Dear Editor,
Patrisia Gonzales and Roberto Rodriguez are right in blaming the North American Free Trade Agreement for undermining human rights and social justice while protecting the investments of multinational corporations (“Indigenous peoples vs. the multinationals,” Opinion, Jan. 2).

NAFTA’s failures to equalize and enforce toxic pollution regulations, and worker health and safety standards, have increased the health risks faced by communities in the border region. In the landmark case of Tijuana’s abandoned maquiladora Metales y Derivados, NAFTA’s own environmental commission could not compel the cleanup of more than 7,000 tons of toxic waste, which still lies exposed to the elements just a mile south of the border.

Under NAFTA, poverty has increased on both sides of the border. In San Diego, the number of low-paying service jobs rose by almost a quarter of a million between 1992 and 2002, as better-paying manufacturing jobs moved across the border. Pockets of poverty in the region more than doubled in the 1990s.

In Mexico, NAFTA initially stimulated job growth at the border. But the average Tijuana maquiladora employee typically earns $1.50 an hour, so far below a living wage that many full-time workers live in squatters’ settlements without paved roads, access to clean water, electricity or sewage service. Now, corporations are shifting operations to countries like China, where wages are a third or less than Tijuana maquiladora workers’ wages. The U.S. and Mexican jobs lost due to low-wage global competition may never return.

NAFTA had little effect in reducing the economic migration of Mexicans to the United States. According to the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, the number of unauthorized Mexicans living in the United States grew from 2 million to 4.8 million between 1990 and 2000, despite the implementation of U.S. policies that resulted in a 500 percent increase in deaths among border crossers between 1994 and 2002.

NAFTA’s legacy of hunger, sickness, economic instability and environmental contamination should be sufficient warning to those who seek to expand this form of globalization in the Central American Free Trade Agreement and the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

AMELIA SIMPSON
Director, Border Environmental Justice Campaign
Environmental Health Coalition of San Diego

Copyright 2004 Union-Tribune Publishing Company. Used by Permission