Frontera NorteSur Apr - June 2009

May 2009

Editor's Note:

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.

Booms and Busts in Border Agriculture

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.

The Downfall of Queen Chile

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.”

Scrambles for the Crown

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.

Machines in the Fields

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.”

Enduring and Changing Foodways

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.”

-Kent Paterson

February 13, 2009

Mexico Tourism: Down But Not Out

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.

-Kent Paterson

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.

Border Time Bombs?

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.

Heading off Disaster

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.

-Kent Paterson

The Day of the Dead Dances Across Borders

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.

-Kent Paterson

The Border Wall Chronicles

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.

Taking a Stand in San Elizario

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.

Today, San Elizario is still contested space.

Hands Through the Fence

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?”

The Border Wall Heats Up Cyberspace

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.  

-Kent Paterson

August 27, 2008

Air, Arsenic and Asarco

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.

“Public health should be touched by politics,” Dr. Barron contended.

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.

-Kent Paterson

Busting Borders and Betting Blackjack on Cruise Ships  

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.

A Cruise Ship Mall

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.

A Big Fuss for Little Money?

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.

“Mexicanizing” Cruise Tourism

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.

“We want to be an attraction for the national market,” Uriza said.   

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.

-Kent Paterson

Research for this article was supported in part by the Fund for Investigative Journalism 

The Dead Don’t Talk: Cold Dust on the Femicide Trail

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.”

-Kent Paterson

The US Presidential Election Unfolds in Mexico

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.”

ORGANIZING MEXICO DEMOCRATS ABROAD

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.”

REPUBLICANS ABROAD

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.”

NOVEMBER 2008

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.

-Kent Paterson

NMSU to Host Timely Immigration Conference

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

NAFTA Awakens the Ghost of Pancho Villa

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.  

 NAFTA Boils  

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.

Calderon’s Counter-offensive

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.”

NMSU Honors Femicide Fighters

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 successi