and Cristo Negro serial murders that ravaged Ciudad Juarez from 1995 to 2003. All three suspects named by Gonzalez were teenagers at the time of the 1995 Lote Bravo killings. A PGJE power point presentation about the case against Alvarez and his friends includes the names of 1995 murder victims Olga Alicia Carrillo Perez and Silvia Elena Rivera Morales as among the possible victims of the suspects. Initially, the PGJE tied the late Egyptian national Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif to the Carrillo and Morales murders.

Asked if the inclusion of Carrillo's and Morales' names in the PGJE's investigation meant that Sharif was innocent of the crimes, Gonzalez said that because Sharif's case was before her time she had no knowledge of his alleged victims. Maintaining his innocence, Sharif died in a Chihuahua City prison last year while serving a 1995 sentence for the murder of Elizabeth Castro in- a conviction critics have challenged.

At a public presentation sponsored by the Santa Fe Rape Crisis and Trauma Treatment held in New Mexico’s capital city on Mother’s Day weekend 2007, Gonzalez credited various US agencies, including the FBI, for permitting her current murder investigation to proceed. At the time of Edgar Alvarez's arrest in Colorado last summer, Tony Garza, the Bush Administration's ambassador to Mexico, announced a major step forward in resolving the eight murders, and Alvarez was quickly deported to Mexico.

Granados, who is jailed on an immigration law violation in the United States, gave a tape-recorded confession to the Texas Rangers last year which led to Alvarez and Delgado. Gonzalez attempted to play a portion of the confession to the Santa Fe audience but the audio failed to deliver.

"The important thing for us is that this is an investigation that flows from the investigation that the North American authorities also are directly realizing," Gonzalez later said in an interview.

"No type of pressure existed. We're working the technical and scientific evidence. Jose Francisco Granados' home produced physical evidence of women's clothing, and other implements including purses, women's shoes, cosmetics. All this is being processed in our forensic laboratory. We even managed to obtain a genetic profile from the Cristo Negro site that we will compare with the genetic profiles of Francisco Granados, Edgar Cruz, Alejandro, and the other two individuals whose detention is pending."

The PGJE's account of the cotton field killing is strikingly similar to the same department's original but later discredited version of how bus drivers Victor Garcia and Gustavo Gonzalez allegedly killed the women. In the original case, Garcia and Gonzalez were accused of randomly kidnapping women, raping their victims and then beating them to death with bats. Both men were allegedly high when they committed crimes, though toxicology tests contradicted the state's assertions. The basic difference in the latest PGJE case is that the alleged perpetrators supposedly used knives to kill their victims.

Sally Meisenhelder, an organizer for the Las Cruces-based Friends of Juarez Women, a non-governmental organization which has worked closely with victims' families, doesn't give credence to the PGJE's latest case. "It's the same old stuff, and now there is whole new set of scapegoats," Meisenhelder said.

Other knowledgeable sources strongly disputed the PGJE's claims of how the murder victims found in the cotton field were killed.

"The official position is absurd," contended Mexican criminologist Oscar Maynez, who headed the PGJE department that supervised the 2001 examinations of the eight victims. According to Maynez, the decomposed nature of the bodies, many of them just bones, made determining the cause of death difficult.

While investigators found no evidence of stab marks on bones of victims, Maynez told Frontera NorteSur that they detected signs that some of the victims could have been strangled to death, a pattern in scores of other killings. An upcoming report from the highly-respected Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, which has spent nearly two years examining the remains of Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City femicide victims, is expected to draw similar conclusions.

Maynez quickly dismissed Attorney General Gonzalez's contention that the lack of identifiable stab wounds in the corpses was caused by the way the presumably substance-impaired killers cut into sensitive organs like the heart. "They are saying that these people are better than surgeons," Maynez said. "The (fabrication) of scapegoats is becoming more sophisticated. They are trying to feed the evidence into the story."

Maynez discounted the possibility that Alvarez and his street buddies, who reportedly struggled with drug, emotional, job and marriage problems, had the capacity to hide, transport and then dump numerous bodies over an eight-year period without being detected.

"You are talking about 16-year-old kids who had no money and were consuming drugs killing women and somehow didn't get caught," he said. "I'm sure they weren't involved in the cotton field murders."

The former PGJE official added, "US officials have to look closely at this case and not take my word for granted. This is very serious. Behind the murders is a very organized, resourceful structure."

The PGJE's case shows other signs of coming apart. Media reports place key suspect Alvarez in Colorado during many of the women's disappearances and murders attributed to the migrant.

Last February, "protected witness" Alejandro Delgado publicly recanted. Delgado charged that he was physically manhandled, isolated and threatened by Chihuahua state police officers. In statements to Ciudad Juarez reporters, Delgado declared that Granados and Alvarez were both innocent, and that he made up the murder story under pressure from Chihuahua state policemen who had isolated him away from his home.

Almost immediately after making his denunciation, Delgado was arrested by the PGJE and charged with murdering 16-year-old Silvia Gabriela Laguna Cruz in 1998. A judge quickly threw out the charge as baseless.

Gonzalez denied that Delgado was forcibly isolated or slapped with a trumped-up charge for complaining to the press.

"Alejandro Delgado said that he was really afraid of Edgar Alvarez's family and that he wanted to be protected," Gonzalez said. "He was with us a protected witness until his wife got mad and wanted him to go home. In our opinion, Edgar Cruz's defense picked (Delgado) once he got home to get Edgar Cruz off the hook."

Then there is the matter of Francisco Granados’ sanity. The allegedly repentant mass murderer reportedly engaged in unusual behaviors like talking to the devil ever since he was a teenager. While acknowledging that Granados could be lying, Gonzalez affirmed that authorities are conducting tests to determine the truthfulness of the suspect’s statements. Still, Gonzalez was confident that, until now, corresponding evidence has established the “reliability of this man.”

Questions hang over the authorities' version of the alleged randomness of how the victims were selected. Three of the cotton field victims had some sort of relationship with the privately-owned ECCO computer school in Ciudad Juarez, as did several other femicide victims in Chihuahua City to the south, an intercity "coincidence" that has not publicly come up at all in the cases against Granados, Alvarez and Delgado.

Patricia Cervantes, the mother of Neyra Azucena Cervantes, a 2003 Chihuahua City murder victim who worked and studied at the successor institution of ECCO, said in an interview that she has not been questioned by the PGJE about any possible connections between her daughter’s murder and the cotton field case. Cervantes expressed surprise at the state’s current case, adding that she has not seen any news of the prosecutions in the Chihuahua City media.

If the official version of the cotton field crimes is correct, it means that numerous victims who came into contact with ECCO, an almost tiny educational institution operating in a population pool of more than 2 million persons in two different places, somehow wound up in the clutches of serial killers in different places and at different times from early 2001 to early 2003. Several years ago, ECCO spokesmen denied any involvement in crimes to the border-region news media.

Pinning the murders on Alvarez and company closes the door on other possible suspects in the serial killings, including police officers. A 2003 US State Department cable about the Cristo Negro slayings obtained via the Freedom of Information Act by Keith Yearman, an assistant professor of geography at Illinios’ DuPage University, noted the lingering suspicions of official complicity in the femicides.

"Authorities report they are following several investigation leads, including one of possible police involvement in the disappearances, but no progress has been reported,” stated the cable.

Yearman, who is waiting to receive documents from the FBI, said that a similar request for documents from the US Central Intelligence Agency related to the cotton field case and other women’s slayings in Ciudad Juarez was turned down on national security grounds.

Claiming no party affiliation, Patricia Gonzalez was elected to her post in a 2004 multi-partisan vote by the Chihuahua State Legislature. The former judge has enjoyed a good rapport with sectors of the women's and human rights communities. At the Santa Fe forum, Maria Pilar Sanchez, director of Ciudad Juarez's Casa Amiga rape crisis center, praised Chihuahua’s state attorney general for "doing things" and bringing "transparency" to the scene.

Gonzalez's office is undertaking an ambitious legal and police training reform program in Chihuahua, planning, for example, to institute oral trials for the first time. However, the legal case against the cotton field suspects is proceeding in the traditional fashion of written statements constituting the weight of evidence.

Gonzalez’s legal reform efforts are encountering resistance from members of the old legal establishment who are criticizing both the speed and character of the reforms.

In Santa Fe, Gonzalez insisted that she is purging the PGJE of bad elements, but charged that her campaign is complicated by persistent corruption in the Federal Agency of Investigations, Federal Preventive Police and Ciudad Juarez Municipal Police.

Gonzalez confirmed to Frontera NorteSur that she has received death threats, specifically in connection to the investigation of men's homicides, but has not suffered "any threats" in relation to the femicide probes.

US support is a cornerstone of Gonzalez's efforts. A $5 million-dollar grant from the US Agency for International Development is underwriting much of the reform project. The grant is managed by the Washington, D.C.-based firm Management Systems International (MSI). According to the non-profit Center for Public Integrity, MSI is a privately-owned foreign aid contractor that runs programs in Iraq, Afghanistan and other nations.

Only days after Edgar Alvarez was deported to Mexico last year, Ambassador Garza appeared in Ciudad Juarez, where he praised the administration Attorney General Gonzalez and Chihuahua Governor Jose Reyes Baeza for opening a new forensic laboratory and "implementing a new criminal justice system that is transparent and fair, that protects human rights.."

Ambassador Garza's words contrasted with the US State Department’s internal discourse just a few years earlier. The State Department cables obtained by Yearman reveal that US authorities were fully aware of multiple episodes of torture, corruption and killings attributed to PGJE personnel.

Assisted by the USAID funding, US border states are contributing to the PGJE's make-over. Gonzalez's office, for example, has signed a training and legal cooperation agreement with the New Mexico Office of the Attorney General. In the run-up to the Santa Fe forum, the New Mexico AG's office released a press statement noting the gravity and cross-border significance of the femicides.

So far, the New Mexico-Chihuahua agreement doesn’t include joint field investigations. New Mexico Assistant Attorney General Maria Sanchez-Gagne told Frontera NorteSur that no one from her office, to the best of her knowledge, is involved in the cotton field investigation. Sanchez-Gagne would not comment on past incidents of violence and criminality involving PGJE agents, but defended the cross-border reform program underway between New Mexico and Chihuahua.

“What I do know is that Chihuahua is moving forward to change its criminal justice system,” Sanchez-Gagne said. “They are the first state to do this in Mexico, and we are applauding them and assisting them to make this a more secure city and state.”

Convictions of Edgar Alvarez and his friends in the cotton field case and other women’s murders could well mark the end game in many of the Ciudad Juarez femicides. High stakes exist for the PGJE, Patricia Gonzalez, Mexican human rights guarantees and US Mexico policy, not to mention the accused suspects, victims' families and society in general.

At the international level, non-governmental human rights organizations, the European Union, the United Nations, the United States Congress, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) have all clamored to one degree or another for justice. In the United States, the murders are likely to get renewed attention when the movie Bordertown, which stars Jennifer Lopez and Antonio Banderas, is released to commercial theaters this year.

According to attorney Adriana Carmona of the Chihuahua City-based Women's Human Rights Center. relatives of 7 Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City femicide victims are pursuing cases against the Mexican government for human rights violations in the IACHR. While the IACHR's recommendations are purely advisory, lawyers for victims' families are studying the possibility of taking the cases to the next level, to the Costa Rica-based Inter-American Court for Human Rights, which issues obligatory orders to member countries, including Mexico.

Four of the IACHR cases involve women that Alvarez and crew are officially suspected of killing, but convictions of the current suspects could help block or slow international legal action. If the critics are on the mark, convictions of Alvarez and his old buddies will mean that the real killers of women once again go unpunished.

Already, Mexican law guarantees impunity in a growing number of the femicides. As the Washington Post noted in a recent article, Mexican law has a 14-year statute of limitations on murder. The newspaper mentioned several murders from 1993 whose prosecution time has passed. On a campaign stop in Ciudad Juarez last year, then-presidential candidate Felipe Calderon vowed to end impunity in the women’s killings.

Meantime, sectors of the Mexican government, media and industry are taking steps to wipe the memory of the cotton field and other serial crimes, still legally unsolved, from the public consciousness. Ciudad Juarez's identity as an industrial border magnet that constantly draws new people to the city even as older residents leave for the United States helps facilitate erasure.

Recently, the Office of the Federal Attorney General quietly withdrew police officers it had long assigned to guard the cotton field. Du Page University's Yearman finds irony in the pending relocation of the US Consulate to a site close to the cotton field in Ciudad Juarez's "Golden Zone". The relocation promises a bonanza for new businesses like hotels that serve thousands of visa-seekers. “The (cotton field) is going to be plowed over so we can expand the US diplomatic presence in Mexico," Yearman observed.

Additional Sources: Washington Post, May 14, 2007. Article by Manuel Roig-Franzia. El Paso Times, July 28, 2006; August 18 and 22, 2006; September 7 and 12, 2006. October 1, 2006. Articles by Diana Washington Valdez, Louie Gilot and Tammy Fonce-Olivas. Norte, September 10, 14 and 28, 2006; February 23, 2007. Articles by Carlos Huerta, Ignacio Alvarado Alvarez and Javier Arroyo Ortega. El Diario de Juarez, February 22 and 23, 2007. May 16, 2007. Articles by Armando Rodriguez, Martin Orquiz, Juan de Dios Olivas, and Sandra Rodriguez Nieto. El Universal/EFE, March 5, 2007. Aserto (Chihuahua City), March 2007. Article by Ignacio Alvarado Alvarez. Denver Post, August 17 and 20, 2006. Articles by Michael Riley, Allison Sherry and editorial staff.

The J. Paul Taylor Social Justice Symposium: Combining Theory and Practice for Environmental Justice

As a movement in its own right, environmental justice came of age during the 1980s. Arising from the struggles of predominantly low income, people of color in the United States and abroad against toxic dumping and other environmental assaults, the EJ movement, as it is now widely known, has spread far and wide.

Fruits of the struggle include the 1994 executive order by President Bill Clinton that ordered federal agencies to consider the "disproportionately high and adverse human health and environmental effects" on minority and low income populations. In a similar vein, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson signed a 2005 executive order that required executive branch departments in his state to adopt an environmental justice imperative.
A ruling by the New Mexico State Supreme Court earlier in the same year ordered the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) to take into account social impacts and health issues in the review process for a proposed landfill in southern New Mexico,

Angus Wright, a professor emeritus of environmental studies at California
State University who has written extensively about the intersection between environmental and working-class struggles, says that a developing trend involves the fusion of academic research at places like New Mexico State University (NMSU) with grassroots, community activism. For Wright, the stakes for an academic-community partnership are higher than ever.

"Our present moment is one in which global climate change and the array of associated issues constitute perhaps the most dramatic and important turning point in the history of humans since the Pleistocene, and the way we meet that challenge will determine the quality of our lives and future generations for as long as we can imagine," Wright says.

In the spirit of combining theory and practice for environmental justice, NMSU's Center for Latin American and Border Studies recently sponsored the latest J. Paul Taylor Social Justice Symposium. Bringing together academic researchers, environmental justice advocates and others in Las Cruces, the event offered a multi-faceted look at environmental justice issues in the US-Mexico border region and beyond.

At one panel, New Mexico State University researchers who are collaborating with different US and Mexican government agencies on promoting alternative energy, spoke about projects that reduce environmental hazards and give indigenous and low-income communities in Mexico and other Latin American nations affordable access to electric power. In an interview with Frontera Norte Sur, NMSU researcher Robert Foster of the College of Engineering's Institute of Energy and Environment estimated that 5 million people in Mexico have no access to the electrical grid.

Foster added that the border state of New Mexico has tremendous potential as an alternative energy producer in wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass resources. "Given New Mexico's population, we can provide all of our electricity needs through the different renewable resources," he said.

In another session, community activists from southern New Mexico testified about rural communities that live with dairy odors, excessive power plant emissions, lead contamination, and chemical spills. Arturo Uribe, a community organizer from the small town of Mesquite south of Las Cruces, traced the multi-generational presence of his family in the Mesilla Valley. Uribe recounted the struggle many Mesquite residents have waged against an agricultural chemical manufacturer, which Uribe blamed for multiple spills and noxious smells.

"I'm right next to a chemical plant and when my grandmother and aunt made tamales they'd complain of odors," he said. "The community of Mesquite should come first before the profits of a company that is polluting,"

Many of the defining battles of the EJ movement have been fought along the US-Mexico border in places like Tijuana, where residents have long fought against the aging Metales y Derivados toxic waste dump, or in Ciudad Juarez-El Paso, where battles have raged against proposed nuclear storage facilities, illegal waste dumps, flood-borne destruction, and lead contamination. Nestled against the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua , southern New Mexico is on the frontlines.

Taking theory out of the classroom, symposium participants climbed aboard a bus for a "Toxic Tour ‘07" of activist Uribe's hometown of Mesquite and other communities where environmental issues are a mounting point of contention between companies and local residents.

The last stop on the tour was Sunland Park, New Mexico, a growing but still poor community set on the base of Ciudad Juarez’s hills. Sunland Park residents suffer from high levels of air pollution, live next to a contaminated Rio Grande and complain about lead contamination from an old smelter. Last summer, some residents' homes were flooded by heavy rains.

Organizations like the Sunland Park Environmental Grassroots Group and Neighbors in Action have opposed the presence of the Camino Real landfill operated that handles garbage from New Mexico, Texas and Mexico.

Kicking off a press conference attended by symposium participants and community members, Sunland Park Mayor Ruben Segura outlined his administration's campaign to transform Sunland Park from a border colonia into an "entertainment corridor" that celebrates the “cosmic race” of the borderlands. In addition to a New Urban-inspired downtown, Segura and planners have a new international crossing, geological park and science museum on the drawing board.

Mayor Segura ran down some of the obstacles confronting his town of about 17,000 people. While Deming, a southern New Mexico town with a comparable population to Sunland Park's, boasts an annual budget of $10.4 million and 165 municipal employees, Mayor Segura said Sunland Park must make do with a yearly budget of $4.4 million and 96 employees. Lack of gross receipts taxes stunts services, he said. Commenting on the Camino Real landfill, Mayor Segura said that it isn’t his business as mayor to push for one particular solution but he contended that the landfill was a "divisive" and archaic entity in a community that is attempting to acquire a new identity.

"And when we talk about social justice and when we talk about the poverty
component, it is the aggregate,” Mayor Segura affirmed. “It is not just one element. You know, the worst thing when I came here as mayor, we were known as the landfill city."

Speaking after Mayor Segura, several residents denounced the odors and spilled garbage that allegedly originate from both the landfill and the fleets of trucks that serve it. Suzanne Michaels, a former El Paso television news personality, who serves as the landfill's spokeswoman, demanded equal say for the company. Contending that Camino Real utilizes state-of-the-art environmental protection technology, Michaels took issue with residents' characterization of the landfill as a "dump." Former New Mexico Governor awarded Camino Real the state’s Green Zia environmental award back in the 1990s.

An exchange ensued between Michaels and resident Agustin Barraza, who
charged that he was never informed that a landfill would be built near his home when he purchased his property. Barraza maintained that upwards of 500 dump trucks pass through Sunland Park every day, hauling and spilling garbage from both sides of the border. "Those are germs that are coming out," he contended. Michaels disputed Barraza's numbers, estimating that the number of dump trucks was between 300-400, but promised to look into the Sunland Park resident's concerns.

In 2004, the NMED confirmed that medical waste and asbestos had been illegally dumped at the landfill, which is uphill from a residential area. In a separate interview, department spokeswoman Marissa Stone said that the NMED negotiated an $11,500 settlement with the Waste Connections company for the 2004 incident. Stone added that two follow-up NMED inspections turned up no violations.

In response to questions from Frontera NorteSur, Michaels denied that dangerous materials from maquiladora plants in Ciudad Juarez or elsewhere were permitted in the landfill. "We do not accept hazardous waste, medical waste or liquid waste," Michaels said. "The maquila trucks when they come in have a manifest that tells everything that is on the truck." Michaels said that a typical load of maquila trash that arrives at the landfill might include trimmings from car upholsteries or waste from card producers.

J. Paul Taylor, for whom the NMSU EJ symposium was named, was on hand for the Sunland Park landfill debate. An 86-year-old former New Mexico state lawmaker from Mesilla who served many years in the New Mexico House of Representatives, Taylor said that he remembered when Anapra, the original community of Sunland Park, was a "small village."

Recalling that he once facilitated a legislators’ tour of the landfill and community, Taylor urged Camino Real to listen to public opinion. "This is their community. They are concerned (about) the health of their children, about what is happening environmentally to their community. They want the best for their community," Taylor said.

The Camino Real landfill, which many Sunland Park residents want relocated, will have to get its solid waste permit renewed by the NMED this year. Considering that Sunland Park is an overwhelmingly low-income, Spanish-speaking community, the permit process will represent a test case of Gov. Bill Richardson's EJ executive order signed in 2005.

According to NMED spokeswoman Stone, her department will apply Governor Richardson’s executive order as it moves through the permit renewal process.

“The environment department is committed to affording the communities fair and meaningful participation," Stone said, adding that a public hearing will be conducted sometime next August. Stone said that a public notice will be published before the bilingual hearing. Prior to the proceeding, the NMED will accept written public comments for the record, she said.

Meanwhile, Sunland Park landfill opponents are joining forces with like-minded activists from nearby Chaparral, New Mexico, who are mobilizing opposition to a landfill slated for their community. Lorena Perales, an organizer of the anti-landfill Vecinos Unidos group, said that residents are dead set against turning Chaparral into a dumping ground for maquiladora plant waste from Mexico. "We don't want the same thing to happen to us as happened to Sunland Park," Perales said.

Elizabeth Rogers and Alex Kelly embarked on the trip of their lives. Selling their Chicago condominium, the couple flew to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, this past winter for a needed break from the old work routine. Based in beautiful but expensive Banderas Bay, the young travelers visited beaches, endured roving street vendors and explored the wonders of the tropical Pacific coast, a place where the waters hop with migratory humpback whales, dolphins and sea turtles. Rogers was struck by the gay-friendly atmosphere. "A lot of rainbow-colored flags and that kind of thing, which is nice," said the young woman. "That's accepted down here, I think."

Lodged in a Puerto Vallarta condo, the Rogers-Kelly team quickly stumbled across the pricey real estate market that defines Puerto Vallarta and surrounding areas. Time share vendors hustled the couple, and ads for expensive properties leaped into their eyes from the pages of slick magazines and newspapers. "There is undeveloped land, developed land, high rise condos, gated communities," Kelly observed.

Finding Puerto Vallarta a pleasant stay, the Midwestern couple nevertheless departed for the next leg of their world journey. Other US visitors, however, are purchasing homes and remaining in Puerto Vallarta for the long-haul. Mark Anthony Venegas should know. A native of Carlsbad, New Mexico, Venegas lived in San Francisco before moving to Mexico in 2003. Now heading a "full-service" real estate company in Puerto Vallarta, Venegas brokers properties, helps potential customers get financing and arranges for new homes to be built on empty lots. One division of Venegas' business caters to gay home buyers.

Seated in the air-conditioned comfort of his office in Puerto Vallarta's Olas Alas neighborhood, Venegas pointed to the push of the "rat race" and the pull of community, typified by a traditional family-centered culture, as attractions that convince gringos to move south. And like in his own case, the prevailing state of politics north of the Rio Bravo is a growing part of the picture, Venegas said.

"I love the US. It's the greatest country in the world. However, it's going through some difficult times right now with the Bush Administration and the war and everything else,” he said. “And so yes, I do believe there are a lot of expatriates that are down here dissatisfied with what's happening in the US."

Ken Grover, a longtime US-born resident of Puerto Vallarta who works in the marketing business, observed that an earlier gringo migrant wave tended to be polarized between affluent migrants and poor ones. "There were two extremes," Grover said. Nowadays, a lot of the newer migrants are better-off baby boomers who are still forced to stretch their dollars, according to Grover. Still, a respectable number of the new Mexican residents must work for a living- just like their darker-skinned neighbors. For some, trying to survive on pesos is a bitter jolt of reality.

Almost entirely ignored by a press more interested in undocumented Mexicans in the United States is the phenomenon of US-born workers who labor away in the service and professional sectors without the proper papers. A company that runs a Puerto Vallarta call center promises Canadians and Americans "help in attaining the proper work documentation necessary."

A recent, path-breaking article published in Dissent magazine described a group that doesn't learn the new language, displays its native flag, maintains its traditional customs, and even celebrates its old holidays in the new country. "Some live and work without proper documentation and have even been involved in the illegal transport of drugs across borders," stated the piece. Sound familiar?

Written by Sheila Croucher, a professor of political science at Ohio's Miami University who is studying US migration to Mexico, the article delved into the complex aspects of the new Gringolandia south of the border. Professor Croucher found that many of the same issues which surround the Mexican immigrant community in the US ring true with the US immigrant community in Mexico as well. As Croucher summarized it in an interview with Frontera Norte Sur, "The precise things that politicians and pundits are railing against in the US."

Nobody knows for sure how many people of US origin reside in Puerto Vallarta and other regions of Mexico, but Croucher said that one US State Department estimate made several years ago pegged the number at about 600,000 souls. Since 9-11, the US government has become reticent about disclosing information concerning US citizens living abroad, Croucher added.

In addition to the older haunts of San Miguel Allende and Lake Chapala in central Mexico, newer gringo "clusters" are emerging in the Baja Peninsula, in Rocky Point (Puerto Penasco) in Sonora, around Banderas Bay in Jalisco and Nayarit, in Zihuatanejo-Ixtapa and Troncones in Guerrero, and along the Mayan Riviera on the Caribbean Coast.

Mirroring Mexican immigrant communities north of the border, US migrant communities in Mexico boast their own social and civic organizations, participate in the political life of the old country and enjoy access to native-language newspapers, radio programs and cablevision.

The 2004 US Presidential campaign signaled the new importance of the US migrant population in Mexico. Speaking by telephone from Mexico City, Croucher recounted how the Democratic Party dispatched former Clinton Administration official Ana Maria Salazar to round up the expatriate vote, while the Republican Party sent President Bush's nephew, George P. Bush, to rally his party’s faithful. In the town of San Miguel Allende alone, the Democrats raised $10,000 dollars for Kerry's bid, Croucher added.

"After 2000 it became clear to people how close the elections could be and the importance of the vote abroad," Croucher affirmed.

A good percentage of the US migrants complain about the drift of politics as well as the propensity for overregulation back in the states. A young woman from the United States who preferred to identify herself only as Denise, has tasted the world from Pakistan to Puerto Vallarta. The world traveler contended that the strict security measures on US borders symbolize the end of liberty as we once knew it, and represent a closing window on the rest of the global community.

"It's a freedom thing, nobody likes to be controlled," she said. "In the states, it's black and white. Here there is a gray area. If you get stopped in the states, you always get a ticket."

For Croucher, economics, specifically health care costs, are far more influential in driving US citizens to Mexico than either George W. Bush or the local street cop. Many Mexican dental clinics and doctor's offices in the border region and points south thrive on a growing US clientele. Fees are reasonable, prescription medicines are affordable, appointments are given in minutes or hours instead of weeks or months, and the quality of service is good, “Americans I talk to have nothing but positive things to say about health care in Mexico." Croucher said.

Considering that the looming mass retirement of the baby boomers coincides with the growing melt-down of the US health care system, Croucher noted a certain irony in the snappy remarks of commentators who accuse Mexico of exporting its problems to the US. "We're exporting our problems abroad," Croucher contended.

Canadians are also moving to Mexico, but many are more apt to complain about Washington than Ottawa.

"The entire country of Mexico is booming with Americans investing," realtor Venegas concluded. He was quick to add that foreigners interested in buying property in Mexico have it easier than anytime in the past. Even though the nation's constitution prohibits foreign land ownership near coasts or borders, foreign buyers can now obtain renewable, 50-year trust deeds that grant all the rights of buying and selling. Mexican banks, most of which are now owned by foreigners, administer the properties for annual fees that average about $500 dollars for individual homes.

Low property taxes coupled with the availability of Mexican home mortgages in the United States are two incentives for foreign buyers. In contrast to the United States, however, prospective homeowners must plop down a bigger cash down payment- something in the neighborhood of 20 percent. With prices for condos and homes quoted in five or six figures, buying a property in Puerto Vallarta and many other markets is not for the budget-minded.

A local trade publication, the Vallarta Real Estate Guide, recently estimated that real estate sales in the Puerto Vallarta-Banderas Bay region jumped from $400 million dollars in 2004 to $550 million dollars in 2005. "Gold Rush Days are Here Again." ballyhooed the publication. Familiar US real estate companies including Century 21, Prudential and Coldwell Banker have representatives throughout the country, and friendly, English-speaking salesmen (and women) regularly emerge from their strategically-placed offices in front of the tourist pedestrian traffic.

Locals report that some Mexican landowners and homeowners are cashing in on the real estate market, selling off their properties in trendy places like Puerto Vallarta's old downtown, or "Gringo Gulch," as it is called. Locally, home prices are beyond reach for the average Mexican citizen, according to Marina Perez, a Puerto Vallarta environmentalist and longtime resident. Consequently, many Mexicans fall into the old Third World practice of purchasing cheap land or squatting on empty lots located on urban outskirts.

"Puerto Vallarta has always been expensive, but with all this going on home prices are going through the roof. The average citizen can't obtain a decent house, unless it is through low-income government programs," Perez said. "So what happens to the people who come without money and don't have access to the government housing programs? They go up on the mountain and get a lot. It doesn't matter to them whether or not they have electricity, water or sewage."

The lure of the shantytown is not surprising. After all, wages in the service-oriented tourist industry are low. A young Wal-Mart worker, who holds what is regarded as one of the "better" jobs in Puerto Vallarta, reluctantly disclosed earning a few hundred dollars a month- a pitiful income in a city whose prices mimic those in the United States. Wal-Mart workers are instructed by the company not to reveal their salaries to strangers or reporters, she added. In San Miguel Allende, Croucher found a similar economic dynamic. "Mexicans will say, yes, there are more jobs in the service industry, but we shop in the same stores and pay the same prices,"

In the broader picture, a combination of high real estate prices but low property taxes could be depriving municipalities like Puerto Vallarta and San Miguel Allende of much-needed sources of extra revenue. Many foreign owners reside in their properties only part of the year and attempt to rent them out to other foreigners at other times, frequently demanding dollars that are then deposited in US banks. In a reversal of J. Ross Perot's NAFTA-induced "giant-sucking sound," it's a cash flow that trickles out of the local Mexican economy in ever greater amounts.

Of course, it's way early to assess all the cultural, economic, social and even political impacts of the gringo population boom in Mexico. In places like Puerto Vallarta, the trappings of culture-music, language, cuisine, social behavior, and even spatial ambience- are undergoing visible and audible transformations. In nightclubs, the music of Shakira easily mixes with the blues of Eric Clapton. On the streets, English words increasingly infiltrate signs and scream from billboards. Franchises of Hooter's, Wal-Mart, Burger King, McDonald's, and Dominos continue sprouting up everywhere.

Like Mexican immigrants who find familiar product brands and culturally-popular businesses like hair-styling salons in the barrios of El Norte, US immigrants in Nueva Gringolandia have ready access to services from home, whether through the Internet or on the ground. The ageless, rowdy boomers who tear down the roof every night at the tequila-soaked Andale! bar in Puerto Vallarta every, can then soothe their hang-over seared, aching muscles with a California-style massage the next day.

Stirring deeper, morsels of low culture and high culture swirl in the expanding stew. Reminiscent of upscale Southern California or Bay Area eateries, Alaskan crab legs, fusion cuisine and Asian flavors are now regular menu items. A hip new restaurant in Puerto Vallarta offers spicy duck quesadillas concocted with Oaxaca cheese, mushrooms and chile-Hoisin sauce.

A tense, uncertain cosmopolitanism is emerging on Mexico's West Coast. English, Spanish and Canadian French are frequently heard in the same social venue, while Mexican indigenous languages spoken by street vendors trying to hawk handicrafts or gum to the better-off foreigners are heard off to the side. Before too long, expect Chinese to be part of the regular linguistic fare. Unlike the hot button issue of Mexican flags in the US, displays of US, Canadian and Mexican flags wave together without raising major hackles in places like Zihuatanejo or Puerto Vallarta.

On the artistic and literary fronts, the newcomers are making their mark too.
Puerto Vallarta's spacious public library, which offers free Internet access, was built with the financial assistance of foreigners. English-language books are available for borrowers to take home. While it might be said that Mexico is suffering a "technical brain drain" because of the migration of many professional Mexicans to the United States, it might be stated too that the US is now beginning to suffer an "artistic brain drain" due to the flight of creative individuals. "I think there are a lot of wonderful writers, artists, intellectuals that are coming down," Puerto Vallarta long-timer Ken Grover celebrated.

Some lament what they regard as the contamination of Mexican culture by rampant consumerism imported from the United States. Credit cards are back in fashion in Mexico, and status symbols prevail. According to world "citizen" Denise, a money game goes on between Mexican nationals and migrants. "You get a lot of Americans here who think they can overrun Mexicans with money," she added, "but Mexicans aren't stupid. They'll charge them double for everything."

In comparison to the immigration debate-polarized US, Miami University's Sheila Croucher hasn't detected a nationalistic resentment in Mexico boiling up against the gringo migrants-at least until now. According to Croucher, natives of San Miguel Allende maintain that the gringo presence allows the town to economically survive. Intriguingly, Croucher has heard more put-downs against the newer arrivals voiced by longer-established gringos. "The idea," she mused, "that these newcomers are messing up 'our' authentic Mexican towns."

In a visit replete with ironies, symbolisms and stirring messages, Subcomandante Marcos of Mexico 's Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) came to Ciudad Juarez on the eve of the annual Days of the Dead celebrations. Arriving as part of the EZLN'S "Other Campaign", Marcos, who is also going by the name of Delegate Zero, met with local non-governmental organizations, indigenous groups, campesinos, students and US supporters of the Other Campaign, some of whom traveled all the way from New York to show the legendary EZLN spokesman a video about the struggles of migrant workers in the Big Apple.

Launched in the months following the publication of the EZLN's Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, the Other Campaign is one step of an effort to unite Mexico 's indigenous and popular movements into a big anti-capitalist left and transform the nation without recourse to arms or political parties.

After an initial round of meetings with farmer, neighborhood and urban indigenous groups, Marcos participated in a November 1 protest at the Stanton Street Bridge between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso , Texas . Temporarily shutting down the crossing with a symbolic barricade of fertilizer sacks and a small coffin, the demonstration expressed solidarity with the Popular Assembly of the Oaxacan People (APPO)-led movement against the state government of Oaxaca Gov. Ulises Ruiz, as well as protesting the 700 miles of new border fences planned by the Bush Administration.

"It's only a wall to kill our people, just like the wall of the river and the desert that assaults them...," Marcos charged. "Our friends cross only to work and not to do harm. In order to cross and work in the US , they're treated like they are terrorists." Quickly picking up on another theme, Marcos blasted the continued impunity surrounding the serial rape-murders of women in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua state. "We've also seen that there's no justice here in Ciudad Juarez . Young women are murdered without anyone ever knowing who the guilty ones were."

As Marcos was speaking, a US Customs and Border Protection agency helicopter flashing a big Department of Homeland Security insignia swooped low over the crowd, snapping pictures and stirring up dust in protestor's faces. Briefly drowning out the Zapatista subcomandante's words, Marcos responded with defiant words that challenged the legitimacy of the border as well as the US and Mexican governments. The occupants of the White House and Los Pinos will fall "one by one" predicted Marcos. As Delegate Zero was delivering his speech, fellow Zapatistas in Chiapas were shutting down state highways in support of the APPO.

Outfitted in his usual military uniform and mask, Marcos shared the microphone with retired teacher Ernesto Ontiveros, a member of the International Association Relatives and Friends of Disappeared Persons and the father of a missing soldier. Marcos, who led EZLN fighters into battle against Mexican soldiers during the 1994 indigenous Maya uprising in southern Chiapas state, spoke after Ontiveros told the story of his son, Lt. Victor Hugo Ontiveros, who has been missing for 10 years.

Eyewitnesses have told Ontiveros that his son was kidnapped by an armed commando and whisked away in Ciudad Juarez on September 2, 1996, never to return home. The young Ontiveros' disappearance was one of the first of the thousands of "levantones,” or forced disappearances, and murders tied to organized crime that have shaken Ciudad Juarez in recent years. Showing no let-up, in the week surrounding Marcos' visits alone, more than a dozen new kidnappings or gangland-style executions were reported in the local press.

Almost three presidents, numerous special prosecutors and wads of promises later, Ontiveros said he still has no peace of mind about what happened to his son. Grinning sarcastically, Ontiveros told Frontera NorteSur that the three most common words he keeps hearing from law enforcement officials are: "we're getting close."

After Marcos' short speech, hundreds of demonstrators marched through downtown Juarez , passing by camper unit 666 of the municipal police force. Marchers followed the Rio Bravo to the gates of the Alta Vista High School , where a second, impromptu protest was staged. Halted at the school's entrance, some demonstrators, members of the press and even high school students trying to enter the school grounds were told by a security team headed by a tattooed, shade-wearing man that they could not pass without an official Other Campaign badge, even though participants were told before the march that no credentials were necessary unless video footage was going to be recorded.

Fresh from a protest against walls and eager to hear Marcos, shouts of "fascist" and "they're putting a wall between us and Marcos" emanated from the increasingly agitated crowd. "This is a public school, you can't impede access," yelled Cipriana Jurado, the director of Ciudad Juarez 's Center for Research and Worker Solidarity group. After a round of chanting, the security men finally relented and let the people onto the school grounds, proving that the mass protest tactics promoted by Marcos and the Zapatistas do indeed work.

Located about 30 feet from the Mexico-US border, Alta Vista High School was an appropriate choice for the Other Campaign's meeting. Seeking shade from the rising fall sun, several students waiting to hear Marcos remarked how they liked the school because of its liberal arts orientation, emphasis on critical thinking and free-style dress code. But Alta Vista's student body has had a rough time this semester, according to the students. Hit by the past summer's floods, the school lost computers and thousands of books. Freudian, Marxian and literary classics were all destroyed, they reported. Starting classes several days late, students said they've had to cope without books and in-school access to computers.

Government pledges to replace the lost materials have yet to materialize, and low-income students must choose between eating lunch or spending 20 or 30 pesos in an Internet cafe to keep with assignments, said student Alejo La Rosa. "It's expensive. You don't eat that day," La Rosa quipped.

La Rosa said he and another student dipped into their own pockets in order to purchase a computer to brighten up the school atmosphere with music that's run out of the small in-house radio station operated by students. "This is our expression of gratitude to our school," he said. "We want this to be the best school. It's our school and we have to support it."

Inside the school, Marcos met privately with representatives of various non-governmental organizations from Mexico and the US , and he later heard a series of public presentations in the courtyard outside. Displayed in front of the meeting area were old black and white photos of young men and women, supposed "subversives" from Chihuahua state, who were picked up by Mexican security men during the 1970s Dirty War and whisked away into official oblivion, much like Lt. Victor Hugo Ontiveros was 20 years later.

Carefully taking notes while puffing away on his pipe, Marcos, a prolific poet and writer, heard emotional presentations from two women who recounted how they were victims of rape; a message appealing for action against femicide in Mexico from the imprisoned Colonel Aurora, or Gloria Arenas, of the Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent People (ERPI); denunciations of attempts to evict residents of the Lomas de Poleo colonia on Ciudad Juarez's outskirts, and the importance of culture in the "refoundation" of the border city.

Representing a rainbow of causes and sub-cultures, campesinos, colorfully-dressed indigenous Raramui women, dread-locked drummers, Chicano movement veteranos, academics, feminists, humble nuns, camera-heavy reporters, old braceros and young students all gathered around the Sup, as he is nicknamed.

Leftist literature sellers were present, and long-haired vendors hawking EZLN t-shirts not unlike the tie-dye merchants who used to follow around the Grateful Dead on concert tours did a respectable business. A new magazine, Ala Siniestra, put out by the University Left Committee of the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez was among the items available. Meanwhile, outside the school, agents from the Federal Preventive Police and other government agencies dutifully eyed the scene.

After the public meeting, Veronica Levya, the Ciudad Juarez representative of the Mexico Solidarity Network, commented that while it's still too early to assess the impact of events like the Other Campaign and the recently-held Border Social Forum, mass gatherings of the type have the benefit of bringing together disparate groups which are often too absorbed in their own day-to-day struggles.

The Other Campaign's Ciudad Juarez stop was just one jut in a long road trip that's taken Marcos and his supporters across Mexico . On the current leg of the tour, Marcos has visited indigenous groups, miners, fishermen and others in Baja California Norte and Sur , Sonora and Chihuahua . Mainstream print media coverage of the Other Campaign in Mexico has been extremely spotty, ranging from outright blackouts to brief, cursory mentions. Government reaction has been muted too, though one Ciudad Juarez news website quoted municipal government secretary Jorge Compean as calling Marcos "a clown." On the US side of the Paso del Norte region, the El Paso Times ran a couple of stories while the Albuquerque Journal featured the Stanton Street Bridge protest as its banner headline story in one of its November 2 editions.

In response to a call that "another world is possible without borders" about 1000 people gathered in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez , Chihuahua , from October 12-15, 2006 . Hailing from Mexico, the United States and other nations, representatives from immigrant rights, environmental justice, campesino, ex-bracero, Chicano, Native American, African American, Asian and Pacific Islander, left, and human rights organizations attended the first-ever Border Social Forum (BSF). A delegation from Cuba 's National Assembly also observed the events. BSF organizer Ruben Solis, coordinator of the San Antonio-based Center for Justice, said the event built on years of cross-border movements to "bring together all that's happened before in a new phase of development."

Kat Rodriguez, coordinator of the Tucson-based Human Rights Coalition, captured the concerns of many of the delegates at the meeting when she detailed migrant deaths in the dangerous border crossing zone between Arizona and Sonora . Rodriguez said her group has documented the deaths of 698 people in the Arizona-Sonora border region during the last three years alone. According to Rodriguez, 317 victims remain unidentified, with 17 remains so deteriorated that it is impossible "to know if they were male or female."

The human rights activist said stepped-up controls are confining previously frequent border crossers to "the golden cage" of the United States and encouraging more men to send for their families. "Another dynamic we've seen in the last three years is an increase in the deaths of women and children," Rodriguez said, adding that the death toll of border crossers has risen so greatly that last year Pima County was forced to rent a refrigerator truck to deposit bodies because the local medical examiner ran out of storage room.

Upwards of 4,000 migrants have died along the length of the entire US-Mexico border while trying to enter the United States without papers during the last 13 years, according to estimates from human rights organizations.

Contending that the failure of market-driven economic policies in Latin America to raise living standards and provide decent-paying jobs is spurring an increasingly fatal exodus from the South to the North, Rodriguez proposed the reexamination of the economic status quo. "I think the first thing we need is to demand a renegotiation of the free trade agreements, NAFTA and CAFTA" Rodriguez said. "Nobody asks why people are coming here."

During the Border Social Forum, hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets of Ciudad Juarez to protest the planned construction of new walls on the US side of the border, a project which activists contend will force more desperate migrants into hostile weather zones like the so-called "corridor of death" east of the Yuma Valley . Before one day, a rainbow suddenly bloomed from the stormy border skies over the marchers.

Blasting the project as the "Wall of Death," the protestors wound their way through the border city's downtown femicide zone where dozens of young women have vanished. Filing by the pink cross monument set up to honor femicide victims and distributing leaflets in memory of 22-year-old schoolteacher Edith Aranda Longoria, who disappeared in May 2005, the marchers partially closed the Santa Fe Bridge between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, Texas, before halting at the US borderline to hear short speeches delivered in support of immigrant workers and against prevailing economic policies.

Justice for veterans of the 1942-64 Bracero Program of Mexican guestworkers who worked in US fields and on railways was one prominent theme addressed at the BSF. Former bracero Filemon Ruiz Martinez, who labored in the sugar beet fields of Michigan in the late 1950s, recalled that he was paid "very little money" for lots of hard work. Early this year the Mexican Congress approved pay-outs to former braceros who had money withheld from their paychecks by the Mexican government decades ago for a supposed savings account. While some ex-braceros received payments of about $3,700 dollars this year, many others like Ruiz complain that they are still waiting for their money. "We understand that they gave 125 ex-braceros in Chihuahua their money, but they have given us absolutely nothing," Ruiz said.

Helping kick-off the BSF was a "reality tour" of Ciudad Juarez neighborhoods and industrial sites. Former maquiladora plant worker and tour guide Veronica Leyva of the Mexico Solidarity Network led two bus loads of visitors through the dusty and flood-prone streets of the Felipe Angeles, Anapra and Lomas de Poleo colonias. Situated in the high desert where company buses transport workers back and forth to the factories far below in the city, Lomas de Poleo is the focus of a land ownership dispute between long-time residents and members of the prominent Zaragoza family. The once-marginal shantytown is now a potentially lucrative parcel of real estate abutting the zone where the state governments of Chihuahua and New Mexico plan the new binational-border city of San Jeronimo-Santa Teresa .

Monitored by two guard towers that rise above the desert shrub, as well as the vigilance of two municipal policemen parked in patrol cars nearby, dozens of visitors listened to two residents accuse authorities of permitting a campaign of violence and intimidation against them to proceed unimpeded. Residents charge that the land conflict is behind house burnings and three deaths in Lomas de Poleo during the last two years, including the deaths of two young children in a mysterious fire. Displaying gunshot wounds, one young man said his friend Luis Alberto Guerrero was killed and another companion wounded in a confrontation last year with alleged Zaragoza gunmen. "The people who were responsible for this act are roaming free," he charged. "The law doesn't do anything."

In the 1990s, Lomas de Poleo gained international notoriety as one of the clandestine cemeteries where the multiple bodies of young female murder victims were discovered. Of the eight crosses erected in honor of the murder victims, only two were visible by the time of the 2006 BSF. One of the remaining crosses was defaced by gang-related graffiti.

Rambling out of the rough hills and back into the glitzy flatlands, the tour buses followed the long commute that maquiladora workers from Lomas de Poleo endure each day as they clock in another shift on the global assembly line. In contrast to the rustic living conditions they witnessed in Ciudad Juarez 's colonias, the BSF delegates also saw the newly redone Paseo del Triunfo de la Republica boulevard that whisks traffic pass the US fast food franchises, strip malls and trendy bars and cafes which define the other Ciudad Juarez . Halting in front of the Antonio J. Bermudez Industrial Park , tour guide Leyva compared the bustling side of her city with the forgotten one, and explained the wages and working conditions she said many maquiladora employees are forced to accept.

"It's important for you to see the channeling of economic resources by the government to the big industries, big capital. This channeling of resources has not permitted the development of the popular colonias," Leyva affirmed. "I don't know if you've noticed that we've passed through big avenues that are well maintained and preserved," Leyva continued. "It's not a coincidence that these avenues have been solely constructed for the purpose of linking together the 18 industrial parks of the city so commerce flows freely to the international bridges."

Yvonne Stratford and Gerda Graham closely paid attention to the tour scenes. The two women belong to Low Income Families Fighting Together, a non-governmental organization struggling to preserve low-income housing in Miami 's African American community of Liberty City . Appalled at the conditions in Ciudad Juarez 's colonias, Stratford and Graham stressed the need for people to organize. "Don't think (anybody) is going to give it to you," Stratford remarked. "You got to go out there and fight for it."

Convened just weeks after summer flooding provoked widespread destruction in Ciudad Juarez , the BSF featured one session in which residents of the Luis Olague colonia and other poor neighborhoods reiterated their complaints about uncertain relocation plans; the theft of flood relief aid; inadequate official support for reconstruction, and the spending of public money on monuments instead of flood control. Some explained how they now suffer anxiety attacks every time the skies thunder and the rain starts dropping.

Although the 2006 floods in Ciudad Juarez were especially bad, this year wasn't the first time colonia residents have experienced disaster from the rains. Elizabeth Flores, the director of Pastoral Obrera, a Catholic Church affiliated worker advocacy organization that assists flood victims, framed the disaster issue as ultimately one of human rights. "(Flooding damage) wasn't unpredictable, " Flores contended. "It was a lack of respect for the human rights of all residents of the city not to invest..."

Flood victims reported an additional problem that emerged after the deluge: the spread of health-threatening molds inside homes and stagnant water pools on the streets outside that provide prime mosquito-breeding grounds. "We cleaned and disinfected," shrugged Luis Olague resident Maria de Jesus Avila . "But what are we going to do?"

After hearing from grassroots groups, the BSF participants issued a statement that called for sweeping changes in economic, immigration, justice, environmental, gender, and security policies on both sides of the border. Comparing the fate of Louisiana flood victims in 2005 to those in Ciudad Juarez a year later, the statement denounced what it called "the classism and racism" of the authorities' "late, timid and limited" response to the flooding disasters in the United States and Mexico.

Denouncing border walls from the US-Mexico frontier to Palestine-Israel, Border Social Forum attendees expressed solidarity with the Oaxaca strikers, Pasta de Conchos mine disaster victims' families ex-braceros, and 5 Cuban prisoners currently held in the United States . They also called for an international group of observers to be present at Ciudad Juarez's embattled Lomas de Poleo colonia in order to "guarantee protection and security" for residents.

A central demand of organizers was to remove agriculture from world free trade agreements and that basic grains in Mexico be exempted from the tariff tear-down scheduled in the North American Free Trade Agreement for 2008. Picking up on last spring's immigrant worker strike and boycott in the United States , support for a similar action planned for May 1, 2007 was declared.

Organizers of the BSF came from many different groups in Mexico and the United States , including the Southwest Workers Union, Border Agricultural Workers Union, Pastoral Obrera, Cetlac, Southwest Organizing Project, Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, Democratic Farmers Front of Chihuahua, Grassroots Global Justice, Farm Labor Organizing Committee, and CISO, among many others.

Modeled after the World Social Forum initiated in Porte Alegre Brazil in 2001, the BSF is a prelude to the first US Social Forum scheduled for 2007 in Atlanta , Georgia . Tens of thousands of people have attended the world and regional social forums. Veterans of the Ciudad Juarez gathering plan to take their movement to upcoming regional and international social forums, as well as to other events like the 2007 Border Governor's Conference in Nogales, Sonora, where an "alternative border people's summit" will be held.

Organizer Ruben Solis said that participating social organizations will likewise attend big NGO meetings slated for Puerto Rico , Venezuela and Bolivia in the coming months. One important achievement of the Ciudad Juarez meeting, Solis said, was a call to organize a Mexican farmer's social forum in Chihuahua , Mexico . At the same time, plans are in the works to create an alternative border media network. In terms of developing solutions, Solis credited the Ciudad Juarez event for putting a wide array of social movements on the path of "convergence." instead of "competition." "(The BSF) carried out what we intended in terms of creating convergence between the movements," he said. "It has a multiplying effect, it's very positive."

In the balmy winds of late March, a bare lawn at the New Mexico State University campus in Las Cruces was transformed into a field of hundreds of pink crosses. Adorned with handmade clothing and pictures to symbolize the murdered women of Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua, Mexico, the crosses were put up by community members and organizers of the Las Cruces-based Friends of Juarez Women as a kick-off to the three-day J. Paul Taylor Symposium on Social Justice convened to promote justice for the more than 500 women and girls murdered or disappeared in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City since 1993.

The event came at a strategic crossroads in the justice movement: While the Chihuahua State Attorney General's Office (PJGE), long charged with investigating the killings, is paying more attention to murders related to domestic violence and assisting in efforts to locate some missing women and identify the remains of unidentified corpses, impunity reigns in the cases of scores of raped and slain women.

“It's true there are 177 guilty sentences for the nearly 400 murders,” said Guadalupe Morfin, the head of the federal Commission for the Prevention and Elimination of Violence Against Women in Ciudad Juarez, “but there is still a layer of impunity in emblematic cases like the cotton field case.”

Choking back tears, Ciudad Juarez resident Malu Garcia told a crowd of hundreds gathered in a university auditorium how her then-four-year-old daughter was watching cartoons on television one day in 2001 only to see the corpse of the child's beloved 17-year-old aunt, Lilia Alejandra Garcia, suddenly flashed on the screen. The teenager had been brutally tortured, raped and strangled. According to Malu Garcia, the little girl suffered an emotional shock. Garcia contended that valuable evidence was lost in her sister's case, despite FBI-generated leads. Subsequently, she said a suspect personally warned her to shut up or suffer a similar fate as her sister.

"I am always going to stand up, not just because of Alejandra or because I have a daughter," Garcia vowed, "but because I am a woman and as a woman it pains me all that those women who have suffered, and I don't want this to continue happening in my country..."

Sadness, frustration and determination fill the voices of family members of murdered and missing women who have spent years struggling to find justice for their loved ones. Sacrificing normal lives, many report threats from anonymous intimidators. Denied justice, some family members and their supporters now seek legal redress in international forums. In frequently emotional testimonies, family members and women's advocates spoke in Las Cruces about lines of investigation that implicate members of law enforcement, organized crime and the business community.

Waving a paper, Eva Arce said she is confident that the recent decision of the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States to accept the case of her long disappeared daughter, Silvia Arce, is a step forward in her struggle. A jewelry and food saleswoman, Arce's daughter vanished in March 1998 along with a friend, Griselda Mares.

Undertaking an exhaustive investigation, Eva Arce pinpointed three officers of the former Federal Judicial Police as the likely culprits in the disappearances. Arce said she later tracked one of the men to a jail in Veracruz state, but the suspect has not been charged in the disappearance of Silvia. The IACHR is likely to issue non-binding recommendations to Mexican authorities in the Arce case, which could then move to the Inter-American Court for Human Rights if officials do not follow the recommendations. Rulings from the Inter-American Court are obligatory for member states like Mexico .

Arizona State University Professor William Simmons urged relatives to consider using an old US law, the Alien Tort Claims Act, as a tool of justice. The law allows foreign nationals to sue officials from their own countries in US federal courts for violations of the law of nations or US treaties. The act has been successfully used in the United States against officials from Paraguay and other countries.

Focusing on the torture suffered by women like Lilia Alejandra Garcia, Professor Simmons said the Mexican government is complicit in sanctioning an internationally-prohibited practice by failing to conduct proper investigations. "So I believe there could be a case in federal courts under the Alien Tort Claims Act," he added.

In the Mexican court system, the parents of Minerva Torres, an 18-year-old resident of Chihuahua City who disappeared in 2001 and was found dead in 2003, is pursuing criminal charges against former Governor Patricio Martinez, ex-State Attorney General Jesus "Chito" Solis and other officials for concealing their daughter's body. For two years, Torres' corpse was stored in state police headquarters without notifying the victim's family.

Torres' body was discovered in July 2003 on the Cuernos de la Luna mountain near state police headquarters, only feet away from the spot where another rape murder victim, Neyra Azucena Cervantes, was recovered two days earlier. Along with Cervantes and Torres, the bodies of 16-year-old Paloma Angelica Escobar and another unidentified victim were found at separate times in the same burial ground. At least three of the victims had attended private computer schools in Chihuahua City . “Like in Ciudad Juarez , we're talking about a clandestine cemetery,” said attorney Lucha Castro of the Human Rights Center.

Filed months ago, the case against Martinez and company is currently in the Chihuahua justice system, but the two former, high-level officials have yet to render their testimonies, according to Minerva's father, Francisco Torres. “It seems to me, there is no political will to try the ex-governor,” contended Castro.

Former prisoners, state officials and even Commissioner Morfin deplored the use of torture to fabricate murder cases against innocent people, including David Meza, imprisoned for almost three years for the murder of his cousin, Neyra Azucena Cervantes. Leading off the round of denunciations were Cynthia Kiecker and Ulises Perzabal, who were tortured by members of the old Chihuahua State Judicial Police and falsely accused of the 2003 murder of 16-year-old Viviana Rayas in Chihuahua City .

US citizen Kiecker described how the musician-artist couple eventually settled in Chihuahua City , participated in marches against the disappearances of women and hanged a banner in protest of the Iraq war. One evening in 2003, their lives were forever disrupted when heavily armed Chihuahua state policemen burst into the couple's home and dragged them off to torture sessions in the old state police academy. "Like we were guerrillas," Perzabal said.

Charged with Rayas' murder, Kiecker and Perzabal were held in prison for 18 months, suffering the razing of their business before a judge declared them innocent. Quickly, the couple relocated to the United States in fear of their lives. "We lost everything we had in Chihuahua : the house, the store we had..," Kiecker said. In riveting fashion, Perzabal demanded the immediate freedom of David Meza, whom the couple met in prison, and the end of torture in Mexico and the world.

Last summer, the PGJE and the Office of the Federal Attorney General sent personnel to the United States to conduct tests on Kiecker and Perzabal in order to document the couple's tortures under the provisions of the Istanbul Protocol, an international agreement meant to document and punish torture. Almost one year later, the couple hasn't seen the results of the tests, according to Kiecker.

Oscar Maynez, a former PGJE criminologist who resigned over a 2001 serial-murder case, warned that new, sophisticated forms of torture are emerging. Citing the case of a 2004 Chihuahua man who was arrested for murdering a woman, Maynez contended that officers planted semen and hair at the crime scene to implicate the suspect. "It shows how the training, instead of pushing for a more scientific investigation, is just making the torture more sophisticated," Maynez said.

Commissioner Morfin said the frame-up of innocents not only victimizes the wrongly-accused suspects, but represents a “latent danger” for women exposed to killers still on the loose.

One authoritative voice who was scheduled to speak in Las Cruces was noticeably absent from the symposium: lawyer Sergio Dante Almaraz, the attorney for Victor Garcia Uribe, one of two bus drivers arrested for the murders of 8 women found in a Ciudad Juarez cotton field in 2001. Garcia, who was tortured into rendering a false confession for the murders, was eventually acquitted of the crimes and released from prison last year. Almaraz, however, was gunned down last January 26 in broad daylight in downtown Ciudad Juarez . At the time of his murder, Almaraz headed up the Convergencia political party in Chihuahua state, a member of the opposition coalition running Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador for president.

Miguel Almaraz, Dante's brother, charged in an interview with Frontera NorteSur that both he and his brother were threatened by Chihuahua state law enforcement officials just days prior to Dante's murder. Ciudad Juarez lawyers demanding clarification of the murder have since been threatened, according to Ciudad Juarez television news reports.

Still, Almaraz's voice rang out clear when a videotaped interview was presented. In the videotape, Almaraz contended that the bodies of the 8 women showed signs of being refrigerated until they were dumped in the cotton field. Large, somewhat isolated ranches on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez owned by former policemen and wealthy individuals boast walk-in coolers, Almaraz said.

If justice has been elusive for known murder victims, it has been next to impossible for unidentified women found killed in both Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City . Victims' advocates are now trying to put names on the nameless. In 2004, non-governmental organizations were able to bring the world-recognized Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) onto the scene. Founded in 1984 and composed of expert anthropologists and forensic specialists, the team has worked in 30 different nations identifying victims of dirty wars and civil conflicts.

In 2005, an agreement was reached between the EAAF and the PGJE to allow the team to work on identifying the remains of unknown female murder victims in Chihuahua state. Working with what it thought was an initial set of 60 separate remains from Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City , the team reduced the number to 55 because specialists determined that body parts had been mixed together in some instances. According to team co-founder Mercedes Doretti, the work has so far resulted in the identification of 19 victims. DNA samples drawn by the team are being processed by the Bole Technology Group in Virginia, the company which worked on identifying the 9-11 victims.

The forensic team's work hasn't been easy. In addition to mish-mashes, body parts have been misplaced and files hidden from investigators. Doretti said the team earlier projected staying in Ciudad Juarez an additional two or three months this year, but is now unsure of the timeline because of the revelation that mass graves were used to bury unidentified women until as late as last year, not just until 1995 as had been earlier reported to the Argentines. Doretti said the EAAF will cast a broad investigative net to determine victims' identities, searching for leads in regions of Mexico and the US Southwest known to be the home bases or destinations of many border migrants.

Doretti said her team's request for 10 missing files prompted the intervention of the PGJE's internal affairs division, which located the records, reportedly archived in the same PGJE department once headed by fugitive Hector Armando Lastra. The former head of preliminary investigations for the PGJE in Ciudad Juarez , Lastra is wanted for running a prostitution ring of underage teenagers who shared the profile of previous rape-murder victims.

In February 2004, Commissioner Morfin's office helped one of the minors file a legal complaint against Lastra with the PGJE's Office of the Special Prosecutor for Women's Homicides in Ciudad Juarez , then headed by Angela Talavera. In 2004, Talavera was named by Maria Lopez Urbina, the ex-federal special prosecutor for women's homicides, as among of scores of former and current PGJE officials allegedly responsible for derelictions of duty. According to press accounts, Chihuahua state judges Catalina Ruiz Pacheco and Armando Jimenez Santoyo later cleared Talavera of any legal wrong-doing.

Evading justice, the Lastra ring catered to a network of "powerful individuals" and businessmen,” according to Commissioner Morfin . "We continue demanding a thorough investigation of this case,” she said.

Meanwhile, families and supporters of the women's justice movement are moving forward with a variety of campaigns. They include promoting post-card campaigns to President Vicente Fox; urging the full passage of the US Congressional resolutions jointly sponsored by Rep. Hilda Solis (D-California) and Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) that request the placement of the women's murders on the official US-Mexico binational agenda, and following up on the New Mexico Senate memorial approved in support of the women of Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City last year.

Kristel Mucino, the Mexico program assistant for the non-profit Washington Office on Latin America , said both the Mexican and US governments must redouble their efforts to curb the violence against women. Mucino recalled how one woman stood up during the symposium to point out how a binational commission between the US and Mexico exists to investigate stolen cars, but nothing similar exists for the women's issue.

"Everybody wanted more US involvement," Mucino said. "(Victims' relatives) distrust the Mexican government so much, they want more US involvement." The Latin American women's advocate added that " Mexico needs to keep investigating the murders.. and hold accountable those in government to investigate and prosecute these cases."

Editors Note: Rising above the U.S.-Mexico border, the towering chimneys of the American Smelting and Refining Company (Asarco) are one of the defining landmarks of the El Paso-Ciudad Juarez-southern New Mexico border. When world copper prices nosedived in 1999, Asarco temporarily ceased its operations. Now a company proposal to renew its Texas state air quality permit and restart production is kindling controversy. The battle, which is shaping up to be the biggest cross-border environmental fight in the region since the movement against the proposed Sierra Blanca nuclear waste dump in the 1990s, is also refocusing attention on decades of alleged pollution left behind by Asarco in the three-state border zone of Texas, Chihuahua and New Mexico, including lead and arsenic contamination. Frontera NorteSur will provide regular coverage of the ongoing Asarco controversy, including these feature articles that examine the issue of lead and heavy metals contamination.

Youngster Natalie Rubalcava used to marvel at the towering, candy cane-like chimneys that rise over the idled American Smelting and Refining Company (Asarco) plant in El Paso, Texas, about two miles from her home in Anapra, New Mexico. Not any more. Leafing through old maps and photos of the old lead and copper smelter when it emitted a visible, dark cloud from the smokestacks, it’s evident the middle-school student has done her homework about the company, lead and environmental hazards to her community.

“Everyone is upset about this company,” says Natalie. “When I found out, I was upset with this company, because I never thought that because of them, we could be contaminated.” Especially vulnerable, children can suffer impairments to their cognitive development if they are exposed to excessive amounts of lead. Together with other youth and adults, Natalie is part of an Anapra community organization, La Casita, which is demanding that Asarco’s full impact on their community be disclosed and dealt with once and for all. On the border where Texas, Chihuahua and New Mexico touch noses, Anapra is an overwhelmingly low-income, Chicano-Mexican immigrant community of about 1,200 people that forms part of the municipality of Sunland Park. Fourth-generation Anapra resident Angela Saenz says nobody ever informed her about what might be coming out of Asarco’s tall stacks. “Everything was kept from us,” she recalls. “Now I come to think about it, every time I would pass through the Asarco company I would get this like really harsh taste in my throat and I would hold my breath.”

Asarco spokespersons claim their company is not responsible for any potential contamination, blaming instead the use of arsenic-containing pesticides, lead-based home paint and smelter-waste materials used in two nearby, privately-owned crushing operations.

Retired Texas attorney Taylor Moore, who advises La Casita members, considers Anapra to be a textbook case of environmental racism. A passionate man, Moore doesn’t mince words when it comes to Asarco, New Mexico health authorities and federal and state environmental officials. He contends that the authorities have systemically concealed Asarco’s pollution for decades. As proof, Moore whips out newspaper articles from 1982 which reported that New Mexico environmental officials had identified Anapra as having the highest levels of lead emissions in the air of any New Mexican community.

Despite the findings, Moore says no systematic blood level tests of lead were conducted of the residents, nor were soil and dust tests of homes carried out. A 1999 environmental lead study of communities in northern Chihuahua and southern New Mexico by the Border Health Office (BHO) of the New Mexico Department of Health excluded Anapra, and residents complain that they were likewise ignored in a 1997 study done by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a sister organization of the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Tired of what they charge is official foot-dragging, Moore and members of La Casita recently took their own blood samples. Supported by members of the El Paso branch of the Sierra Club, they obtained 40 sample kits from a private lab based in Minnesota and went to work. On a recent day, dozens of giggling-and sometimes crying-children crammed into the sweltering front room of La Casita, where nurses pricked their arms to draw blood and sent the samples off to be checked by an El Paso doctor. “I feel very satisfied that justice has been done, and finally we’ve been taken into account with these kinds of tests,” says middle school student and La Casita activist Blanca Ortega.

“We have at our own expense attempted to try to find out whether these kids have lead in their blood,” adds Moore. “They need to be tested for every heavy metal Asarco emitted.” Thomas Ruiz, an epidemiologist with the Border Health Office (BHO) of the New Mexico Department of Health, says his agency wants to know too whether or not Anapra’s children and other residents have high amounts of lead in their blood. Ruiz says anecdotal accounts about previous blood sampling he heard from a longtime area doctor did not raise any alarm bells, but that his agency needs to know more.

The BHO plans to conduct two studies beginning in June to test for lead in the soil of Anapra and in the blood of its residents. A separately-funded BHO study of urine samples from 14 Anapra and Sunland Park residents began last March, the first phase of urine sampling planned for as many as 50 people, but the initial results still have not been reported, says Ruiz. Working with Sunland Park’s La Clinica de Familia, nurses and doctors plan to fan out in Anapra for two or three Saturdays in June to draw blood samples from up to 200 children. “We’re going to see if there are high levels of lead in the blood of kids in Sunland Park,” says Ruiz. While previous United States Environmental Protection Agency studies revealed high amounts of lead in soil around Mt. Cristo Rey at Anapra’s doorstep, Ruiz concurs with residents that dirt immediately outside private homes remains to be tested. He says his office wants to test the soils of 100 homes. “We know that (Asarco) has existed for many years,” adds Ruiz, “and with the studies we’ve done we’re analyzing if there are problems.”

Some residents, however, don’t want personnel from the BHO sampling in their community. A new group, Anapra Moms Against Asarco, is calling for independent testing of their children. According to a statement from the organization, “Anapra mothers have no confidence that Border Health and the institutions supporting them will fairly test now, after Border Health ignored the children and Anapra for over twenty years.”

Ruiz says he expects the results from the planned BHO soil and blood sampling in Anapra to be available later in the summer.

Built just across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juarez and almost smack dab against the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), Asarco is blamed by environmentalists for the high amounts of lead and arsenic which have been detected on neighboring properties. For more than a century, from 1887 to 1999, the smelter processed lead, cadmium, zinc and copper and employed up to 25,000 workers. Operating through world wars, political revolutions, presidencies, and technological changes ranging from the introduction of the telephone to the high-speed internet, the plant showered tens of thousands of tons of emissions of the substances onto nearby communities. From 1968 to 1971 alone, the smelter belched 1116 tons of lead, 560 tons of zinc, 12 tons of cadmium, and 1.2 tons of arsenic into the atmosphere, according to the El Paso City-County Health Office. Those were the days when travelers pulling into El Paso from the west would be greeted by the sight of billowing, blackish clouds drifting from Asarco and blanketing the border. Welcome to the Paso del Norte.

By the dawn of the first Earth Day, El Paso officials and residents decided something had to change. In 1972 Texas authorities shut down El Paso’s historic Smeltertown colonia, a neighborhood settled by Asarco workers, after high levels of lead were found in the blood of the settlement's children. Ruling on a legal dispute between Asarco and local and state authorities in the same year, a Texas state judge ordered the company to install a new sulfuric acid plant and pollution control equipment valued at approximately $20 million dollars, conduct air quality monitoring, and provide medical services to children in Smeltertown and Old Fort Bliss for a 30-month period. The judge enjoined Asarco from emitting any heavy metals “as to be injurious to human health, animal life or vegetation.”

In 1985 Asarco ceased processing lead, focused its business on copper and subsequently outfitted the plant with updated pollution-control technology costing almost $100 million dollars. Nowadays, Asarco officials are quick to point out that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) selected the plant as a pollution-control model under the Clean Air Act’s toxics control program. “If you want to smelter in the country, you have to model after us, boasts Lairy Johnson, the El Paso environmental manager for Asarco. In 1999 Asarco was purchased by the Mexico City based-Grupo Mexico, one of the world’s largest mineral resource companies. Blaming low copper prices, the company idled the plant the same year.

But troubling reports indicated that contamination connected to Asarco’s past operations persisted in the environment. In 2001, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sampled five sites at the UTEP campus and found lead ranging from 428 parts per million (ppm) to 2,000 ppm. Quoted in the El Paso Times, Texas State Senator Eliot Shapleigh, who represents the district near Asarco, said sources claimed other samples taken from UTEP detected as much as 10,000 ppm of lead. Arsenic, which has been linked to cancer, was detected in samples ranging from 34.8 ppm to 138 ppm, according to the El Paso Times.

Beginning in 2002, the EPA began a clean-up program of hundreds of homes with high lead levels near Asarco, though hundreds of other properties remained to be tested. Sen. Shapleigh has waged a so-far unsuccessful battle to obtain Superfund status for the Asarco site, a designation which would net greater federal aid for a clean-up that’s likely to run into tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars. His position is opposed by El Paso’s lameduck mayor and city council, who recently agreed to file suit against Asarco to force the company to directly pay for remediation costs.

Meanwhile, a lead exposure study by the Texas Department of Health examined 37, 795 El Paso children between 1997 to 2002 and found elevated lead levels (above 10 micrograms per deciliter) in the blood of 463 of the study’s subjects, with higher lead levels corresponding to children residing closer to the Asarco plant. Lead poisoning has been long linked to development difficulties in children.

Spurred by the lead discoveries, as well as Asarco’s application to renew its air quality permit and restart the refinery, new homeowner, community and UTEP student groups took to the streets. Sometimes in the hundreds, they have marched, rallied and petitioned during the last two years demanding that the lead and other contaminants be cleaned up and Asarco not be allowed to reopen. A recent poll of El Paso voters conducted jointly by the El Paso Times-KVIA-ABC television tallied 48 percent of the respondents as opposing Asarco’s reopening and 42 percent as favoring it. Supporters cited additional jobs as the main reason for their posture. Ten percent of the polled voters were undecided.

Asarco spokespersons deny their company is responsible for the contamination in adjacent zones, blaming instead the use of arsenic-containing pesticides, lead-based home paint and smelter-waste materials used in two nearby, privately-owned crushing operations. Their argument received some support in a 2004 paper presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. Authored by Dr. Nicholas Pingitore, Dr. Maria Amaya and others, the paper noted that previous researchers and the EPA considered Asarco to be the culprit of heavy metals contamination in El Paso, but cited other reasons the core area near Asarco could be laden with high amounts of lead, including the prior use of unleaded gasoline and old, vintage homes brightened with lead paint. According to Pingitore and associates, the various factors “confound one’s ability to distinguish the relative contributions of Pb from the smelter point source and from the local areal sources.”

Doctors Amaya and Pingitore are associated with a six-year, $1.7 million-dollar National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences-funded study of lead exposure in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. Although the authors presented preliminary, general findings about El Paso at the 2004 American Chemical Society meeting (which also showed higher lead findings on blocks closer to the smelter), they did not do the same for Ciudad Juarez. Phone calls seeking comment from Dr. Amaya, lead investigator for the project, were not returned.

In Ciudad Juarez, questions prevail about the true impact of Asarco’s historic operations. The working-class neighborhoods of Bellavista, Altavista, Ladrillera, Cazardores, Felipe Angeles, and Puerto Anapra are within close proximity to the old smelter by the river. A recent report by Mexico's Attorney General for Environmental Protection (Profepa) stated that lead levels in Juarez neighborhoods near Asarco did not exceed permissible amounts, but the results drew more questions than answers . "How come in Juarez Profepa can say there is no lead?" questions Marianna Chew, an organizer with the Sierra Club's Beyond the Borders program in Juarez-El Paso. "Just a few meters (El Paso) from where they found lead. It's illogical-scientifically, socially and politically."

Indeed, the Profepa study contradicted an earlier Mexican study, which just like the Smeltertown probe, also detected high levels of lead close to Asarco and in the blood of children aged one to nine years old living in neighborhoods close to the plant. The 1974 study for the federal Sub-Secretary for Environmental Improvement (SMA) and the Chihuahua Coordinated Public Health Services showed elevated lead levels in the blood of more than half the children living within one mile of Asarco and in about 14 percent of children residing up to 2.5 miles from the plant. The study also found high amounts of lead in household dust sampled at residences closest to the plant, averaging 1,322 ppm, while lead samples in the soils of homes nearest the smelter averaged 492 ppm.

Covering 704 families and 752 children, the study estimated that the health of as many as 8,000 children could have been adversely impacted by Asarco. Notably, the SMA-Chihuahua study was performed almost 11 years before Asarco ceased processing lead, and before many new residents arrived to a border city undergoing an economic and population boom. Completed more than three decades ago, the report has been gathering the proverbial dust ever since.

The Sierra Club’s Chew has been meeting with Ciudad Juarez residents and activists to put Asarco back on the burner. Chew says she faces an uphill task of informing a new generation about the company’s history. “People have been there for 5 or 6 years,” says Chew. “They don’t know what Asarco means, so we have to educate them.”

Decades ago, however, it was a different story. In 1976 elections, the opposition National Action Party (PAN) raised Asarco in its campaign, demanding that the company accord the same treatment to Juarez residents as it did to those of Smeltertown . Namely, the Panistas wanted Asarco to pay for the cost of evacuating residents nearest the smelter, and the government to prohibit residential development in zones likely to be affected by Asarco’s fumes.

In December 1977 Juarez PAN leaders reiterated the demands in a letter to SMA Delegate Guillermo Quijas Cruz, requesting that a binational U.S.-Mexico commission be set up tackle the Asarco issue. Invoking the names of “8,000 Juarez children,” the letter contended that Asarco “isn’t a political problem, but a grave social problem that requires the intervention of all Juarez residents.”

None of the PAN’s proposals were translated into public policy, even under subsequent PAN municipal and state administrations. Instead of staying away, many new Juarez residents settled in the neighborhoods close to Asarco. Few probably knew about the 1974 study. Unlike El Paso, where the EPA is cleaning up homes near the smelter, no remediation efforts are underway in Juarez. Alberto Torres, a former mayor pro-temp of Juarez and a signatory of the 1977 letter to the SMA, says efforts to get action were stymied by “power structures” in the U.S. and Mexico. As government faltered, some turned to the courts.

In 1981, Texas lawyers filed a class action civil lawsuit against Asarco on behalf of Ciudad Juarez residents in El Paso’s U.S. District Court. The plantiffs in the case, Ontiveros vs. Asarco, included the family of a child whose death was blamed on toxic poisoning from the plant. The plantiffs’ lawyers used a novel argument in the case, accusing the smelting firm of trespassing on their clients’ well-being by emitting heavy metals that fell to earth and provoked “physical and mental pain.” The plantiffs requested no less than $10,000 dollars each in compensation, but settled out of court for an unspecified sum.

Asarco’s battle with one group of Ciudad Juarez residents was over, and the bigger problems pertaining to the company’s possible, wider impact on the city’s environment were not flushed out in public. Largely forgotten, the old smelter controversy briefly simmered again in 1992 when Alberto Torres’ daughter, Clara Torres, wrote the Texas Air Control Board about Asarco’s pending air quality permit. Protesting the fumes, she contended that no soil and air samples had been taken and no lead levels in blood checked on the Juarez side. “Air has no ownership and boundaries,” noted Torres. In the 21^st Century, Asarco is once again an issue in Juarez. Cipriana Jurado, the director of the Worker Solidarity Research Center and the Juarez representative for the Southwest Network of Environmental and Economic Justice, says she wants more medical studies and remediation programs in affected neighborhoods. “(Asarco) should clean them up, because they are ones who caused the pollution,” contends Jurado.

Lairy Johnson, who has worked as Asarco’s environmental manager for more than five years, says no Mexican government agencies have made any formal demands for Asarco to help pay for or clean up the company’s alleged pollution. The environmental manager says Asarco is frustrated by such accusations at a time when it is trying to be a good corporate citizen and help boost the border economy. “It’s kind of disheartening when we live in one of the poorest areas of the country,” he says. According to Johnson, a restarted El Paso plant would provide up to 400 jobs and generate $300 million dollars annually to the border economy.

However, a growing number of Juarez residents want Asarco to remain inactive, and some plan to participate in the public trial scheduled for July 11 in El Paso to decide whether or not Asarco’s air quality permit will be renewed. Hundreds of signatures have been gathered on a Juarez petition that calls for Asarco to not reopen. “It’s important that the Mexican people are mobilizing” muses Alberto Torres. “I think (Asarco) should never open again. They’ve been here for 100 years and have been polluting both sides of the border.”

Mexico's Sierra Madres are the stuff of legend. Rising high from north to south, the mountains have been the scene of mining fever, epic railroad building, armed uprisings, foreign invasions, narco-cultivation galore, and much more. They likewise have been the stage of widespread struggles over the environmental sustainability of timber harvesting. The issue has gained such importance in Mexico that a popular soap opera broadcast on Televisa in 2004, Mujer de Madera, had as one its central plot themes the fight against illegal timber and animal trafficking. And this year, June 28 marks the 10th anniversary of the Aguas Blancas Massacre in Guerrero state, an incident in which 17 unarmed farmers were gunned down by state police in part due to the campesinos' protests against logging in the mountains near Acapulco.

Since 2000, two Mexican forest activists who supporters say were imprisoned on trumped-up charges to curtail their activism have won the Goldman Environmental Award. They are Rodolfo Montiel of Guerrero state and Tarahumara activist Isidro Baldenegro of Chihuahua state. Both men were released from jail after broad international campaigns on their behalf. But forest activists charge that repression and violence have not ceased. In this feature article, FNS portrays the case of Felipe Arreaga Sanchez, a co-founder along with Rodolfo Montiel and others of the Campesino Environmentalist Organization of Petatlan and Coyuca de Catatlan in Guerrero, who was arrested and imprisoned last year on murder charges. Arreaga has been since named a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty Interational. On a recent visit to Mexico, the Sierra Club's Stephen Mills compared the Guerrero campesino to Kenyan green belt activist Wangari Maathai, the winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize.

Clutching his three-year old granddaughter Dayra Itzel, Felipe Arreaga Sanchez speaks about the destruction of the environment in the noisy visitor's courtyard of the Zihuatanejo jail. While an evangelical Christian group blares redemption songs and invokes brown-uniformed prisoners to praise the Lord through a sound-system that almost rattles the bars, Arreaga strains his words to recount episodes of the long-struggle against forest exploitation in the southern state of Guerrero which he says landed him behind bars on a murder charge.

The former secretary of the Campesino Environmentalist Organization of Petatlan and Coyuca de Catatlan (OCESP) was one of the principal founders of a movement that gained international recognition in the late 1990s when its members stopped logging trucks from delivering timber to a Mexican Pacific coastal mill operated at the time by the Boise Cascade Corporation. The protesting small farmers charged contractors for the United States-based company were overcutting the forest and drying up water sources.

In November 2004, Arreaga was arrested by Guerrero state police and charged with the 1998 murder of 15-year-old Abel Bautista, the son of onetime Boise Cascade logging contractor Bernardino Bautista. Save for a brief visit to the hospital during which he was handcuffed to his bed, Arreaga has been in prison awaiting trial since last fall.

Arreaga maintains he is innocent, and is puzzled why he was jailed years after the Bautista murder happened. "What I am clear about is interests have been effected," he affirms. Like the late human rights lawyer Digna Ochoa, who traveled to the Guerrero mountains with Arreaga shortly before her mysterious death in 2001, Arreaga contends that he too is a target for his activism. "The same thing that happened to her is happening to me," he says.

Arreaga is visibly perturbed by yellow press rumors that he is the general of the Popular Revolutionary Army, a guerrilla group active in the Guerrero mountains. "General, huh," retorts Arreaga, adding he has been against guns ever since the murder of his mother and an aunt in the late 1970s by paramilitary gunmen. A believer in the Roman Catholic faith, Arreaga's background as a one-time lay preacher-of-the-word is evidentin his philosophy of social change. "War is won through the heart," he says. "You have to have a love for justice."

A longtime forest advocate, Arreaga has had previous scrapes with the authorities. In 1999, Mexican soldiers arrested OCESP activists Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera and charged them with possessing weapons and drugs. According to Mexico's official National Human Rights Commission, evidence existed that Montiel and Cabrera were tortured by their captors. Arreaga and other OCESP members spent months running and hiding in the mountains from soldiers they charged were out to do them harm.

Drawing the backing of luminaries the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev and Ethel Kennedy, Montiel and Cabrera were finally released from jail- just weeks after Digna Ochoa's death. However, they are afraid to return to their homes because of threats. In addition to Arreaga and 14 other men, Montiel is formally accused of the murder of Abel Bautista.

World attention on the Guerrero forest conflict faded after the release of Montiel and Cabrera, but it is picking up again due to Arreaga's incarceration. In recent months, the campesino activist has received letters from supporters worldwide, and dozens of Mexican and international environmental and human rights organizations have sent e-mails, faxes and letters to Guerrero state authorities demanding Arreaga's freedom. The deluge of support apparently has been so great that the new governor of Guerrero recently blocked some e-mails from arriving to his address. Arreaga has been declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, and he has received the assistance of the Salt Lake City-based Environmental Defenders Law Center and prominent Seattle attorney Marica Newlands of the Heller Ehrman law firm.

When asked his reaction to the international movement on his behalf, Arreaga doesn't answer in the first person. Instead, he trails off to his favorite subject-ecology. "It brings a moment of pleasure and happiness to know that there are people committed to the environment," says Arreaga. "I say don't do it for me, but for the environment, for those that will come and for those that have been here before."

Never receiving a formal education as a child, Arreaga later took adult basic education classes and is now using his prison time to practice reading and writing. But the son of the Sierra Madres is well-versed in ecological themes, learning about clear-cutting, species extinction and climate change from first-hand observation as a small farmer. Arreaga readily recalls how it was in the Guerrero mountains when he was a boy, growing up in a region rich with deer, iguana, jaguar, iguanas and "guacayamas in the pines." Gradually the young man grew alarmed as he watched the animals disappear, vast tracts of land burned for cattle pasture, patches of forest stripped for timber, and water dry up high in the mountains. "There are no crayfish, iguana, wild plant and animal life," sighs Arreaga.

Nowadays, Arreaga laments the fate of the forest. "That's my home, its the home I defend. My job is to educate the people in the countryside and in the city." he says. Contrary to some popular versions in Guerrero, Arreaga and the other campesino envrionmentalists do not have a strict no-logging stance, but Arreaga insists that proper studies need to be done and immediate reforestation projects undertaken before a plot can be cut. "I'm not against exploiting timber, but it has to be done in a rational way," he says.

In the region surrounding his prison cell, the land almost wails Arreaga's warnings of ecocide. Parched dry from late rains, the rivers that flow down from the Sierra to the Pacific recently seemed more like shriveled-up desert arroyos than lush tropical waterways.

Possessing a pair of sad brown eyes, Arreaga's daughter, Maria Elena Arreaga, decries the sparse precipitation. "There is no water in the mountains," she flatly states.

Maria Elena, who was present when her father was arrested outside their home in Petatlan, points to a report issued by the Tlachinollan Human Rights Center of La Montana, a non-governmental organization which is providing legal assistance to Arreaga. The report details numerous irregularities in the authorities' case, including the fact that one of the men co-indicted with Arreaga, Crispin Sanchez Cortes Santana, had been dead for two years before the murder of Abel Bautista. "We brought photos of his grave in Petatlan and the lawyer got his death certificate from Petatlan," says Celsa Valdovinos, Arreaga's wife. "It's clear the crime of which my husband is accused is a fabrication."

The case against Felipe Arreaga essentially rests on a signed statement by a man who has vanished. His name is Prisiliano Bautista, and he was ambushed while traveling in the mountains with his half-brother Abel. Prisiliano supposedly saw Arreaga and more than a dozen gunmen- including the deceased Crispin Sanchez- hiding near a large rock. Staff from Tlachinollan inspected the site, as did Maria Elena, and concluded that no such rock capable of concealing a large group existed.

Marcial Bautista, Prisiliano's uncle, and an OCESP activist, gave a declaration in favor of Arreaga. The older Bautista stated that he was the first to come upon the scene of the ambush in 1998 and immediately asked Prisiliano if he had identified the attackers. The younger man reportedly responded in the negative.

Arreaga has attempted to bring in Prisiliano Bautista for a cross-examination of the young man's testimony, a procedure allowed under Mexican law, but Bautista has not responded. Celsa Valdovinos journeyed with defense staff to Michoacan where Prisiliano had moved and knocked on the young man's door. According to Valdovinos, Prisiliano's wife informed the visitors that her husband had moved to the United States. Gaudencio Aguilar Moreno, one of Arreaga's lawyers, says Prisiliano's non-availability for questioning was then duly certified by a Michoacan judge.

Then there are the video and statements from witnesses who place Arreaga several hours from the scene of the murder on the day in question in 1998, first being treated for a back problem and later attending a wedding. Finally, another prosecution witness has retracted his testimony, saying it had been pressured.

The case against Arreaga is proving to be an embarrassing one for Guerrero state authorities, who inherited it from the previous Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)-dominated state government. The new state government is headed by Governor Zeferino Torreblanca Galindo, a longtime civic activist and former mayor of Acapulco who was elected on the ticket of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Before winning office last February, Torreblanca campaigned for the respect of human rights and the law. In addition to the high-profile Arreaga case, the Torreblanca administration is under pressure from a hunger strike by 5 self-proclaimed political prisoners, including Joviel Rafael Ventura, a survivor of the Aguas Blancas Massacre. Recently, supporters of the hunger strikers symbolically crucified themselves in front of the U.S. Consulate in Acapulco, and one man threatened to sew his mouth shut in the city's plaza.

Arreaga's supporters criticize the Torreblanca adminsitration, saying numerous requests for a personal meeting with the governor have so far fallen on deaf ears. In late June, a group of Arreaga's Mexican and U.S. supporters met with Guerrero State Government Secretary Armando Chavarria, who promised the activists that a three-lawyer commission would review the case. But supporters contend that enough information exists for the state to simply withdraw the charges. "On the contrary, they should find out who is fabricating these charges and accept there are some corrupt elements inside their own offices, powers that need to be cleaned up," says Veronique Bassot, the international relations coordinator for the Tlachinollan human rights center.

Defense lawyer Gaudencio Aguilar further questions why at the same time Chavarria is pledging to review the case, the state attorney's office is appealing a defense motion to close the case to further evidence presentations and put it before the judge for a verdict. Aguilar surmises that the appeal is an attempt to drag out the case to the bitter end of the 10-month limit allowed under Guerrero state law. "There is no evidence to introduce," contends Aguilar. "There are no elements in the case to prove that Felipe really committed the murder." Another legal source says the state does not want to close the case because it is trying to locate the much sought-after Prisiliano Bautista and obtain additional evidence.

Recently assuming the case, Judge Ricardo Salinas exudes a tone of surprise at the international spotlight cast on Arreaga. Judge Salinas says he has received his share of international visitors in a case he characterizes as having "celebrity status." Judge Salinas assures that the law is being followed to the book in the Arreaga matter, but can't issue a sentence until the state attorney's appeal is decided by a court in Acapulco.

Judge Salinas differs from the state attorney's interpretation of the 10-month trial limit, adding that judges can declare sentences before 10 months if the process is in order. He appears ready to rule on Arreaga's guilt or innocence. Depending on the outcome of the Acapulco court's decision, Judge Salinas predicts a decision in "maybe in one month or so."

While Arreaga's lawyers battle for their client in the courts, human rights activists are alarmed at another development quite possibly related to the case. Last month, on May 19, Albertano Penaloza, one of the other men co-indicted with Arreaga for the Bautista murder, was driving with 4 of his children near the family home in Banco Nuevo in the Petatlan mountains. Gunmen opened fire on the family's vehicle, spaying it with more than 80 bullets and killing two of Penaloza's children. The father and another son were seriously wounded. Supportive of the OCESP, Penaloza once worked for Bernardino Bautista and was known to have denounced irregularities surrounding timber harvesting.

"We're very concerned about this wave of repression against the campesinos," says Veronique Bassot.

Arreaga confronts 50 years in the hoosegow if a guilty verdict is delivered. Even with the slammer hanging over his head, Arreaga says he is most pained by not being able to contribute to the ecological struggle. Even inside, he is a passionate disseminator of the e-word. The green prisoner says he proposed conducting an environmental workshop to educate fellow inmates, but jail officials rejected his offer. While he is stymied from pursuing projects he once had in the works, Arreaga maintains a vision in which the Guerrero mountains are reforested, slash-and-burn agriculture abandoned, and iguana nurseries built to repopulate the species.

Before he was jailed, Arreaga and Celsa Valdovinos were involved in the promotion of organic farming and a massive seeding of red cedar trees to revive the scarred landscape of Petatlan. The president of the Women's Environmentalist Organization of Petatlan, Valdovinos attempts to maintain the eco-projects going while traveling back and forth to Zihuatanejo to visit her husband and garner support for his cause. Arreaga, meanwhile, hones up on his reading and writing. And he chats ecology with visitors.

As the Christian fellowship lays down its Bibles, a guard approaches to tell visitors the day is almost over. Arreaga crushes a plastic Pepsi bottle (Coca Cola isn't sold in the Zihuatanejo jail) and begins explaining how trash needs to be properly compacted and recycled. He then clutches Dayra Itzel again, her distant, baby eyes giving a hint that even at her young age she is aware that something is not quite right.

A wave of violence since mid-January 2005 has shocked the state of Tamaulipas. More than two dozen family members from the same town were kidnapped on January 14 and three of them were murdered. Six days later six federal prison employees were abducted and killed--perhaps in retaliation for moves to limit alleged drug lords' powers in federal prison facilities around the country. In response to the violence, the state is calling for the military to take over crime prevention in violent areas of Tamaulipas.

During the evening hours of Friday, January 14, 2005, 26 members of the same family were kidnapped from three homes by a group of armed men in Soto La Marina, Tamaulipas. Three days later three of those abducted--a former mayor of Soto La Marina and two of his sons--were found murdered. Soto la Marina is approximately 120 miles south of Brownsville, Texas.

Sixteen men and one woman that were taken from Soto La Marina were freed between Saturday, January 15, and Sunday, January 16 but refused to file police reports about the incident. The men that were killed were identified as Teodoro Herrera Sosa and his sons Jaime and Teodoro Herrera Ramírez.

A Mexican federal law enforcement official said that kidnappers arrived aboard boats and vehicles to the coastal area where the abductions took place. Six people were still missing as of January 20.

State officials relate the crimes to drug trafficking but family members say that they all work in the fishing industry.

In 2002, the former mayor, Herrera Sosa, was arrested for cattle rustling, a family member confirmed. It was not stated if he was ever convicted of the charge.

Some 140 law enforcement officials from the local, state and federal level were working on the case as of Monday, January 17, a state official said. On Thursday, January 20, two people were detained in relation to the kidnappings. Unnamed sources said that the two are state preventative police officers charged with protecting a state official that lives in central Tamaulipas where the crime occurred.

On Thursday, January 20, 2005, workers at the federal prison in Matamoros finished their shift at 8 a.m. and left to go home. What happened next is not yet certain but by 11:30 a.m. a Ford Explorer was found near the entrance to the prison with dead bodies of six employees inside. According to one account the men were abducted one by one as they left work. Another version of events is that some of the men were taken by force from their homes.

Officials were alerted to the location of the vehicle by an anonymous phone call. When they arrived to the vehicle they found three men in the back seat and three in the cargo area. All of the men were blindfolded and handcuffed. Some of the vehicle's windows were shot out which suggested that the men were killed at that location. The men had been sprayed with gunfire and were also shot deliberately in the head at close range.

The federal attorney general's office (the PGR) will investigate the slayings since the men's bodies were found on land belonging to the federal prison. One federal investigator said on Thursday that it was too early to speculate about why the men were killed.

One possible motive raised by the Tamaulipas press is that the men were killed in retaliation for federal efforts to clean up and secure federal prisons in Mexico City where some of Mexico's alleged drug kingpins are being held.

Osiel Cárdenas, the alleged leader of the Gulf Cartel which has traditionally controlled Matamoros, is in one of the Mexico City-area prisons, La Palma. A group of enforcers said to be under his control, Los Zetas, which is comprised of deserted Mexican special forces soldiers, has in the past used large numbers of men to carry out daring prison rescues and lethal operations against competing drug traffickers.

Between the time of the Soto La Marina and Matamoros killings the state of Tamaulipas had already called on Mexican defense forces to take over anti-crime vigilance in the state.

The state government's position is that Tamaulipas is experiencing spill-over violence resulting from competition between drug cartels that have seen their organizations and territories thrown into disarray by recent high-level arrests.

Eugenio Hernández Flores, the governor of Tamaulipas, said on January 19 that "if it is true that Tamaulipas is suffering from the consequences of a fight that is taking place at the national level between these organizations, we demand that the federal government do its job."