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ASARCO Impacts Cuidad Juarez

By: Frontera NorteSur Apr-Jun 2007

February 25, 2005 -- In Ciudad Juarez, questions prevail about the true impact of Asarco’s historic operations. The working-class neighborhoods of Bellavista, Altavista, Ladrillera, Cazardores, Felipe Angeles, and Puerto Anapra are within close proximity to the old smelter by the river. A recent report by Mexico's Attorney General for Environmental Protection (Profepa) stated that lead levels in Juarez neighborhoods near Asarco did not exceed permissible amounts, but the results drew more questions than answers . "How come in Juarez Profepa can say there is no lead?" questions Marianna Chew, an organizer with the Sierra Club's Beyond the Borders program in Juarez-El Paso. "Just a few meters (El Paso) from where they found lead. It's illogical-scientifically, socially and politically."

Indeed, the Profepa study contradicted an earlier Mexican study, which just like the Smeltertown probe, also detected high levels of lead close to Asarco and in the blood of children aged one to nine years old living in neighborhoods close to the plant. The 1974 study for the federal Sub-Secretary for Environmental Improvement (SMA) and the Chihuahua Coordinated Public Health Services showed elevated lead levels in the blood of more than half the children living within one mile of Asarco and in about 14 percent of children residing up to 2.5 miles from the plant. The study also found high amounts of lead in household dust sampled at residences closest to the plant, averaging 1,322 ppm, while lead samples in the soils of homes nearest the smelter averaged 492 ppm.

Covering 704 families and 752 children, the study estimated that the health of as many as 8,000 children could have been adversely impacted by Asarco. Notably, the SMA-Chihuahua study was performed almost 11 years before Asarco ceased processing lead, and before many new residents arrived to a border city undergoing an economic and population boom. Completed more than three decades ago, the report has been gathering the proverbial dust ever since.

The Sierra Club’s Chew has been meeting with Ciudad Juarez residents and activists to put Asarco back on the burner. Chew says she faces an uphill task of informing a new generation about the company’s history. “People have been there for 5 or 6 years,” says Chew. “They don’t know what Asarco means, so we have to educate them.”

Decades ago, however, it was a different story. In 1976 elections, the opposition National Action Party (PAN) raised Asarco in its campaign, demanding that the company accord the same treatment to Juarez residents as it did to those of Smeltertown . Namely, the Panistas wanted Asarco to pay for the cost of evacuating residents nearest the smelter, and the government to prohibit residential development in zones likely to be affected by Asarco’s fumes.

In December 1977 Juarez PAN leaders reiterated the demands in a letter to SMA Delegate Guillermo Quijas Cruz, requesting that a binational U.S.-Mexico commission be set up tackle the Asarco issue. Invoking the names of “8,000 Juarez children,” the letter contended that Asarco “isn’t a political problem, but a grave social problem that requires the intervention of all Juarez residents.”

None of the PAN’s proposals were translated into public policy, even under subsequent PAN municipal and state administrations. Instead of staying away, many new Juarez residents settled in the neighborhoods close to Asarco. Few probably knew about the 1974 study. Unlike El Paso, where the EPA is cleaning up homes near the smelter, no remediation efforts are underway in Juarez. Alberto Torres, a former mayor pro-temp of Juarez and a signatory of the 1977 letter to the SMA, says efforts to get action were stymied by “power structures” in the U.S. and Mexico. As government faltered, some turned to the courts.

In 1981, Texas lawyers filed a class action civil lawsuit against Asarco on behalf of Ciudad Juarez residents in El Paso’s U.S. District Court. The plantiffs in the case, Ontiveros vs. Asarco, included the family of a child whose death was blamed on toxic poisoning from the plant. The plantiffs’ lawyers used a novel argument in the case, accusing the smelting firm of trespassing on their clients’ well-being by emitting heavy metals that fell to earth and provoked “physical and mental pain.” The plantiffs requested no less than $10,000 dollars each in compensation, but settled out of court for an unspecified sum.

Asarco’s battle with one group of Ciudad Juarez residents was over, and the bigger problems pertaining to the company’s possible, wider impact on the city’s environment were not flushed out in public. Largely forgotten, the old smelter controversy briefly simmered again in 1992 when Alberto Torres’ daughter, Clara Torres, wrote the Texas Air Control Board about Asarco’s pending air quality permit. Protesting the fumes, she contended that no soil and air samples had been taken and no lead levels in blood checked on the Juarez side. “Air has no ownership and boundaries,” noted Torres. In the 21st Century, Asarco is once again an issue in Juarez. Cipriana Jurado, the director of the Worker Solidarity Research Center and the Juarez representative for the Southwest Network of Environmental and Economic Justice, says she wants more medical studies and remediation programs in affected neighborhoods. “(Asarco) should clean them up, because they are ones who caused the pollution,” contends Jurado.

Lairy Johnson, who has worked as Asarco’s environmental manager for more than five years, says no Mexican government agencies have made any formal demands for Asarco to help pay for or clean up the company’s alleged pollution. The environmental manager says Asarco is frustrated by such accusations at a time when it is trying to be a good corporate citizen and help boost the border economy. “It’s kind of disheartening when we live in one of the poorest areas of the country,” he says. According to Johnson, a restarted El Paso plant would provide up to 400 jobs and generate $300 million dollars annually to the border economy.

However, a growing number of Juarez residents want Asarco to remain inactive, and some plan to participate in the public trial scheduled for July 11 in El Paso to decide whether or not Asarco’s air quality permit will be renewed. Hundreds of signatures have been gathered on a Juarez petition that calls for Asarco to not reopen. “It’s important that the Mexican people are mobilizing” muses Alberto Torres. “I think (Asarco) should never open again. They’ve been here for 100 years and have been polluting both sides of the border.”