Media Release

Community marks completion of toxic Tijuana site cleanup

Metales y Derivados exemplifies need for Obama administration to amend NAFTA

(Tijuana, Mexico) – Environmental Health Coalition (EHC) and residents of Tijuana's Colonia Chilpancingo put a toxic legacy to rest today as they marked completion of the long-awaited cleanup of the Metales y Derivados battery recycling plant. Metales became infamous for exposing how the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) fails to hold polluters responsible for their toxic messes and fails to enforce cleanup responsibilities.

EHC and activists with the Colectivo Chilpancingo Pro Justicia Ambiental (Colectivo), EHC's Community Action Team in Tijuana, mobilized to clean up the site, expressing concerns about health impacts, including an extremely high rate of birth defects in the neighborhood nearest to the site. “We took to the streets to protest, conducted petition drives and letter-writing campaigns, met with government officials, and organized tours of Metales and the community for U.S. and Mexican government officials,” said Lourdes Luján, a longtime member of the Colectivo and lifetime resident of Colonia Chilpancingo. The group and its U.S. allies also met with members of the media, students, and activists with environmental justice, labor, women’s and migrants’ rights groups. After more than a decade, the Mexican government agreed to a groundbreaking settlement to clean up the mess. “We finally got U.S. and Mexican authorities to acknowledge the problem,” Luján said.

While EHC and the Colectivo take heart in the fact that the neighborhood of Colonia Chilpancingo will now be safer, it never should have taken almost15 years and such extraordinary efforts to fix this problem. “In the case of Metales, NAFTA did nothing to address a serious and avoidable public health problem,” said Magdalena Cerda, community organizer with EHC’s Border Environmental Justice Campaign. “With a new American President who campaigned on the need to update NAFTA, there is an opportunity to rewrite the rules to protect communities.”

NAFTA was a high profile campaign issue for Congressional seats as well as the U.S. presidential candidates. Amelia Simpson, director of Border Environmental Justice Campaign said, “The nation joined Barack Obama in rejecting NAFTA as unfair. Metales makes the case that public health and the environment are in jeopardy in Mexico, in the U.S., and around the world as long as NAFTA is the model for global trade.”

Key Background:

• Between 1972 and 1994, the U.S.-owned Metales y Derivados recycled thousands of car and boat batteries from the U.S., extracting lead for profit. They dumped more than 23,000 tons of toxic waste from the recycling process at the site. Battery parts and heavy metals were illegally buried or dumped in open piles and rusted barrels around the three-acre site.
• In 1994, the Mexican government shut the plant down, and its owner, José Kahn, fled across the border to San Diego. Mexico issued arrest warrants and charged Kahn with environmental crimes, but he was not extradited and was able to evade any prosecution.
• In 1998, EHC and community members filed a complaint about the Metales site with the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, NAFTA’s environmental watchdog agency. Four years later, the Commission issued a report that said exposure to heavy metals could “severely harm human heath” and called the cleanup “urgent.” But the report exposed a major flaw in NAFTA. Even though the Commission concluded that Metales represented a clear danger to the people of Tijuana and called for an immediate clean up, it had no enforcement power to compel the Mexican government or anyone else to clean up the toxic waste. It was like a court that could convict someone of murder but not issue a sentence.
• Over the next few years, Environmental Health Coalition and the Colectivo continued tirelessly to pressure the U.S. and Mexican governments to address the problem. In 2004, those efforts resulted in a landmark agreement between the Mexican government and the community that had been poisoned for so many years. In a legally binding agreement, the Mexican government would spend $1.5 million to clean up the site over the next five years.
• The agreement represents the first time a structure was created for cross-border and community-government collaboration on toxic site cleanups. It is also the first time the Mexican government has entered a binding agreement with a community to clean up a toxic site, and included community oversight in the cleanup process.
• The cleanup is officially completed today, roughly six months ahead of schedule.