October 1993

Features

NAFTA and the Environment

NAFTA and the Politics of Toxic Waste

by Mary E. Kelly

NAFTA and Consumer Rights

How NAFTA Endangers Health, Labor and Environmental Standards

by Patti Goldman

NAFTA and Mexico

The Perfect Dictatorship: Repression and One-Party Rule in Mexico

by Andrew Reding and Christopher Whalen

NAFTA and Democracy

Distorted Democracy

by Charles Lewis

Editorial

NAFTA vs. Democracy

by Ralph Nader

Resources

by Ralph Nader

THERE ARE ONLY A FEW DAYS LEFT in the countdown to the Congressional vote on the supragovernmental trade agreement with Mexico and Canada , known as NAFTA . Big business forces that are pro-NAFTA are launching a multimillion dollar television campaign on your screens. NAFTA means jobs, they say. Organized labor, which knows a little about job losses in the past decade to runaway plants which use serf-workers and sell back to the United States, is also televising its anti-NAFTA viewpoints, though with less frequency.

My concerns about NAFTA are that it will further weaken our internal democratic sovereignty. It will erode the rights of citizens to determine health, safety and worker standards in our country without being compelled to deal with the external, autocratic tribunals of NAFTA and the 120-nation General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

NAFTA proponents in Congress, the Clinton Administration and business associations and among narrow-gauged economists have several common characteristics. One is that just about none of them have read the bulky two volume NAFTA agreement. Second is that they view NAFTA in purely economic terms, within narrow trade model assumptions, and ignore the political and non-law enforcement provisions that embody its corporatist ideology.

As a result, proponents make the most falsely decisive predictions about NAFTA�s impact on the U.S., Mexican and Canadian economies - predictions that avoid the known empirical records of Mexico�s dictatorial, repressive regime and the current behavior of new U.S. factories operating just across the border in Mexico in awful polluting and workplace conditions.

NAFTA has not been subject to grassroots discussion and debate by the American people. They have been shut out by the very secretive and autocratic methods that NAFTA-critics have charged this supragovernmental agreement with promoting in the future. Negotiated in secrecy by Bush functionaries and corporate lobbyists, NAFTA moves to Congress under an autocratic "Fast Track" law that limits debate to 20 hours and prohibits any amendments to this 2000-page deal. This alone should put up a yellow light to citizens who believe in deliberative democracy and legislative judgments on what is wrong and what is right in these pages.

A year ago, President Bill Clinton delivered a long address on NAFTA and listed about a dozen areas which he said needed to be fixed - such as food safety, truck safety, worker retraining, more democratic dispute-resolution procedures, etc. His recently approved side-agreements did not fix them. So, Clinton�s own words, that enforceability of the laws by all signatory countries is essential, have remained just that - words.

The core question is whether our modest democracy can enter into an economic union with a repressive dictatorial regime, composed of a few very wealthy ruling families, government officials and their police power.

Opponents of the Bush NAFTA say no, because worker, consumer and environmental laws in Mexico won�t be enforced since the ruling oligarchy profits from their non-enforcement. And the oppressed Mexican people do not have the democratic rights, remedies and free elections to do anything about it.

As many a small U.S. business person can sadly narrate, Mexico is not a place where the rule of law reigns. The rule of power, the rule of the bribe (mordida) are what counts. In business dealings, U.S. citizens have been thrown in jail without due process, had their contracts broken, their assets stolen and some of their stories reported on page one of the Wall Street Journal.

These businesspeople got a taste of what the ordinary Mexican worker, consumer, citizen or brutalized peaceful protestors receive regularly. The 60-year long ruling party, known as PRI, routinely steals elections, including the 1988 election that put President Salinas in power. There are no independent courts, no civil rights, no civil liberties, no enforcement for minimum wage or worker health and safety laws, no freedom of speech, no pollution controls for the masses in Mexico. Typical of a dictatorial plutocracy, if you are rich, powerful or otherwise well-connected, the paper laws can be invoked to support your position.

Laws that are not enforced under NAFTA become unfair competitive advantages. For example, a U.S. factory closes down in Missouri and goes to Mexico where even weak worker, environmental, tax and other laws go unenforced. This transplanted factory can then sell its products back into the United States in competition with a factory that stayed in the United States and followed the rules.

Under NAFTA, the U.S. government can complain before a secret commission that is structurally unable to make a decision for many months, much less enforce it. Our courts have no role in these matters.

What�s more, NAFTA, contrary to its proponents� false claims, exposes our federal, state and local laws on health and safety, for instance, to challenge by foreign countries before these commissions.

Trade matters subordinate health and safety values under NAFTA and proposed revisions to GATT. It�s already happening. Under the U.S.-Canada trade agreement of 1988, Canada is suing the United States, saying that our asbestos phaseout is really a trade barrier keeping out Canadian asbestos. The asbestos phaseout is to protect workers and consumers from a very hazardous substance that has taken tens of thousands of U.S. lives.

When you want a local, state and federal safety law to protect your families, the workplace or the environment, do you think secret tribunals in Mexico City, Rome and Geneva should contradict what our nation decides is best for its people? That issue and economic unions that entrench dictatorial regimes are the two topics you won�t find the national media paying much attention to in the coming days.

But you can make sure your members of Congress do.

Reasonable people agree that NAFTA will cost jobs, reduce incomes, and undercut environmental standards. NAFTA lobbyists have spent millions of dollars promoting predictions that other economic benefits will outweigh these costs. But the lobbyists have failed. Both the facts and the common sense tell us that the benefits will go primarily to the small number of Americans who invest in Mexico and - for a time - a tiny part of the labor force in a few sectors of agribusiness and some capital goods industries.

In the short run, the much larger costs will be job losses for U.S. manufacturing workers. In the long run, a majority of the U.S. work force will suffer loss of income. Most important, by encouraging U.S. producers to respond to competition by seeking out cheaper labor, NAFTA will undercut any hope for the U.S. economy to find a high- wage, high-skill path in the global economy.

The central economic problem with NAFTA is that it will permanently lock in the huge distortion between wages and productivity in the Mexican export manufacturing sector. Today, labor productivity in Mexico�s export industries is typically 80 to 100 percent of U.S. levels, while wages and benefits are 10 to 15 percent of what U.S. workers earn. In a growing number of factories in Mexico owned by multinationals, labor productivity is even higher than in comparable U.S. factories because the Mexican plants are newer and the workers often get more training. Where labor is cheap to hire it is cheap to train.

The disparity between wages and labor productivity is a result of the policies of the authoritarian Mexican government. Through a variety of measures, including government wage controls, physical intimidation of workers and official encouragement of employer associations that collude in fixing wage rates, workers� pay in Mexico is kept down in order to attract more foreign capital.

Environmental degradation is permitted for the same reason. Because Mexico is ruled by one political party, which in turn is dominated by an entrenched oligarchy, the country lacks effective political opposition, independent trade unions, an independent judiciary, strong environmental groups and similar institutions that in a democracy keep a check on government power.

No amount of rhetoric about having "confidence" in U.S. workers� ability to compete can change the fact that Mexican wages and environmental policies put U.S. workers at a brutal disadvantage. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs have already been lost. NAFTA will make things worse. It is designed to protect U.S. investors in Mexico from policy changes of future Mexican governments, freeing them to expand production in Mexico to sell goods in the U.S. market.

Claims that NAFTA�s purpose is to give U.S. firms access to the Mexican market are disingenuous. Although the Mexican labor force is large, the Mexican market is minuscule because incomes are low, and it will remain so until the political structure is changed. The theory of free trade, which supporters of NAFTA invoke, implicitly assumes that wages are commensurate with productivity. Since in this case they are not, the free trade argument is irrelevant. It is perfectly consistent to favor free trade and oppose NAFTA.

NAFTA supporters point to the two-year-old U.S. trade surplus with Mexico as "proof" that the agreement will generate a net gain of jobs. But that surplus is already shrinking, not rising as proponents have been predicting. In the first six months of 1993, the surplus with Mexico has shrunk by half. And the evidence indicates that it will soon disappear.

First, the primary cause of the two-year-old surplus with Mexico is the overvalued peso, which has raised the relative price of Mexican exports to the United States and lowered the price of U.S. exports to Mexico. When the peso drops, probably next year, the current surplus will evaporate.

Second, the United States is only running a surplus in capital goods and components, which are being shipped to Mexican producers in order to increase their capacity for future production of consumer goods destined for the United States. Since the consumer goods market is much larger and will grow more rapidly than capital goods markets, the overall trade surplus is bound to shift to Mexico, especially if NAFTA is passed.

NAFTA backers - and the so-called "studies" they cite -conveniently ignore the loss of jobs in the U.S. due to shifting investments to Mexico. This enables them to keep a straight face when arguing that investment in Mexico will generate demand for U.S. exports. The idea that a billion dollars invested in Mexico creates greater benefits in the U.S. than a billion dollars invested in, say, California defies common sense. When investment shifts are taken fully into account, the impact of NAFTA proves to be a loss of at least another 500,000 jobs over the next 10 years.

Job loss and the threat of job loss from NAFTA will undercut incomes in the rest of the economy. Even employers who want to produce in the United States will be driven by competition to lower the wages they pay here. By encouraging U.S. management to compete on the basis of low labor costs in the short term, NAFTA will drastically reduce the incentive for them to invest in the creation of high-performance workplaces in the long term.

Supporters claim that NAFTA will reduce illegal immigration. A similar claim was made for the maquiladora program in which U.S. tariffs on Mexican goods are reduced to the extent they are made with American components. But the maquiladora program has drawn hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers to the U.S. border where, because of Mexico�s low-wage strategy, they could not support a family. So they crossed the rivers to the U.S..

NAFTA will also increase illegal immigration by dislocating millions of Mexican farmers who will no be able to compete with U.S. grain exporters.

Unfortunately, the NAFTA side agreements do almost nothing to protect labor and the environment. There is no effort to set common standards. Countries are merely encouraged through a ponderous legal process to enforce whatever their own laws happen to be. Whereas NAFTA provides that a single violation of intellectual property rights is actionable, violations of labor and environmental rights cannot even be considered by the trinational commissions established in the side agreements unless the government has "persistently failed to effectively enforce" the laws. If the offending government argues that it has higher enforcement priorities and that in due time it will get around to it, the government is off the hook.

The larger issues of deliberate government policies that violate labor rights and hold wages down are specifically excluded from the enforcement provisions of the side agreement, and are therefore implicitly permitted. All mention of a common goal of striving for a high-wage economy that was in the original U.S. draft of the side agreements was deleted in the final version. On the environmental side, problems such as toxic wastes, air pollution and wildlife protection are also ignored.

In an obvious effort to placate U.S. public opinion, Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari vaguely promised to consider linking the minimum wage with productivity. Only the hopelessly naive could take him seriously. In a statement revealing the contempt in which Mexican leaders hold the side agreements, that country�s commerce secretary recently assured Mexican legislators that the side agreements are so cumbersome that it will be virtually impossible for any violation ever to result in trade sanctions.

Supporters say that if we do not pass NAFTA, Mexico will be in a crisis, the Salinas regime will be discredited, and the 50-year reign of his political party may come to an end. NAFTA or no, Mexico will have an economic political crisis when the peso is devalued and short-term capital flees. It is the price every country pays - including ours - for speculative excess.

There is no reason to put U.S workers at risk to save the Salinas regime from its own folly, especially when they are already facing years of slow job growth, real wage decline and inadequate investment here. The response that the unemployed will be taken care of with retraining programs is a cruel joke.

A continental economic development policy linking Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. makes sense. But its goals must be to raise the living standards of the majority of people in all countries, not to lower them. The condition for an integrated market should be democracy and common minimum labor and environmental protections. The first step down that more sensible North American path is to reject NAFTA so we can start with a clean slate.

- by Jeff Faux, president of the Economic Policy Institute.

This article appeared in Roll Call on September 27, 1993.

NUMBER OF MEXICAN PEASANTS THAT ABANDONED FARMING AND MIGRATED TO MEXICAN CITIES AND THE U.S., 1960-1990: 9 MILLION

ESTIMATE OF THE NUMBER OF MEXICAN PEASANTS THAT WILL BE FORCED TO ABANDON FARMING AND MIGRATE TO THE CITIES AND THE U.S. UNDER NAFTA: 3 TO 14 MILLION

AVERAGE HOURLY FACTORY WAGE IN THE U.S.: $10.97

AVERAGE HOURLY FACTORY WAGE IN MEXICO: $1.85

APPROXIMATE AVERAGE HOURLY WAGE PAID TO MAQUILADORA FACTORY WORKERS: $0.75

WORLD BANK ESTIMATE OF THE COST OF MEETING THE MINIMUM DAILY NUTRITIONAL REQUIREMENTS OF A MEXICAN FAMILY OF 5: $15.00

NUMBER OF TOP 100 U.S. CORPORATIONS THAT HAVE AT LEAST ONE PLANT IN MEXICO: 100

LARGEST PRIVATE SECTOR EMPLOYER IN MEXICO: GENERAL MOTORS

LARGEST PRIVATE SECTOR EMPLOYER IN THE US: MANPOWER TEMPORARY SERVICES

NUMBER OF GOVERNMENT SUBSIDY PROGRAMS THAT WILL BE ALLOWED UNDER NAFTA: 2 (OIL AND GAS MEGA PROJECTS AND DEFENSE SPENDING)

From: the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

by Mary E. Kelly

THE BORDER TOWN OF MATAMOROS, located in northeastern Mexico across the river from Brownsville, Texas, was once a quiet ranching and agricultural community. Over the last decade, however, it has undergone a startling transformation. Under Mexico�s border industrialization program, which provides incentives to U.S.-based companies to set up manufacturing operations along Mexico�s northern border, Matamoros now has over 90 maquiladora factories, many of which are owned by U.S. corporate giants such as General Motors , AT& T and Zenith . Mexico�s woefully underfunded and politically weak environmental regulatory program has not kept up with the rapid industrialization. Maquiladora plants in Matamoros operate without the scrutiny and environmental controls they would have faced had they stayed in the United States.

The town�s residents are now feeling the consequences of this neglect. Behind the Stepan Chemical plant, and just yards from the small, broken-down dwellings of Colonia Chorizo, environmental tests revealed the presence of xylene at levels more than 50,000 times the U.S. standard for safe drinking water. About half a mile away, in a canal near General Motors� Rimir plant, investigators discovered xylene at levels more than 6,000 times the U.S. standard.

The pollution is visible to the naked eye - orange and purple slime pours out of discharge pipes and flows down open canals, eventually discharging into a sensitive coastal lagoon south of Matamoros on the Gulf of Mexico. One can often see dead animals in these ditches. Children, oblivious to the contamination, play at the edge of the murky water. When the Matamoros city dump is on fire, as it often is, the billowing black smoke can be seen from the north side of the river in nearby Brownsville. A visit to the dump itself is like stepping into a nightmare of industrial society run amok. People scavenge among the acres of municipal trash and industrial waste, slogging through pools of black-gray water to find the most sought-after prize - a used industrial chemical barrel in which to collect water at their homes on the edge of the dump.

In the face of these horrendous environmental conditions, some residents of Matamoros have begun to mount a campaign for stronger environmental protection. Working with religious, environmental and political groups in the United States, neighborhood leaders have developed a "toxic tour" of Matamoros. "We have had visits from countless major Mexican, U.S. and foreign media organizations, environmental activists and U.S. Congressional delegations," said Mar�a Teresa M�ndez, one of the organizers. "No visitor goes away unmoved."

Efforts to call attention to the border�s environmental problems have begun to bear fruit. U.S. House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt took the toxic tour of Matamoros in the fall of 1991. He met with colonia and ejido leaders while officials of the Mexican, U.S. and Canadian governments were negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In a major trade policy speech to the Institute for International Economics in Washington in July, Gephardt spoke about the environmental devastation he had witnessed. "In Matamoros, some of America�s biggest corporations dump toxic waste directly into the water supply - water that turns the colors of the rainbow," he said. "When I stood outside the homes of families living near Mexican factories owned by U.S. chemical corporations, the emissions made my skin burn." Gephardt went on to outline specific initiatives he argues should be enacted before Congress can approve NAFTA.

Environmental issues have moved to the center of the public and Congressional debates over NAFTA, with much of the focus on the U.S.-Mexico border region. Critics of NAFTA in both the United States and Mexico complain that the trade negotiations were put on a fast track to bolster the political fortunes of then-President Bush and Mexico�s President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. In the rush to complete NAFTA, these critics argue, the governments failed to develop meaningful proposals to address the border�s current environmental and health problems, or to provide the necessary resources and infrastructure to handle what is expected to be a significant increase in U.S. industrial investment in Mexico under a free-trade accord.

Low wage rates in Mexico, often less than one dollar per hour, combined with the Mexican border region�s proximity to U.S. markets, have already made the area an attractive "off-shore" manufacturing base for U.S. companies. Favorable customs and tariffs for border industry have strengthened the pull. There are now over 1,800 maquiladora plants along the border, compared with fewer than 500 in 1982. The plants employ over 380,000 people, and have become Mexico�s second largest source of foreign exchange, eclipsed only by oil export revenues.

Losing control

Industrialization of the border has greatly increased the amount of hazardous waste being generated in the region, but tracking is woefully inadequate. Mexico does not keep an inventory of hazardous waste and, unlike the United States, Mexico does not have a law requiring industries to publicize basic environmental data on their operations.

Many of the plants use large amounts of toxic solvents, acids, metal-plating solutions and other chemicals that result in hazardous by-products. The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), using information compiled by Mexico�s environmental agency, reports that about half the approximately 2,000 maquiladoras in Mexico may generate hazardous waste. The limited environmental testing that has been done near maquiladora parks in the border region also shows the presence of high levels of toxic contaminants associated with hazardous waste.

Mexico�s ground-breaking 1988 environmental law requires that most hazardous waste generated by U.S.-owned maquiladoras be returned to the United States. But Mexican and U.S. environmental officials acknowledge that they cannot account for most of the waste. According to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), only 91 of the 600 maquiladoras along the Texas-Mexico border have returned waste from Mexico through U.S. Customs ports since 1987. The GAO concludes that, although Mexico is trying to create a stronger waste-management program, the Mexican government does not know how many maquiladoras are generating hazardous waste, the amount of waste generated or the final disposition of that waste.

Hindering efforts to legally dispose of toxic waste is the lack of approved final disposal facilities in Mexico for toxic waste. According to law, the waste must be sealed in barrels and transported to landfills. There are currently only two authorized sites in Mexico - one in San Luis Potos� and the other in Monterrey in the border state of Nuevo Le�n. Rene Franco, an environmental consultant in Ju�rez, Mexico, says "the geographic location of these facilities, as well as their installed capacity, are far from satisfactory for existing industry, much less for the industry that will result from a free- trade agreement." The Mexican border had a toxic-waste incinerator in Tijuana, but its permit was revoked this June after neighboring residents protested. Proposals for two large waste dumps in Texas have generated vocal opposition from communities on both sides of the border.

Much of the hazardous waste generated by maquiladoras and other border industries is being disposed of illegally. This January, in a public environmental forum in Monterrey, Mexico, then-Subsecretary of Ecology Sergio Reyes Luj�n said only 10 percent of the toxic waste generated by industry in Mexico goes to authorized disposal facilities.

The vast desert region of northeastern Mexico is a favorite location for clandestine dumps. In May, for example, environmental officials discovered a dump of over 600 barrels of toxic waste located about 20 miles south of Ju�rez, across from El Paso, Texas. Investigators have begun to trace many of the barrels back to U.S.-owned maquiladora plants.

Health risks

Exposure to illegally disposed hazardous waste can occur in a variety of ways. In the border region, children play in open sewage canals which contain waste from industrial parks, and people fish in contaminated streams or use old hazardous-chemical barrels for storing drinking water. Exposure to such waste can have serious health ramifications, including various forms of cancer and birth defects. Recent investigations have begun to bring potential problems to light.

Health-care workers in Brownsville, Texas have documented a skyrocketing rate of birth defects, particularly in the number of babies born with undeveloped brains, a condition known as anencephaly. Researchers have found that anencephaly rates in Brownsville are over three times the U.S. national average. In Matamoros, across the river, researchers have documented at least 42 cases of anencephaly over the last year and a half.

"To date," says Gregoria Rodriguez, a health-care doctoral student and a volunteer at the Brownsville Community Health Clinic, "our research indicates that environmental toxins which are emitted by many of the maquiladoras operating in Matamoros may indeed by one possible cause of this tragedy." After the Brownsville/Matamoros anencephaly investigation received national attention in both the United States and Mexico, health-care workers in other border cities such as Ciudad Acuna and Juarez began reviewing their limited records, and discovered similar anomalies.

Observers say the border�s toxic waste crisis stems from two basic problems. First, Mexico lacks sufficient financial resources for a strong environmental enforcement and oversight program. Burdened by a foreign debt of over $100 billion, Mexico spent much less on environmental programs per capita in 1991 than the United States did, even though funding levels in Mexico increased 1000 percent over 1990. The disparity between the amount that each country budgeted for hazardous waste management is striking. In the United States, the EPA had a 1991 hazardous-waste budget of over $300 million, supplemented by significant state spending on hazardous-waste regulation. Mexico, by contrast, had a 1991 hazardous-waste budget of only $2.3 million.

Limited resources also impede Mexico�s ability to clean up illegal disposal sites. For example, at the recently discovered 600-barrel dump outside of Juarez, Mexican environmental investigators have been severely hampered by the lack of money needed for testing the ground water and soil samples for contamination. Moreover, Mexico does not have an equivalent to the U.S. Superfund Law, which requires those responsible for generating the waste to pay for the clean-up of abandoned disposal sites. Therefore, "it is not clear whether the land will ever be fully cleaned up," says Texas Water Commission Border Affairs Director Hector Villa, whose agency has helped Mexico�s environmental authorities transfer the barrels to an authorized disposal site.

Agreements lack teeth

Another basic problem is that the United States and Mexico have relied strictly on informal cooperation to deal with toxic waste in the borderlands. Under the La Paz Agreement, signed in 1983 by then presidents Ronald Reagan and Miguel de la Madrid, the two countries agreed to work with each other to address a range of environmental problems in the region. Yet neither country devoted sufficient resources to set up an adequate binational system that would track the generation and disposal of toxic waste in the region.

This year, after the border�s environmental woes were spotlighted during the debate over NAFTA, the two countries� environmental agencies agreed to deal with pollution with a new "Integrated Plan for the Mexico-U.S. Border." Included among the plan�s goals for the next few years are improved surveillance and tracking of cross- border movements of toxic waste, as well as the ability to determine the amount of waste being generated by the maquiladora plants. However, the plan remains strictly an informal agreement.

The integrated plan is the centerpiece of efforts by presidents Bush and Salinas to convince the public in both countries that they are addressing border environmental issues. The Bush and now Clinton administrations also argue that NAFTA will improve Mexico�s ability to deal with environmental problems because Mexico�s revenues from foreign investment and trade with the United States will increase as a result of the agreement.

Some critics claim both countries should permit greater cross-border cooperation among state and local governments. "It is the border communities that are feeling the impact of this rapid industrialization on a day-to-day basis," says Helen Ingram, director of the Udall Center for Public Policy at the University of Arizona. "It is those communities that can best make concrete progress in protecting their shared environment. But they can�t do that if Washington, D.C. and Mexico City continue to insist on tight federal control over U.S.-Mexico environmental relations."

Calls for change are also being heard in Mexico. Alberto Szekely, one of Mexico�s leading environmental law experts who helped negotiate the agreement on behalf of Mexico, argues that although U.S. and Mexican environmental agencies have opened lines of communication since 1983, a new agreement is needed that would deal more forcefully with border environmental issues, particularly toxic waste.

Roberto Sanchez, the director of Urban Studies at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, recommends creating a new binational environmental agency. Sanchez says this new agency could be given oversight authority for environmental and worker- health issues in the borderlands, and could help to coordinate the efforts of various federal, state and local authorities.

Many observers feel that without a strong new agreement or treaty on border environmental issues to accompany NAFTA, problems such as the illegal disposal of toxic waste, and battles over new disposal sites will continue. Those concerned with the welfare of border communities acknowledge that the NAFTA negotiations provide a golden opportunity to grab the attention of federal officials in both countries. Says Ingram: "We have not had this much attention to the border in years - and now is the chance for us to get some fundamental changes in the way we try to protect our shared environment. We just hope Washington and Mexico City are taking us seriously."

Postscript: the struggle underway

Proposals for two large toxic-waste dumps in Texas, both of which would be located within 20 miles of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo, have spurred unprecedented binational concern among governmental and non-governmental organizations alike. Chemical Waste Management, Inc. is proposing to build what would be one of the United States� largest toxic-waste landfills in the Terrell County, about 100 miles upriver from Del Rio, Texas. A newly formed company called Texcor, Inc. wants to create a landfill for uranium mining and other radioactive waste in Kinney County, near Eagle Pass, Texas. Each of these sites must receive a license from the Texas Water Commission, the state�s primary environmental agency, before beginning operation. On June 30, 1993, the Water Commission denied Texcor�s application, but the company has filed an appeal.

The two proposals have garnered strong opposition, both in Texas and Mexico, prompting at one point a brief binational citizens� blockade of the international bridge between Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras, Coahuila. The proposals have also sparked formal diplomatic protests by Mexico, and were a prominent issue at the U.S.-Mexico Border Governors� Conference in San Diego, California in April 1992. In an unprecedented move, the state of Coahuila, the municipio of Ciudad Acuna and Mexican environmentalists intervened in the Texas state proceedings to oppose the granting of permits for either of the two sites.

At first glance, the proposed Chem Waste site looks like an ideal spot for disposal of toxic waste, but appearances can be deceptive. Although the landfill would be located in somewhat isolated desert territory, the area�s steep side canyons, giant underground caves, sink holes and limestone formations contain several potential pathways by which contamination from toxic waste could reach the ground water supply, says Robert Kier, an expert hydrogeologist hired by the City of Del Rio to evaluate the proposed site. The aquifer below the proposed site, known as the Trinity Plateau of the Edwards aquifer, supplies several fresh-water springs, among them Sam Felipe Springs the City of Del Rio�s sole water source. The aquifer also crosses the border into Mexico, although less is known about its exact configuration there. "If pollution escaped from the proposed landfill," says Kier, "there is little doubt that it could reach the San Felipe Springs and other important fresh-water springs in the area."

Opponents of the Chem Waste site are also concerned about the company�s history of environmental violations at its other facilities. Says Del Rio City Attorney Jim Bayne: "This company has been assessed some of the largest penalties for violations of hazardous-waste laws in the United States." A report by Greenpeace brands Chemical Waste Management�s parent company, Waste Management, Inc. as "one of the world�s biggest polluters." Greenpeace based its assessment on the company�s record-setting payment of over $45 million in penalties and settlements in environmental cases over the last decade.

Opponents of Texcor, on the other hand, are concerned that the company does not have a track record to show it can safely operate its proposed radioactive waste dump. According to Madge Belcher, a long-time Kinney County rancher and president of Communities Against Radioactive Environment (CARE), Texcor has never operated any waste-management site or any other type of industrial facility.

But what seems to most frustrate opponents on both sides of the border is the contradiction between current governmental efforts to clean up the Rio Grande - spurred on by the desire to eliminate environmental objections to NAFTA - and the thought of major toxic-waste facilities being located nearby.

"It is incredible for the United States, on the one hand, to expect the government of Mexico to spend over $400 million to clean up the Rio Grande," says Belcher, "and, on the other hand, to sanction radioactive and hazardous waste dumps close to that same river."

APPROXIMATE NUMBER OF U.S. COMPANIES NOW OPERATING IN MEXICAN FREE TRADE ZONES (MAQUILADORAS): 1750

PERCENTAGE OF A RANDOM SAMPLE OF U.S. MAQUILADORA PLANTS FOUND BY A 1992 U.S. GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE STUDY TO BE IN COMPLIANCE WITH MEXICAN ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS: 0 PERCENT

PERCENTAGE OF U.S. MAQUILADORA COMPANIES THAT HAVE COMPLIED WITH LEGAL REQUIREMENTS THAT THEY RETURN HAZARDOUS WASTE TO THE UNITED STATES FOR TREATMENT: 5 PERCENT

PERCENTAGE OF COMPANIES THAT RELOCATED TO THE MAQUILADORA CITY OF MEXICALI ADMITTING THAT LAX ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION WAS AN IMPORTANT FACTOR IN THEIR DECISION TO RELOCATE: 26 PERCENT

A "CESSPOOL AND BREEDING GROUND FOR INFECTIOUS DISEASE"-That is how the American Medical Association described conditions in the Maquiladora free trade zones

ESTIMATE OF THE NUMBER OF GALLONS OF UNTREATED SEWAGE DUMPED DAILY INTO THE RIO GRANDE FROM MAQUILADORA FREE TRADE ZONES: 100 MILLION

NUMBER OF VIRUSES CAPABLE OF CAUSING POLIO, DYSENTERY, CHOLERA, TYPHOID, MENINGITIS OR HEPATITIS FOUND IN THE NEW RIVER, WHICH RUNS NORTH FROM MEXICALI: 15

ESTIMATED COSTS OF PROVIDING SEWER AND WATER TREATMENT FACILITIES FOR WORKERS EMPLOYED IN THE MAQUILADORA PLANTS: $6.5 BILLION

TAXES PAID TO THE MEXICAN GOVERNMENT ON PROFITS MADE BY U.S. MAQUILADORA PLANTS: $0.00

Source: the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

Sidebar

BECAUSE NAFTA REDUCES the authority of federal and state governments to control foreign investment in the resource sector, or to limit the export of vital natural resources, it will entrench and even accelerate the unsustainable patterns of resource exploitation that have already led to serious crises in several resource sectors.

Under the rules of free trade embodied in NAFTA, and with few exceptions, each NAFTA country is required to provide other parties the same access to its natural resources that it allows its own citizens and domestic industry. Nor can governments discriminate against foreign companies or markets by imposing export taxes or other charges. Moreover, under the proportionality clauses of NAFTA, foreign access to a share of natural resources is guaranteed for as long as those resources last, no matter how severe domestic shortages become.

In addition, NAFTA provides special status to government subsidies for oil and gas megaprojects, protecting them from the challenge that they represent unfair trade practices, while leaving government support for efficiency and conservation entirely vulnerable to such attack.

Export control and sustainable resource management

All three NAFTA parties currently control the export of some natural resources in order to conserve those resources and promote local economic development. Resource export controls have an immediate and obvious impact upon the rate at which those resources are exploited. Moreover, by restricting the export of unprocessed resources like logs, fish or energy, governments encourage processing to take place in communities close to the resource base. Because local communities derive more value from their resources, the resource base becomes more valuable for those most dependent upon them.

For resource-based communities, this means a more dynamic and diverse economy, and ultimately a greater stake in sustainable resource management. For government, the result means more tax revenue from the economic activity that now takes place within its jurisdiction. This in turn means having the fiscal resources needed to invest in resource enhancement and conservation measures, and a stronger rationale for doing so, because now such public expenditures benefit a broad processing and manufacturing community and not just harvesting industries.

On the other hand, without the ability to ban the export of resources, or to require local processing, the economies of resource-based communities become poorer and less diverse. Income becomes entirely dependent upon the rate at which the resource is extracted - and the viability of local economies becomes far more vulnerable to commodity price trends, which are notoriously unstable.

Considered in this light, the ability to control resource exports is vital for any government seeking to implement sustainable resource management programs. Yet it is precisely this prerogative that NAFTA will remove by making it virtually impossible for Mexico, Canada or the United States to regulate exports of vital natural resources.

Clearly export controls provide no guarantee that governments will implement sustainable resource management strategies. However, without the authority to regulate or tax exports, governments are simply without the tools needed to pursue more sustainable policies, however compelling the environmental or economic imperatives may become.

One example of collisions that have and will continue to take place between resource management objectives and the rules of free trade comes from the first dispute to be resolved under the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (the prototype for NAFTA). The case involved a challenge by the United States to a Canadian fisheries management regulation for West coast salmon and herring fisheries.

The Canadian regulation required that all salmon and herring be landed in Canada for inspection and biological sampling before being exported to U.S. markets. Canada insisted this measure was essential if it was to deter false reporting and ensure that foreign fishing boats respected regulatory limits set for the domestic fishing fleet.

In upholding the U.S. challenge to the regulations, the dispute panel held that a country could maintain export controls for resource conservation purposes only when the country can show that its export embargo "would have been adopted for conservation reasons alone," and that the same purpose could not have been accomplished by other means. This is a test that few, if any, environmental regulations could hope to pass, particularly where administered by trade bureaucrats.

The Canada-U.S. trade panel refused to make any distinction between the rights of domestic and foreign fishing companies. While this is entirely consistent with the rules of free trade, it is fundamentally incompatible with the notion that the opportunity to exploit a resource must bear some relationship to the responsibility to manage and care for it. Giving foreign fishing companies the same right to exploit coastal fish resources as those enjoyed by domestic producers guarantees the right of all to exploit a resource for which no effective management authority exists.

Increasing consumption of non-renewable energy resources

The section of NAFTA dealing with the energy sector represents a radical departure from the theory of free trade. It encourages all three governments to subsidize oil and gas exploration and development, by sheltering these subsidies from countervailing duty actions. Thus, under NAFTA�s rules, efficiency and conservation measures will be competing with energy imports that will often have the benefit of substantial government subsidies. Moreover, NAFTA prohibits the use of import taxes or charges to offset such subsidies and create a "level playing field" for demand-side, efficiency-oriented alternatives. Furthermore, because government support for efficiency and conservation is given no similar protection under NAFTA, these programs are vulnerable to trade sanctions. This blatant double standard will further undermine the ability of efficiency and conservation initiatives to compete on this lop-sided and supply- oriented playing field.

There are a host of other ways in which NAFTA would defeat efforts to reduce extravagant and uncompetitive energy appetites:

o State "least cost" utility planning - in which the option of efficiency is weighed against the option of more electricity generation - will be open to challenge under NAFTA if its effect is to impede access for those wishing to supply energy those regulated markets. Environmental costing rules, or other efforts to provide a premium for efficiency and conservation initiatives, such as those in place in several states, will be particularly vulnerable to attack as market barriers.

o NAFTA limits the ability of national governments, and most likely state and local governments as well, to demand that products they buy be energy efficient, if the desired performance criteria would favor domestic producers.

o NAFTA�s "Technical Barriers to Trade" section paves the way for regulatory initiatives, such as appliance efficiency standards or building performance codes, to be attacked and overturned.

o Finally, as is true for all natural resources, NAFTA removes the authority of all governments to control energy exports, even in the event of domestic shortage.

An alternative resource agenda

The effect of NAFTA rules for resource trade will significantly increase pressures to exploit diminishing resources while undermining the ability of governments to constrain these forces. Indeed, it would be difficult to devise rules of trade that would be more damaging to the prospects of sustainable development. That NAFTA could seek to entrench such unsustainable resource policies, is a testament to the undemocratic way in which this trade agreement was negotiated by administrations that are distinguished by their indifference to the ecological problems that loom ahead.

If trade agreements are to foster rather than undermine efforts to achieve sustainable resource management objectives, they must preserve and even enhance the regulatory prerogatives of governments, not strive to eliminate them. In the area of resources management this means:

1. Preserving the authority of governments to regulate resource exports through quantitative or price controls, for the purposes of conservation or community economic development;

2. Preserving the authority of governments to adopt preferential purchasing policies intended to encourage innovation in efficiency and conservation technologies;

3. Preserving the authority of governments to support, or to provide incentives for, efficiency and conservation measures such as least-cost utility planning and;

4. Removing the special status given government subsidies to oil and gas energy mega-projects.

It is critical that the serious contradictions that exist between the policies of free trade and those needed to ensure the sustainable management of vital natural resources be addressed before they are enshrined in international trade agreements.

- Steven Shrybman, staff member of the

Canadian Environmental Law Association

At the time, NAFTA critics argued that side agreements could not possibly cure the fundamental problems with the overall agreement - but they certainly expected the side agreements to go further than they ultimately did. NAFTA analysts have generally described the environmental side agreement as more far-reaching than the Labor Agreement, but careful scrutiny of the Environmental Agreement shows that it is essentially toothless.

Toothless enforcement

The centerpiece of the Environmental Agreement is the creation of a North American Environmental Commission, which will have some minimal power to sanction countries that engage in persistent pattern of refusal to enforce their own environmental laws. But, as even Mexico�s top trade negotiator has acknowledged, the procedures the Commission will have to follow before it will be able to levy fines or other sanctions are so tortured that there is little chance the Commission will ever impose sanctions.

In what the Journal of Commerce called "an apparent attempt to address concerns about national sovereignty and the amount of fines that may accrue to Mexico under the agreement," Mexican Commerce Secretary Serra Puche told the Mexican Congress in August 1993 that "the time frame of the process makes it very improbable that the stage of sanction could be reached."

The actual enforcement process is so complicated it almost defies description.

First, if a country appears to be engaging in a pattern of non enforcement of its environmental laws, the complaining country must conduct informal consultations to try and resolve the problem. If the informal consultations do not bear fruit, a country may ask for a meeting of the Commission. The Commission can make recommendations on how the involved countries (known as parties) should resolve the dispute, but its recommendations can only be made public on a two-thirds vote. If, after 60 days, the Commission has not resolved the dispute, any of the parties may make a written request for an arbitration panel to judge the merits of the complaint, but the panel can only be convened on a two-thirds vote of the Commission. The panel is to deliberate for 6 months, but non-governmental organizations are not allowed to make submissions. After the 6-month deliberation, the panel is to publish an initial report; after a 30-day comment period and within 60 days of its initial report, the panel is to publish a final report. The panel�s final report is then delivered to the parties and the Commission. If the panel concluded that there has been a persistent pattern of non-enforcement, then the parties are obligated to devise an Action Plan to resolve the problem. If no Action Plan is agreed on, or the complaining party is not satisfied with it, the complaining party can request that the panel be reconvened - but it must do so within a two-month period, or begin the process all over again. Only at this point can the panel impose monetary fines.

As attenuated as this process is, a country can only invoke it in a limited number of situations:

o The Commission can only review the repeated failure to effectively enforce existing law. Major environmental problems caused by the lack of regulation in an area are not in any way reviewable.

o The Commission can only impose sanctions when a government fails to "effectively enforce" its laws. But government agencies are almost always given discretion about how to enforce a particular law, which means the "effectively enforce" standard is extremely subjective and difficult to meet.

o The Commission can only take action if a country engages in a persistent pattern of nonenforcement. But because the Environmental Agreement defines "persistent" in very vague terms, it creates a huge loophole by which countries will be able to argue that their non-enforcement of a law has not been persistent.

A narrow vision

Perhaps more important than the ineffectiveness of the Environmental Agreement�s enforcement mechanism is its narrow conception of the "environment." Because the side agreement treats the issue of the environment so narrowly, it fails even to address most of the criticisms raised by environmental critics of NAFTA. Here is a sampling of some of the fatal flaws with NAFTA that the Environmental Agreement ignores:

o NAFTA does not include provisions to protect a country�s ability to maintain environmental, health or safety product standards that may have a disparate impact on foreign producers of the product.

o NAFTA fails to recognize that from an environmental and social perspective, laws regulating how a product is produced are as important as those regulating the products themselves. Only by recognizing process-based trade restrictions as legitimate will governments retain their ability to keep domestic standards high without placing domestic producers at a competitive disadvantage. Laws that restrict the import of products made with CFCs or timber harvested in an unsustainable fashion, for example, could be subject to challenge under NAFTA.

o NAFTA allows state and local environmental, health and other laws which are more stringent than NAFTA-approved standards to be challenged as illegal trade barriers or practices.

o While the text of NAFTA notes "that it is inappropriate to encourage investment by relaxing domestic health, safety or environmental measures," it does nothing to prevent this from happening.

o NAFTA prevents the United States, Canada and Mexico from controlling the export of natural resources, a prerequisite to implementing and administering sustainable resource management programs.

o International environmental agreements that depend on trade sanctions for enforcement could conflict with NAFTA. Only the international environmental treaties governing protection of the ozone layer, endangered species and the waste trade are given protection under NAFTA. In other cases, NAFTA may preclude the United States, Canada or Mexico from imposing a trade sanction on one of the other NAFTA signatory countries as part of an international environmental agreement.

o The NAFTA dispute panel provisions fail to provide citizens from the United States, Canada and Mexico with the means to obtain information from, and participate in, resolution of trade disputes concerning environmental, conservation, health and safety matters.

o The use of government procurement as a means to encourage the growth of markets in environmentally friendly products (for example, recycled paper, energy efficient lights, solar panels) is an important environmental tool. But environmental preferential purchasing policies are vulnerable to challenge under NAFTA.

o NAFTA includes no provisions to protect family farmers, who play a central role in promoting sustainable agricultural techniques. If family farmers - in all three countries - are forced to compete with cheaper imports, they will have to intensify their use of pesticides and other environmentally harmful practices or go out of business.

o While the Environmental Agreement does partially address environmental problems on the United States-Mexico border, its terms are vague. And while the agreement does contain provisions for the cleanup of water and municipal waste, it does not deal with other key issues such as toxic cleanup, conservation and smokestack emissions.

- This article is based on an analysis by Public Citizen.

According to NAFTA�s supporters, poverty is the main cause of environmental degradation in Mexico. Although they admit that there are problems with both environmental legislation and prevailing standards there, they consider the challenges primarily technical and financial. The budget of Mexico�s environmental agency is too low; there are not enough trained personnel; and the country still lacks state-of-the-art environmental technology.

NAFTA, they assert, will solve all of these problems. It will make Mexico a richer country, which in turn will create the financial resources to clean up the environment and prevent further degradation of the natural-resource base. An increased budget will mean better oversight and enforcement, because more personnel can be trained and hired to ensure that the law is observed. Consultants from Canada and the United States can provide much-needed technology for natural resource management and conservation.

Human costs of economic change

What these NAFTA supporters ignore, however, is that it is precisely the NAFTA-style economic reforms implemented in Mexico over the past 10 years that have accelerated growing poverty and environmental degradation.

Ask the maquiladora workers who have to drink water from polluted sources, the Tarahumara Indians who can no longer benefit from their forests because of massive deforestation by lumber companies, the coastal fishers who have been hurt by Pemex�s oil drilling, or the millions of Mexico City residents whose health-care costs have risen dramatically due to air pollution. Large portions of Mexico�s population are being seriously hurt by the county�s economic liberalization program. NAFTA will only accelerate these trends and strengthen the government�s unwillingness to tackle them.

The other major factor leading to massive environmental degradation in Mexico is the authoritarian nature of a 64-year old one-party state that does not feel compelled to implement laws or to permit significant citizen oversight. The Mexican government has repeatedly promised progress in these areas, but given the record of the Salinas administration, the Mexican people remain rightfully skeptical.

Without a true democratization of Mexican society, billions of dollars and rivers of ink will be wasted before any real progress is made.

Meanwhile, independent environmental organizations in Mexico face the problem of very limited access to information. Environmental impact assessments of major projects financed with World Bank and other loans are very rarely published in Mexico for public scrutiny. Grassroots organizations thus have to turn to colleagues in Washington to obtain this information.

Even when evidence of ecological destruction is in hand, it is unlikely that the Mexican government will be responsive unless pressure comes from outside the country. And even then, as the controversies over NAFTA have demonstrated, the Salinas administration will respond only with limited, short-term measures unrelated to the structural problems that must be addressed.

For example, more than a year after the deadly explosions in the Guadalajara sewage system, no one has yet been prosecuted, despite Salinas� pledge that those responsible would be punished.

When it finds it useful, the Salinas administration has invoked the issue of sovereignty, casting itself, for example, as Mexico�s defender against the attacks of ecological imperialists. That sovereignty was sacrificed a decade ago, however, when Mexico opened its doors wide and gave what has become increasingly free rein to foreign corporations.

The issue of sovereignty is but a ruse. The Mexican government is on the offensive because, after decades of unrestricted use of public funds and violations of the public trust, it simply refuses to be held accountable to its own people.

In Mexico, as in most of the countries of the South that have adopted programs of privatization and deregulation simultaneously, wealth and power have become more dramatically concentrated and the majority of the people are more alienated than ever from their government. NAFTA, unless drastically overhauled, would only serve to perpetuate these frightening trends and leave a privileged few free to continue their manipulation of Mexico�s natural and political environments for private gain.

- By Carlos A. Heredia, director of international programs at

Equipo Pueblo. This article originally appeared in

The Miami Herald/International Edition, July 5, 1993

by Patti Goldman

INTERNATIONAL TRADE AGREEMENTS are not simply about tariffs anymore. Although they do seek to eliminate tariffs and quantitative trade restrictions, they also prohibit what are called nontariff trade barriers.

Under this concept, trade challenges have been mounted in recent years against domestic health and environmental laws that had previously been thought to be the province of domestic law. Regulations designed to reduce tobacco use, to promote fuel economy, to inspect milk production for health reasons and to institute effective recycling programs have been challenged as unfair trade barriers. Trade concerns have also been raised in connection with domestic standard setting, such as the U.S. nutritional labeling program, policies with respect to carcinogenic residues to be permitted in foods, the establishment of tolerances for particular pesticide residues and a phaseout of asbestos. Some of these challenges have led to weaker health and environmental measures, resulting in more cigarette exports to, and consumption in, several Asian countries, the invalidation of reusable bottle requirements of Denmark �s recycling program, and a regulation permitting residues of a suspected carcinogenic pesticide in imported wine.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) furthers this trend in two principle ways. First, it requires the United States , Mexico and Canada to "harmonize" (make equivalent) their food safety and technical standards in accordance with certain processes set forth in the Agreement. Second, it prescribes rules that such measures must meet in order not to be considered unfair trade barriers. If disputes arise under these provisions, NAFTA establishes a secret dispute settlement process in which unelected trade bureaucrats will determine the viability of the challenged measures with no input from domestic proponents of the measures and little, if any, input from scientific or technical experts.

Lowering standards

NAFTA furthers a recent trend toward harmonization of domestic health and environmental standards. It would require the United States, Mexico and Canada to use international standards as a basis for their own standards. Since the international standards are generally developed in secret with extensive industry input but no public oversight or participation, they are often weaker than U.S. standards.

By mandating that domestic standards be based on international ones, NAFTA may curb innovative responses to health, safety and environmental problems. After all, its purpose is to create uniformity in such standards. But uniformity prevents a country from being a leader in devising new, more hard-hitting solutions.

NAFTA creates additional, strong incentives for countries to adopt international standards. Any domestic standards that provide greater public health protection than pertinent international standards must comply with several pages of NAFTA rules. To avoid the need to justify a stronger standard, and possibly defend it against a trade challenge, a country may follow the path of least resistance and simply adopt the international standard.

Not only does NAFTA require the use of international standards as a basis for domestic ones, it requires the signatory countries to make their standards "compatible" to the greatest extent practicable, and to make their food safety standards "equivalent" or, where appropriate, identical. Some types of standards, such as truck drivers� medical standards, truck and bus brake standards, automobile emissions requirements and rules pertaining to the transportation of hazardous cargo, must be harmonized within a specified number of years (between one and six) of NAFTA�s adoption.

Because the United States has stronger standards than other countries, particularly in the areas of truck safety, automobile emissions and exposure to cancer-causing pesticides in food, the only way for the United States to harmonize such standards is downward. Even if a standard still seeks to guard against the same risk, it can be significantly weakened by using less effective means to get there. For example, a pesticide ban may be replaced by a rule permitting small residues of the pesticide, or mandatory labeling may be supplanted by a voluntary labeling requirement, or a ban on a harmful product may give way to precautionary measures.

Downward harmonization is made all the more likely because of the way that harmonized standards will be developed under NAFTA. Committees, composed of representatives of each country, will establish harmonized standards. However, these committees need not involve the public in their proceedings. There is no open meeting requirement, no right of access to their records, no requirement that the public be afforded an opportunity to comment on proposed standards. In this respect, these committees diverge sharply from U.S. lawmaking or rulemaking processes.

When a harmonized standard is agreed upon by these committees, there will be enormous pressure for the United States to adopt the standard. And, if the U.S. federal government does so, the states will also be expected to fall in line. Indeed, NAFTA requires the U.S. federal government to take all necessary measures to ensure state and local government compliance with NAFTA�s food safety provisions, and to seek to do the same for other nonfood standards. Many U.S. national health and environmental laws permit states to adopt more stringent regulatory requirements. For example, states may ban harmful pesticide residues or the use of dangerous pesticides that are permitted under federal law. Under NAFTA, stronger state standards are vulnerable to attack as nontariff trade barriers.

The attack on health, safety and environmental measures: targeting aspirations

NAFTA constrains domestic standard setting in three principal ways. First, it imposes some limitations on the goals that the countries can legitimately pursue. Second, it limits the means that may be used to achieve those goals. Third, it requires countries to permit some imports that do not comply with domestic standards.

In contrast to the standards and food safety provisions developed in the Uruguay Round of negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade , NAFTA generally permits the United States, Mexico and Canada to establish the levels of protection afforded by their food safety and technical standards. However, this general guarantee is subject to the condition that there may not be unjustifiable distinctions in the levels of protection afforded in different circumstances that result in discrimination against imports or a disguised trade restriction.

There is little consistency in the levels of protection provided by U.S. standards dealing with various exposures to pesticides, let alone those dealing with pesticides on the one hand, and food additives, microbiological contamination, and food irradiation on the other, particularly when state standards are part of the calculus. The same is true with technical standards addressing such diverse matters as recycling, air bags, heart valves, prescription drugs, products containing ozone-depleting chemicals, hazardous shipments and toxic chemical bans. These distinctions may result more from the laws� different historical or political origins than from rational policymaking. Some of these distinctions may well have a disproportionate impact on imports, which the exporters will surely claim is unjustifiable. If such arguments are successful, the latitude that NAFTA gives countries in setting their levels of protection will be seriously constrained.

In addition, food safety standards must be based on scientific principles, may not be maintained where there is no longer a scientific basis for them and must be based on risk assessments. Here are two examples of what this "scientific" standard may mean in practice:

o The Delaney Clause of the U.S. Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, which prohibits the use of carcinogenic food additives in certain foods and carcinogenic color additives in all foods, is the result of a congressional determination made more than 30 years ago that carcinogens should not be introduced into the food supply in the face of their uncertain effects on human health. Industry groups have criticized the scientific basis for the Delaney Clause as outmoded, and other countries have attacked it as an unfair trade barrier. Under NAFTA, a trade panel (composed of trade experts more sympathetic to industry�s desire to have free access to international markets than to public health protections) will decide whether the Delaney Clause has a sufficient scientific basis to pass muster under the terms of the trade agreement.

o In 1986, California voters adopted Proposition 65, a referendum that prohibits knowingly and intentionally exposing anyone to chemicals that are listed by the State of California as causing cancer or reproductive toxic effects, without providing a clear and reasonable warning. As a popular referendum, Proposition 65 may be vulnerable to claims that it was not "based on scientific principles" or a risk assessment.

These examples illustrate the effects NAFTA�s scientific basis requirements may have on cutting-edge food safety regulation, such as food irradiation, biotechnology and the use of growth hormones in beef production. Where the scientific evidence is not yet in, a country may choose to follow the precautionary principle and protect its citizens from possible, but uncertain, harm. NAFTA imposes limits on the extent to which countries can take action in the face of such scientific uncertainties.

The attack on health, safety and environmental measures: targeting the tools

Often, the domestic laws that provide the greatest health, safety and environmental protection impose more restrictions on trade than less effective alternatives. As a result, the most effective domestic protections are the most apt to be challenged as unfair trade barriers.

If trade agreements permit such challenges, they erect another obstacle to overcome in instituting strong domestic health, safety and environmental regulations. Such challenges put trade dispute resolution panels in the position of second-guessing the judgments made by domestic lawmakers and regulators. Recognizing that trade panels are more likely to be receptive to their economic objections, opponents of health, safety and environmental measures will gladly bring their arguments to a trade panel.

NAFTA invites such challenges. Several of its provisions enable challengers to question whether a particular trade restriction is necessary to promote legitimate domestic objectives. For example, food safety measures may be "applied only to the extent necessary to achieve [the country�s] appropriate level of protection, taking into account technical and economic feasibility." Under this provision, a pesticide ban could be challenged on the ground that permitting trace residues would provide the same level of protection as a ban. The bill that would establish the U.S. Circle of Poisons Prevention Act, which would ban the export of certain hazardous pesticides, might be challenged on the ground that prohibiting and monitoring for residues of the pesticides on imported foods would achieve the desired public health protection. Or, mandatory nutritional labeling to provide consumers information about potentially harmful food additives, such as salt, MSG, sulfites or nitrites, could be attacked on theory that voluntary labeling would suffice or that not all foods need to be covered by mandatory requirements.

Similarly, under NAFTA, nonfood health, safety and environmental measures may not create unnecessary obstacles to trade. More specifically, if a standard operates to exclude an imported product, NAFTA requires that the import be permitted if the product satisfies the standard�s legitimate objective.

The impact of this provision is illustrated by the trade-based arguments presented by the Government of Canada in an amicus brief filed in a court challenge to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency�s phaseout of asbestos. Canada contended that a less restrictive alternative would involve banning the most harmful type of asbestos, while still permitting the use with restrictions of less harmful types of asbestos, which are produced principally in Canada. The court decided the case on domestic law grounds without reaching the trade issues. Under NAFTA, however, Canada would succeed in such a trade challenge, if it could show that banning imports of the Canadian type of asbestos is not necessary to achieve the legitimate public health objective of the phaseout.

Many recycling programs might also be considered "unnecessary obstacles to trade." Recently, the United States objected to an Ontario taxing scheme that imposes higher taxes on recyclable beer cans than on reusable ones because it results in higher overall taxes on U.S. beer, much of which is exported to Canada in cans, than on Canadian beer, most of which is sold in bottles, in part, it is argued, because the Canadian manufacturers have already made the transition to less wasteful containers. Because these measures may have the effect of excluding noncomplying imports, they could be attacked as restricting trade more than is necessary to achieve their legitimate goals.

In addition, although NAFTA specifies that obligations under certain international environmental agreements prevail in the event of a conflict with NAFTA, it requires the United States, Mexico and Canada to use the means of complying with such obligations that are the least inconsistent with other NAFTA provisions. The United States has gone beyond its mandatory obligations under both the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora in ways that severely restrict trade, e.g., bans on certain CFC chemicals and trade in endangered species. These bans would be vulnerable under the least-inconsistent-with-NAFTA test.

A final way that NAFTA affects the means available to achieve legitimate goals is in its distinction between product standards and regulation of the method of producing the product. Trade may be restricted as part of regulation of the processing methods only to the extent that the methods relate to characteristics of the product, as in the case of sanitation standards for food processing. NAFTA does not permit import restrictions because of adverse effects of the production process on health or the environment.

A recent trade challenge under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) illustrates the types of laws that may be undermined by this trade rule. Mexico challenged a U.S. tuna embargo imposed because the method of catching the tuna resulted in the incidental killing of dolphins in excess of the amount permitted under U.S. law. The panel found the embargo inconsistent with GATT because it restricted trade in a product (tuna) because of a process (the method of catching the tuna) that was unrelated to the quality of the end product. It also considered the embargo contrary to GATT because it sought to protect animal life and a resource outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States. NAFTA does nothing to prevent trade rules from undermining U.S. extraterritorial or process regulations, which could be devastating to U.S. attempts to protect the global commons and endangered species.

The attack on health, safety and environmental measures: targeting import restrictions

NAFTA requires the United States, Canada and Mexico to permit imports from other NAFTA signatory countries that have different, but equivalent, standards or processes. This requirement invites wholesale circumvention of domestic law. The U.S. Congress may establish a standard or an agency may promulgate regulations prescribing the conformity assessment procedures that will be used, yet an agency may nonetheless permit imports that do not comply with those laws. This would be done under the amorphous concept of equivalency, which calls for a subjective comparison of different standards without any clear guidelines for the process to undertake or the factors that must be considered.

For example, under the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) decided that Canadian meat inspection procedures were equivalent to those of the United States, even though the U.S. tests end products for listeria contamination, while Canada regulates the work environment in which the food is processed, and the equivalency study did not assess the Canadian system�s control or testing for drugs approved for use in Canada but not in the United States. Pursuant to its equivalency determination, the U.S. ceased inspecting all Canadian meat imports in 1989, and instead instituted a cursory reinspection system designed not to ensure that the meat imports met U.S. standards, but rather to ensure that Canada maintained its equivalent inspection system. The General Accounting Office criticized the relaxed border inspections, contending that USDA documentation did not support the conclusion that the Canadian meat inspection was equivalent to the U.S. system. Meat inspectors complained that Canadian producers were taking advantage of the cursory reinspections and shipping contaminated meat. Under this system, the rejection rate dropped by half.

Equivalency determinations made under NAFTA may have serious health implications. Thus, since 1982, as the number of steers imported from Mexico into the United States has increased nearly fourfold, the incidence of tuberculosis has increased substantially, with most traced cases being linked to Mexican cattle. In addition, from 1984 to 1988, imports of Mexican meat to the United States were prohibited because they had not met U.S. standards. Since 1989, USDA has certified several plants, and meat exports to the United States have grown. Given past problems with Mexican meat exports, an equivalency determination could raise serious health issues.

Equivalency is an inexact concept that can mean different things to different decisionmakers. As the Canadian meat inspection example illustrates, controversial public health determinations underlie equivalency determinations, yet NAFTA, like the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement, entitles countries to such a determination, even on an expeditious basis, without requiring the assessment of every potentially significant public health issue or every inspection process.

NAFTA also requires that the United States, Mexico and Canada make each other subject to the same food safety inspection procedures. This is so even if there has been a legitimate reason for treating the country differently. For example, the United States has established special inspection procedures for Mexican produce because it has higher DDT residues than domestic produce and than permitted under U.S. law. Under NAFTA, the U.S. may be required to discontinue these inspections, which would allow more foods with DDT residues onto U.S. dinner tables.

Stacking the deck

Not only do NAFTA�s terms threaten the standards adopted by federal or state governments to achieve health, safety and environmental goals, but when disputes arise, they will be resolved through a dispute settlement process that is stacked against consumer and environmental interests. The decisionmakers are trade experts, who are unlikely to be schooled in or sympathetic to health, safety and environmental regulations. Moreover, NAFTA mandates that dispute settlement proceedings take place entirely in secret; it even bars countries from making their own submissions available to the public under freedom of information laws. There is also no mechanism for domestic proponents of the measure to defend it by filing friend-of-the-court briefs or even by scrutinizing and highlighting flaws in the defense mounted by their government, since those submissions are required by NAFTA to be kept secret. Therefore, if NAFTA is approved, its effect on domestic standards will be in the hands of politically unaccountable panels operating behind closed doors.

These panels would wield significant power. If a NAFTA panel finds that a domestic measure violates NAFTA, and the country does not change its measure within 30 days, the challenging country would be entitled to retaliate against the defending country�s imports. No prior authorization is required for retaliatory trade sanctions, as is the case under GATT. Thus, if Mexico had brought its challenge to the U.S. tuna embargo under NAFTA, it could have refused U.S. imports equivalent in amount to the embargoed tuna until such time as the United States removed the tuna embargo. In other words, NAFTA may force countries literally to pay a penalty for having effective health, safety and environmental standards, and thereby make strong protections too costly to afford.

Raising drug prices

Canada�s 1969 Patent Act allowed Canadian companies to sell less expensive, generic versions of patented medicines. The system, known as compulsory licensing, compels pharmaceutical companies to license competitors to copy their inventions in return for payment of a royalty. It has long been used in Britain, Canada and throughout the developing world to serve the public good while still acknowledging private rights. From 1991 to 1992 alone, Canadians saved between $413 and $426 million in drug costs thanks to the availability of compulsory licensed drugs and off-patent generic medicines.

Mexico used to permit national firms to copy chemical and pharmaceutical products patented abroad. But the United States put pressure on Mexico to change its law by withdrawing preferential tariff treatment from Mexican exports of chemical products. In 1991, Mexico changed its law to give multinational corporations 20 years of patent rights.

Although the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement contains no chapter on intellectual property, a commitment to pass Bill C-22, weakening Canada�s system of compulsory licensing of pharmaceuticals, was clearly part of the deal. Bill C-22 established a period of exclusive protection for pharmaceutical patents of seven to 10 years measured from the date the drug receives clearance for public sale.

In February 1993, the Canadian parliament passed Bill C-91 as an accompaniment to NAFTA and as a replacement for Bill C-22. Bill C-91 applies a 20- year period of exclusive monopoly protection to pharmaceutical patents. C-91 will abolish Canada�s compulsory licensing system and could cost Canadians as much as $7 billion over the period 1993 to 2010.

The Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association of Canada maintains that its member firms will invest substantially in new research and development (R& D) and manufacturing in Canada because of the improved investment climate created by the passage of Bill C-91. In 1992, PMAC member companies� R& D spending represented 10.5 percent of sales, an improvement on the 1988 R& D-to-sales ratio of 6.5 percent, but a ratio that still fell short of the international standard of 16 percent. But while promising an improvement in R& D investment, PMAC chairperson Judy Erola has stated that Bill C-91 only brought Canada up to the minimum standard set by other countries and still did not provide sufficient incentive to bring Canadian pharmaceutical R& D up to the international standard of 16 percent.

Privatizing Life

One of the most controversial applications of intellectual property rights involves the patenting of plants, animals, genetic material and even inventions derived from the human body. The ethical and social issues of patenting genetically engineered life forms has been debated much more extensively in Europe and the Third World than in North America. But while many of the issues concerning the consequences of patenting life forms have yet to be resolved, the biotechnology industry is pressing hard for immediate recognition of patents on genetic discoveries, plants, animals and even inventions derived from human beings.

The NAFTA negotiations presented an opportunity for the biotechnology industry to set new precedents covering protection for genetic engineering processes and products. The U.S. Industrial Biotechnology Association, representing more than 80 percent of U.S. companies investing in biotechnology R& D, successfully lobbied the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to use the NAFTA talks to win changes to a section of Mexico�s 1991 industrial property law excluding life forms from patent protection.

The Bush and Clinton administrations have made it clear that in order to be eligible for entrance into trade treaties with the United States such as NAFTA, governments must first sign bilateral investment and intellectual property treaties with the United States. The draft intellectual property treaty clearly states that "all inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology" must be considered as patentable subject matter.n

- Based on Intellectual Property Rights in NAFTA: Implications

for Health Care and Industrial Policy in Ontario, a report by the

Ecumenical Coalition for Economic Justice, October 1993.

NUMBER OF PESTICIDES THAT HAVE BEEN BANNED IN THE UNITED STATES BUT ARE STILL LEGAL FOR USE IN MEXICO: 17 (INCLUDING DDT)

PERCENTAGE OF CROSS BORDER FOOD SHIPMENTS THAT ARE INSPECTED FOR PESTICIDE RESIDUES BY THE US CUSTOMS SERVICE: 1 PERCENT

PERCENTAGE OF FOOD IMPORTS WHICH FAIL TO MEET THE FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION�S TESTS: 40 PERCENT

Source: the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

by Andrew Reding and Christopher Whalen

IN 1991, PERUVIAN NOVELIST MARIO VARGAS LLOSA scandalized the Mexican political establishment by describing Mexico as "the perfect dictatorship." "The perfect dictatorship is not communism, not the Soviet Union, not Cuba, but Mexico, because it is a camouflaged dictatorship," he argued. "It may not seem to be a dictatorship, but it has all of the characteristics of a dictatorship; the perpetuation, not of one person, but of an irremovable party, a party that allows sufficient space for criticism, provided such criticism serves to maintain the appearance of a democratic party, but which suppresses by all means, including the worst, whatever criticism may threaten its perpetuation in power."

The last several years, when a democratic opposition has struggled to emerge in Mexico, have tested the "perfect dictatorship." Unfortunately, put to the test, the Mexican government and the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) have proven Vargas� claim true.

Approaching the 1988 presidential elections, the ruling establishment expected its choice, Carlos Salinas, to win the presidency by a safe margin. But a groundswell of support for opposition leader Cuauhtemoc Cardenas caught the PRI off guard.

As a result, the PRI had to resort to extraordinary measures to maintain its grip on power. The government computers used to tally the 1988 vote mysteriously failed on election eve and the actual documentation has never been released, but available evidence strongly suggests that Cardenas won some 42 percent of the vote compared to 36 percent for Salinas. The government withheld results for more than a week while Cardenas ballots were burned and the PRI vote was inflated by party "alchemists" to produce a convenient 50 percent majority for Salinas.

Proponents of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) conveniently overlook the fact that the legitimacy of one of the signatories to the agreement is at best highly questionable. When forced to concede that there may be some irregularities in the Mexican electoral process, and in human rights conditions more generally, they argue that closer integration of Mexico into the North American economy will bring a democratic scrutiny that will provide an impetus for reform within the country.

But the 1991 Mexican mid-term elections, which took place in the shadow of the NAFTA negotiations, suggest otherwise. While many foreign observers graded the 1991 elections as relatively clean, domestic observers and participants knew otherwise. A close examination of the election shows that fraud, intimidation and rigged procedures were as widespread as ever.

Rigging the rules

In the 1991 elections, the PRI used the institutions it controlled to tilt the field in its favor. The president and the PRI hold a 13 to 8 majority on the General Counsel of the Federal Electoral Institute. The conditions, as well as the results, of the 1991 elections reflected this lopsided composition. During the campaign, the Federal Electoral Institute:

o Withheld voter identification cards from localities known to favor the opposition (these areas were previously identified by direct PRI door-to-door surveys of neighborhoods);

o Delayed disclosure of voter registration lists until well after legally-mandated dates, making verification virtually impossible;

o Allowed the ruling party exclusive use of the national colors and a similar red, white and green symbol for the government�s "Solidarity" program of grants and handouts for the poor;

o Prevented Mexican nationals living in the United States and other countries from voting, because of presumed sympathies for the opposition;

o Permitted the ruling party to enjoy a near-monopoly of television and radio time. Televisa, for instance, was allowed to set its prime-time rates for political advertising at $77,000-$107,000 per minute, high enough to exclude all parties except the PRI from national television.

Government control on election day was extremely tight in every state but Baja California. It was typical to find polls administered exclusively by members of the ruling party. Poll manipulation was widespread throughout the country.

A recent study of state electoral boards released by UNAM (National Autonomous University) in Mexico City revealed that the number of registered voters in San Luis Potosi dropped from almost 90 percent of eligible residents in 1988 to 76 percent last August. In just this one state, more than one quarter million Mexican citizens were deprived of their right to vote.

The "clean election"

The federal and state elections held in the northern border-state of Nuevo Leon in July 1991 were generally considered among the cleanest, least fraudulent elections in recent memory. Foreign press accounts and even Mexican news reports praised the Salinas government for "allowing" what seemed to be free and fair elections. Yet in an inspection tour of 20 polls in metropolitan Monterrey (the state capital), foreign observers encountered widespread irregularities.

In every case the local poll president and secretary belonged to the PRI. Roughly one in three polling locations visited turned out to be at the home of a PRI member. Later, upon examining the two volumes of official results from the gubernatorial and state congressional elections in Nuevo Leon, evidence of systematic fraud was readily apparent.

In the gubernatorial race, for instance, there were 123 precincts where the number of votes cast exceeded the number of persons registered to vote. In 63 of those, an effort had been made to compensate for the overenthusiasm of the ballot-stuffers by subsequently annulling enough ballots to drop beneath the number of registered voters. In another 43, generally urban, locations where the opposition National Action Party (PAN) is strong, there had been massive annulments (sometimes more than 50 percent) of ballots, often resulting in PRI landslides.

In rural areas, hard-hit by government policies that have forced down prices for agricultural commodities, the PRI nonetheless pretended to have obtained an extraordinary 100 percent of the vote in scores of localities, often with equally fantastic claims of near-100 percent voter turnouts. In fact, such shut-outs were by far the most frequent occurrence in rural Nuevo Leon, followed by locations in which the PRI claimed 99 percent of the vote, then 98 percent, etc. A sampling of 277 polls in four rural districts in Nuevo Leon found an incredible 62 polls reported 100 percent support for the ruling party. None of the polls in the sample reported lower than 64 percent vote for the PRI.

Similar results were uncovered in other states. In the gubernatorial race in Guanajuato, the PAN found 506 precincts (out of 3000 examined) in which the number of votes cast exceeded the number of registered voters, and another 597 with shut-outs (zero votes for the opposition) or near shut-outs (one to five votes for the opposition). In the governor�s race in San Luis Potosi, opposition poll watchers were barred from entering about half the polling places, making a reliable parallel count altogether impossible.

During a late 1991 visit to Washington, Sergio Aguayo of the Mexican Academy of Human Rights said that in San Luis Potosi the conditions for a free and fair election were absent: "In the first place, the local media were completely biased in favor of the PRI candidate. Second, there was an enormous disproportion in the economic resources available to the PRI and opposition candidates. Third, voter registration was defective and worked against the opposition. As for election day, we found irregularities in 54 percent of the polls. ... With the evidence we obtained, we were unable to determine who won. The only certainty was that this was not a free and fair election."

The official results of the summer 1991 elections reflect both the means by which they were secured and the effective lock the ruling party has on the electoral system. The PRI took 290 of 300 directly-elected seats in the Chamber of Deputies; 31 of 32 Senate races; all 40 directly-elected seats in the Representative Assembly of the Federal District; and all seven governorships. Although President Salinas asked the "governors-elect" of Guanajuato and San Luis Potosi to "resign" for the good of the country, he has been unwilling to concede that the elections were fraudulent.

The results are even more striking in view of the fact that the single senatorship and three of the 10 congressional districts won by the opposition were in Baja, California. The only state not under PRI control (the governor�s office and state congress were won overwhelmingly by the PAN in 1989) is also the only state the PRI could not pretend to win in 1991. This illustrates an important point: without exclusive access to state funds, patronage and control of the media, the PRI is vulnerable to defeat.

In October 1991 testimony before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Relations, Douglas Payne of Freedom House in New York put the connection between the protection of human rights and expanded democracy in concise terms: "The heart of the electoral problem remains the lack of separation between the PRI and the state, and the innate structural imbalances that follow from it. In his address to the September 1990 PRI National Assembly, Salinas proclaimed that the government and party would continue to be one and the same, a reality made clear by the 1991 elections. Salinas is a deft politician, both at home and abroad, and his economic achievements are considerable. But if Mexico is to become a modern, democratic state, he must move beyond tactical concessions toward establishing the conditions for genuine multiparty politics."

Control of the electoral authorities is the key to preservation of one-party rule. That is why neither President Salinas nor his Institutional Revolutionary Party have been willing to consider any electoral reform that would create truly independent electoral commissions, as demanded by Mexico�s democratic opposition. It is also why the Salinas Administration has ruled out any possibility of inviting U.N. and Organization of American States observation teams, a practice by now routine elsewhere in the hemisphere. Were Mexico�s elections as clean as its government insists, there would be nothing to hide.

Control and intimidation of the media

An independent media could serve to combat some of the PRI�s anti-democratic practices, but the media in Mexico is independent in name only. The government succeeds in controlling the information that reaches the public through a complex system that relies on bribes, institutional coercion, threats and intimidation.

Individual reporters who insist on maintaining a critical distance from the government and covering stories that cause official embarrassment are frequently subjected to threats, intimidation and even murder, which the Mexicans call "the ultimate form of censorship." In the months preceding the 1991 elections, a number of journalists were attacked - professionally and physically - and one was murdered:

o On July 8, 1991 medical doctor and political columnist Victor Manuel Oropeza was stabbed to death in his doctor�s office in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. His assailants did not touch the almost $2,000 in cash present in his office at the time, nor anything else. Oropeza had been one of three hunger strikers who in 1986 protested the government�s stealing of the gubernatorial election from Luis Alvarez. Oropeza was a persistent critic of the "illegitimate" state government and of the Federal Judicial Police, and was contemplating initiating a new hunger strike over fraud in the preparations for the 1991 midterm elections.

The federal Attorney General�s office sent a special envoy to Chihuahua to take charge of the Oropeza case. Rather than trying to apprehend the murderers, the envoy instead sought to portray the victim as a homosexual, then accused the deceased of selling psychotropic drugs. When neither of those accusations took hold, he had two persons tortured into confessing they had murdered Oropeza in the course of an attempted burglary. The accused later denied the confessions and described the tortures to human rights groups. The Attorney General�s own human rights aide, dispatched to the scene, reported that the whole process was "ridiculous ... what we saw once again was the fabrication of guilt by torture."

o On July 5, 1991, Proceso political reporter Francisco Oritz Pinchetti, who covers Mexican elections, was kidnapped, beaten and robbed by police of the Secretariat of Protection and Traffic of the Federal District.

o On July 10, 1991, Raul Cremoux, editorialist for the daily Excelsior, was kidnapped by six heavily armed men in two cars (seemingly plain-clothed police), who threatened him and his family, holding him at gunpoint and warning that he should never again write critical articles about President Salinas. This brutal assault came after Cremoux wrote an article speculating that President Salinas might seek to amend the constitution in order to remain in office.

o On June 12, 1991 gossip columnist Manu Dornbierer of Excelsior published a column in which she stated that the president�s brothers Raul and Enrique Salinas either have obtained or will obtain 50 percent of the Hippodrome of the Americas concession for the next 25 years (the president and his brothers are avid equestrians). After a furious response by federal Attorney General Ignacio Morales Lechuga, Excelsior canceled Dornbiorer�s "La Gente" column, and declined to publish her reply to the attorney general, forcing her to give up journalism for the remainder of Carlos Salinas� tenure of the presidency.

o On March 7, 1991, Yucatan journalist Rafael Loret de Mola was summoned to the Federal District by Secretary of Government (interior minister) Fernando Gutierrez Barrios, who provided him with airline tickets and $12,000, instructing him to leave the country for three months. Loret had challenged the constitutionality of President Salinas� dismissal of Governor Victor Manzanilla after the latter had recognized the PAN�s victory in the mayor�s race in the state capital of Merida.

Human rights and democracy

Lacking the popular mandate that would result from free and fair elections, the PRI regime sustains itself through a combination of subsidies for the poor, favoritism for key businesses, subtle persuasion and bribery, and force. That the latter is usually used only as a last resort against those who cannot be persuaded or bought into conformity only magnifies its effectiveness. The pattern of officially sanctioned violence is sufficiently selective to serve as a warning to others.

A March 29, 1989 commentary in Uno Mas Uno summarized the situation in Mexico with respect to acts of lawlessness by government officials: "Many Mexicans know very well what it is to feel abused, mistreated, arrested, insulted, blackmailed, tortured and even murdered by agents who represent the state�s coercive apparatus or by common or higher court officials ... Suspicion of all forms of authority has almost been endemic and automatic for Mexicans, but what has happened over the past few years ... seems to be close to a deep crisis."

The political party that has most directly challenged the democratic legitimacy of the regime has suffered the worst repression. More than 100 members of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) have been killed by security forces, goon squads and PRI members since the 1988 presidential election. PRD mayors have been shot at, detained on trumped-up charges of drug dealing and terrorism, tortured and imprisoned.

The persistence of major human rights violations, carried out with complete impunity, is intimately linked to the lack of democratic accountability in Mexico. As long as Mexican citizens are prevented from passing judgment on their leadership in free and fair elections, such violations - to say nothing of more generalized corruption - will remain endemic.

Commenting on the rising level of violence in the southern state of Chiapas, Catholic Bishop Samuel Ruiz highlighted "the anomalies" that occurred during the August 18, 1991 balloting. Electoral fraud, he said, had transformed "people�s euphoria" into "great disappointment" culminating in massive demonstrations. The Bishop told La Jornada, "There are two signs pointing to the frightening growth in [government] repression. First, the people are increasingly aware of their rights and their historic responsibility; second, there is a growing urgency within the government to maintain order."

We initially learned of this U.S. disinformation campaign when we joined Mexican Congressmen representing all three major political parties on a NAFTA fact- finding mission. We heard repeatedly that the failure of this NAFTA in the U.S. Congress would cause political and economic chaos in Mexico and destroy U.S.-Mexican relations. That argument is false. More recently, President Salinas has been threatening a Mexican walk out on NAFTA if it is not approved as written and immediately. This position does not represent Mexican political and economic reality, it is political posturing for international and domestic election consumption.

The reality is that Mexico�s economic and political situation is mostly independent of NAFTA. The lack of democracy and the poor political policies that have been implemented in the last 65 years have driven half the population towards poverty and extreme poverty. Resolving this problem is the real issue for Mexico�s future stability. Moreover, while we support a trade agreement between our countries, many Mexicans think that this NAFTA would be a bad deal for us, in part because it will lock in our intolerable political situation.

The lack of democracy not only undermines Mexican political stability; it impairs our economy as well. An "unofficial" deal-known of quite openly in Mexico as "El Pacto"- cut between the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the PRI-controlled single national labor union has caused the real-buying power of the Mexican worker to go down by 50 percent in the past decade. Workers who try to organize independent unions are harassed, silenced, blacklisted and/or fired from their positions. As well, recent neo-liberal economic and domestic policies have devastated Mexico�s small businesses and thrown small farmers off their land.

These miserable conditions are forcing small farmers and the unemployed to migrate to the big cities, where unemployment is already high, or to migrate North to the United States in search of better living standards.

These problems are the result of lack of real democracy in Mexico. One political party, the PRI, has maintained a tight grip over every branch and level of the Mexican political scene. As a result, Mexico is not a democratic society where citizens can hold legislators accountable for their actions, fight for a decent standard of living or ensure enforcement of our laws, much less the terms of a trade agreement.

Perhaps U.S. citizens do not know how dangerous and difficult it is to voice any opposition to the PRI machinery. Over 220 of our opposition party members have been murdered since 1989. The courts have such an intimate relationship with the government that it matters little what our constitution or laws say. Such abuses have been documented by Amnesty International and Americas Watch in recent reports.

Even getting laws enforced is risky. The government�s handling of the recent grounding of the tanker, Betula, which spilled over 4,000 tons of sulfuric acid off Mexico�s west coast, demonstrates the anti-democratic and deceitful behavior that typifies the current Mexican government. Despite clear evidence of environmental damage and human health effects from the spill, the Mexican government still claims no acid was released. The government proceeded to arrest local fishers who demonstrated to obtain financial and medical help with the spill.

Why do we have this one-party mock democracy? When opposition parties, such as ours, attempt to challenge the system and win support at the national level, ballot boxes are mysteriously burned. This is precisely what happened when our PRD candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, ran against Salinas in 1988. Although impartial UN observers were denied access to monitor the elections, many international reporters and unofficial observers concluded that the elections were fraudulent. Even officially, the election was the slimmest victory margin in the history of the ruling party. Many Mexicans believe Cardenas won.

Such post electoral conflicts are the norm because the PRI has become an expert at sophisticated electoral maneuvers and sham "reform" proposals to keep its tight grip. Opposition parties and non-government agencies have demanded that political reform be introduced to achieve security among citizens in the electoral processes. Unfortunately, this security has not been achieved. For instance, the PRI maintains and has maintained a tight hand over the electoral tribunal. Under the constitution, the electoral tribunal is to be chosen by the state, not the party. The PRI also decided who has the "right" to vote and who doesn�t. For example, the PRI excludes off electoral lists citizens who might vote against the "party." These practices have allowed the PRI to maintain majority representation in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Without NAFTA it will be very difficult for Salinas to maintain his absolute political control to name his successor for the August 1994 "elections." We consider this one of the best reasons not to approve this NAFTA. We find it outrageous that U.S. trade officials have argued that a reason to vote for NAFTA is to allow Salinas to choose his successor, thus maintaining Mexican one-party rule and undermining a real democratic election here.

In July, we decided to return to Washington to clear up the misunderstandings about our country and to meet with U.S. Congresspeople. Besides clearing up the Mexico myths, we also explained our position on NAFTA and the supplemental agreements. Greater economic and cultural cooperation between our two countries needs to continue and increase. We agree with those pushing NAFTA that we live in an increasingly interdependent world and that retreating and closing our doors is not the answer. However, we feel that this NAFTA also is not the answer.

This NAFTA is a bad deal for most citizens in all three countries. The primary beneficiaries of NAFTA in Mexico will be the wealthy business leaders already reaping enormous profits from Salinas� trumpeted economic policies. The pact is not good for most Mexican workers, farmers or communities. Unfortunately, the side agreements do nothing to touch the fundamental flaws in the NAFTA text.

U.S. voters just tossed out 12 years of trickle down philosophy, but NAFTA is its international embodiment. With the Mexican presidential elections just around the corner, shouldn�t Mexican citizens have the right to decide what kind of Free Trade Agreement we want?

- by Enrique Rico, Jorge Calderon, Michael Leon, and Manuel Huerta

The Legislators are members of the Mexican opposition party,

Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

THE WIDESPREAD DENIAL of basic human rights in Mexico provides strong ammunition for NAFTA opponents. If dissidents cannot function safely in Mexico, they ask, what assurances are there that the supposed social and environmental safeguards included in the NAFTA side agreements will ever be enforced? Moreover, given the official U.S. policy of sanctioning human rights offenders, should the United States be willing to reward a Mexican government that has compiled such an awful human rights record?

Below are excerpts from the June 1993 Amnesty International report, "Mexico: The persistence of torture and impunity:"

o According to continuing reports received by Amnesty International, torture, ill- treatment and other forms of coercion are still used during the early stages of criminal investigations as a means of obtaining confessions. According to human rights monitors, torture and ill-treatment are still frequently practiced by members of the judicial police in charge of an investigation. The most frequently reported methods of torture include beatings and kicks; forcible introduction of carbonated water into the victim�s nostrils (Tehuacanazo); semi-asphyxiation with plastic bags (la bolsita); forcible submersion (pozole); and intimidation of the victim with death threats. Other methods reported to Amnesty International include electric shocks with electric prods; suspension from the wrists for prolonged periods and food deprivation.

o Despite the legislative and administrative reforms adopted by the Mexican government to prevent the use of forced confessions in criminal proceedings, such illegally obtained statements continue to be admitted by most of the courts involved in such proceedings.

o Other reforms of Mexican legislation purportedly adopted to reinforce the protection of defendant�s rights, particularly those intended to prevent arrests without warrants; to provide legal counsel from the moment of arrest and interpreters for non-Spanish speaking defendants; to provide for medical examinations of detainees; and to dismiss confessions as the sole evidence in criminal proceedings are frequently flouted.

For example, Amnesty International has continued to receive reports about non- Spanish speaking indigenous defendants who have had no access to an interpreter during their questioning by the police during their declarations before the Ministerio Publico, nor during subsequent court hearings, but who have nevertheless been remanded based on their supposed confessions.

o The victims of torture in Mexico come from most walks of life, but are usually from the poorest sectors of the population. Amnesty International has continued to receive reports of torture and other human rights violations against peasants and members of indigenous communities who often lack the power, knowledge or counseling to defend their individual rights against abusive officials. They are the most frequent victims of the ineffectiveness of the reforms adopted by the Mexican Government to prevent such abuses.

o Amnesty International continues to believe that the principal reason for the continuing practice of torture and ill-treatment in Mexico is the effective immunity from prosecution enjoyed by law enforcement agents [who engage in] torture.

o Despite legal reforms enshrined in the federal law to prevent and punish

torture, which provide for compensation for victims, Amnesty International knows of only one case where a victim of torture and gross miscarriage of justice has received satisfactory official redress.

by Charles Lewis

FROM 1989 TO THE PRESENT, Mexican government and business interests have spent at least $25 million in Washington to promote the development and enactment of NAFTA . Mexico has employed a veritable phalanx of Washington law firms, lobbyists, public relations companies and consultants. This number is conservative - the cumulative total as reported to the U.S. Department of Justice. Based on statements made to the Center for Public Integrity by the most knowledgeable Mexican NAFTA official in Washington, Mexican interests will spend an additional $5 million to $10 million to promote NAFTA in 1993, bringing Mexico�s total NAFTA-related expenditures in Washington to more than $30 million by the time the dust settles.

Ironically, this massive effort has been waged by a country not known for its financial robustness. Before 1990, Mexico�s spending on representation in Washington was mostly to promote tourism. In the context of lobbying by foreign interests on a specific issue, Mexico has mounted the most expensive, elaborate campaign ever conducted in the United States by a foreign government.

To comprehend the sheer dimension of this effort, it should be noted that to date, pro-NAFTA expenditures by Mexican interests already exceed the combined resources of the three largest, and best-known foreign lobbying campaigns waged in Washington during the past quarter century: the operations mounted by South Korea during Koreagate, by Japanese interests during the Toshiba controversy, and by Kuwait following the Iraqi invasion.

Since 1989, to achieve maximum access to the U.S. political process, Mexican interests have hired at least 33 former U.S. government officials with experience throughout the federal government, from Congress to the White House, from the State Department to the Treasury Department. Some of those former officials include:

o Bill Brock of the Brock Group . This former U.S. Trade Representative testified about trade issues before a Senate committee in 1991, made favorable comments about Mexico, but did not mention his financial ties to the Mexican government.

o Timothy Bennett of SJS Advanced Stratagies . This former Assistant U.S. Trade Representative who worked on U.S.-Mexican trade issues subsequently was retained by Mexican business interests regarding NAFTA.

o Ruth Kurtz - This former International Trade Commission and Senate trade analyst was hired by Mexican business interests. She has had frequent contact with her former Capitol Hill colleagues, and organized several all-expense-paid trips for them to Mexico.

As a part of the unprecedented NAFTA campaign, during the past two years Mexican business interests have taken at least three members of Congress, a governor, and 48 congressional staffers on a dozen separate "fact-finding" trips to Mexico.

Two high-level appointments to the Clinton Administration, Charlene Barshefsky and Daniel Tarullo, have been paid by Mexican interests to do NAFTA-related work. But those are only the most recent Mexican connections to the Clinton administration.

After Mexico discovered George Bush might not win re-election, Bill Clinton and his thinking about NAFTA suddenly gained new urgency. Mexico began talking to Clinton campaign officials in the summer of 1992. Weeks after the election, two Clinton transition officials met with Mexico President Carlos Salinas� chief of staff, and on January 9, 1993, Salinas and Clinton met in Texas. The Mexican leader was the only head of state the President-elect saw during the transition period. At least two paid lobbyists for Mexico were on the Clinton transition team:

o Joseph O�Neil of Public Strategies . This former top aid to Senator Lloyd Bentsen assisted the Treasury Secretary during the transition process. At the same time, he and his firm were on a six-figure retainer to Mexico.

o Gabrielle Guerra-Mondragon of Guerra & Associates and TKC International . This former special assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico has been lobbying the Congress on behalf of Mexico and while on retainer was also a Clinton transition advisor on national security issues.

Just as Mexican companies are aggressively promoting NAFTA, so too are U.S. companies. The U.S. business community has created a handful of new organizations and tapped some old ones to work on gaining support for the NAFTA. Because the disclosure laws are weak, it is difficult to calculate how much U.S. corporations and trade associations are spending in their effort to gain support for NAFTA. These groups are in contact with Mexican Embassy offices in Washington, and one key organization alone, USA*NAFTA, expects to spend at least $2 million.

Canada , despite its traditionally strong lobbying presence in Washington, has not been particularly aggressive or active in its efforts to promote NAFTA. Canada, of course, already has a trade agreement with the United States. Other factors that help explain Canada�s "silent partner" role in NAFTA include the political fallout that Prime Minister Brian Mulroney suffered in the aftermath of the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement and Canada�s current recession.

By any measure, the anti-NAFTA forces have been financially "out-gunned" by the Mexicans and the U.S. business community in this lobbying effort - because of the poor quality of existing public records and lax disclosure requirements it is impossible to gauge by precisely how much. But this motley collection of environmental and consumer groups, labor unions and conservative business organizations to date have spent a fraction of what NAFTA proponents have spent. In terms of grass-roots organization, NAFTA�s opponents have millions of people�s names on mailing lists, but it is unclear to what extent they have been contacted or organized regarding NAFTA. Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO has organized a few trips to Mexico for members of Congress, and three organizations which receive at least some labor money - the Economic Policy Institute, the Economic Strategy Institute and the Congressional Economic Leadership Institute - have sponsored fact-finding trips to Mexico for members of Congress. Finally, in terms of both money and organization, the entry into the fray of billionaire former presidential candidate Ross Perot has markedly shifted the power equation and makes the legislative outcome of NAFTA somewhat less predictable.

At the most superficial level, as a general matter, when huge sums of money are injected in to the political process, democracy usually becomes distorted. People or groups without the wherewithal to obtain influence and access to the corridors of power find themselves in effect disenfranchised.

Author William Greider has written about a sophisticated form of political planning he calls "deep lobbying," the purpose of which is to define public argument and debate. "It is another dimension of mock democracy - a system that has all the trappings of free and political discourse but is shaped and guided at a very deep level by the resources of the most powerful interests."

How does all of this relate to NAFTA? For starters, the debate is about something called the North American Free Trade Agreement. Not only have powerful interests managed to make their agenda America�s agenda, they�ve even been able to help define public perceptions by labeling it with a positive-sounding name.

For years, the logic, the assumptions and the seeming inevitability of NAFTA have been carefully constructed - by prominent business interests in the three respective countries, their elected, responsive government officials and their legions of paid representatives. Getting presidents and prime ministers to think and talk about NAFTA, getting the trade negotiators together to hammer out the logistics, controlling how the actual agreement will be disseminated and thus described to the public and girding for battle legislatively, all require substantial sums of money and hired Washington insiders. But for the NAFTA proponents, it has been worth it, because the parameters of the political discourse and debate have been set, leaving the other side at a serious disadvantage.

Except for some token memberships on a few trade advisory committees, the more modestly-funded anti-NAFTA forces frequently have been ignored, reduced to the reactive role of eleventh-hour yammering naysayers. Because of deep lobbying, the NAFTA opponents automatically become trivialized as almost caricature-like figures, mere props in the trading game.

In the end, not only has the massive infusion of money one again distorted democracy, it has undermined the public�s confidence and trust in the integrity of the decision-making process.

NAFTA was negotiated in secret, and by North America�s largest corporations, among them many of its worst polluters

NUMBER OF BUSINESS REPRESENTATIVES SERVING AS TRADE ADVISORS TO THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION DURING NAFTA NEGOTIATIONS: 117

NUMBER OF ENVIRONMENTAL AND CONSUMER GROUPS REPRESENTATIVES SERVING AS TRADE ADVISORS TO THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION DURING NAFTA NEGOTIATIONS: 1

NUMBER OF COMPANIES SERVING AS NAFTA ADVISORS LISTED IN EPA�S TOXIC RELEASE INVENTORY AS THE 10 BIGGEST DISCHARGERS OF HAZARDOUS WASTE IN AMERICA: 5

Source: the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

NAFTA Fact Check

AN UNPOPULAR AGENDA

When NAFTA is so unpopular, why is President Clinton so committed to it?

PERCENTAGE OF AMERICANS WHO, ACCORDING TO A JULY CNN/USA/GALLUP POLL, OPPOSE NAFTA: 65 PERCENT

LENGTH OF NAFTA TEXT: 2000 PAGES

HOURS CONGRESS HAS UNDER THE FAST-TRACK APPROVAL PROCESS TO DEBATE NAFTA: 20

AMOUNT ESTIMATED BY THE LA TIMES THAT THE MEXICAN GOVERNMENT WILL SPEND LOBBYING FOR NAFTA: $100 MILLION

From: the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

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Washington, DC 20036

815 16th Street, NW

Washington, DC 20036

Worker Network

7435 Nichigan Avenue

Detroit, MI 48210

Communications About NAFTA

PeaceNet

18 DeBoom Street

San Francisco, CA 94107

110 Maryland Ave., NE, Suite 307

Washington, DC 20002

United States

2100 L Street, NW

Washington, DC 20037

1436 U Street, NW

Washington, DC 20009

927 15th Street, NW, 4th Floor

Washington, DC 20005

Maquiladoras

3120 West Ashby Street

San Antonio, TX 78228

8124 West Third Street, Suite 212

Los Angeles, CA 90048

Free Trade

Calle Godard 20

Colonia Guadelupe Victoria

Mexico, D.F.

07790 MEXICO

Apartado Postal 27-467

Mexico, D.F. 06760

MEXICO

804 - 251 Laurier Ave. W.

Ottawa, ON K1P 5J6

CANADA

Association

517 College Street, Suite 401

Toronto, ON M6G 4A2

CANADA

Alternatives

904 - 251 Laurier Ave. W.

Ottawa, ON K1P 5J6

CANADA

1730 Rhode Island Ave., NW, Suite 200

Washington, DC 20036

1800 Guadelupe, Suite B

Austin, TX 78701

Trade Policy

1315 5th Street, SE, Suite 303

Minneapolis, MN 55414-1546

1910 K Street, NW

Washington, DC 20006

1317 F Street, NW, Suite 600

Washington, DC 20004

1911 Pennsylvania Ave., NW

Washington, DC 20006

and Impunity

New York: Amnesty International, 1993

By Andrew Reding

and Christopher Whalen

Washington: World Policy Institute, 1993

New York: Institute for Alternative Journalism, 1993

Care and Industrial Policy in Ontario

Toronto: Ecumenical Coalition for Economic Justice, October 1993

Factories on the Move

By Harry Browne and Beth Sims

Albuquerque, NM: Resource Center Press, 1993

Corporate Power

San Francisco: Earth Island Press, 1993

Edited by Ricardo Hernandez and Edith Sanchez

Albuquerque, NM: Inter-Hemispheric Education Resource Center, 1992

P.O. Box 6003

Durham, NC 27708-6003

4677 30th Street, Suite 214

San Diego, CA 92116

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