On the border, a Mexican doctor treats NAFTA's victims
As leaders of the Western Hemisphere met in Quebec last spring to discuss expanding the North American Free Trade Agreement to include almost every scrap of land between the Arctic and Tierra del Fuego, Dr. Nancy Rodriguez was in a colonia on the Mexican border trying to figure out how to deal with rats. A world away from the high-powered talks in Canada, the young physician found herself at ground zero in the free-trade zone--where aggressive theories of economic expansion find real-life expression.
The squatter-settlement-turned-neighborhood where Rodriguez works is called Derechos Humanos--Spanish for "human rights." Its 15,000 residents are mostly migrants from Mexico's interior, drawn to the border in hopes of finding work after NAFTA went into effect in 1994. When Rodriguez opened the colonia's first health clinic three years ago on the outskirts of Matamoros, Tamaulipas, residents had no running water, electricity, or sanitation. Homes were built of cardboard or plywood, while a fallow piece of land adjacent to the colonia, owned by a Matamoros family named Guerra, served as a makeshift dump. A canal on the colonia's southern edge was used as storm drain, trash bin, rodent refuge, and illegal dumping ground for the industrial waste produced by nearby maquiladoras, or assembly plants.
When Mexico's Border Industrialization Program began in 1965, Matamoros--which is just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas--was a small city with roughly 70,000 inhabitants. Back then, industries from the United States built plants all along the 2,000-mile border, taking advantage of rules that allowed companies to import raw materials duty-free for assembly in Mexico and then export the finished product--also duty-free--back to the United States. Other enticements included low health and safety standards for workers, meager wages, lax environmental oversight, and proximity to the U.S. market. In the ensuing years, companies from other countries built maquiladora plants as well. But the passage of NAFTA, with its accelerated elimination of additional trade barriers, shifted border industrialization--as well as migration--into overdrive.
Though maquiladoras pay some taxes to the central government in Mexico City, they are not required to contribute to the local tax base in any substantive way--which means that border boom-towns like Matamoros have not been able to keep pace with their rapid growth. Matamoros has doubled in size since NAFTA's passage, to nearly 700,000 residents, overwhelming the city's infrastructure.
Water is also a problem. Steamers once plied the Rio Grande, but now the river is shallow and polluted. According to the U.S. EPA, Matamoros will have serious water shortages by 2005. It is a city fueled by free trade, but growing all out of proportion to itself.
There is a difference between the earth and the world, and 36-year-old Rodriguez has come to understand it. The world is that blue bauble seen from outer space, an idea rather than a place with people in it, impelled toward the future by grand abstractions: globalization, liberty, free trade. In the world, there are no limits. The earth Rodriguez walks on each day is something else again, animated by squawking chickens on the roadside; old men selling edible yucca blossoms and used clothing from donkey-drawn carts; children running and screeching in a hard-packed dirt schoolyard; corn sprouting from the soil; asthma; typhoid; dengue fever; rats.
Rodriguez was raised and went to medical school in Matamoros, but not until she ventured into the colonias did she see the links between the health of the body and the health of the air, water, and land. "It became impossible for me not to relate health and environmental issues," she now says. "I had never before been so close to families with basic needs such as water, sanitation, and electricity." Smoke from the nearby and constantly burning municipal dump blankets Derechos Humanos and, according to Rodriguez, causes eye, skin, intestinal, and respiratory problems. Uncollected trash in and around the colonias attracts rats and flies, which transmit diseases like typhoid. Without running water, families have made do catching rain in barrels or waving down the water man who periodically passes by in his truck. Standing water breeds mosquitoes, which can carry dengue fever.
Along the canal, a boy playing soccer misses his goal attempt and sends the ball sailing. His friend descends the trash-strewn bank, chasing the ball into the fetid water--which contains a belly-up cow. Empty plastic bags are everywhere, thousands of them caught on barbed-wire fences and in the denuded branches of the few remaining mesquite trees. The bags snap in the interminable wind; the loose ones float like ghosts of consumers past above the land.
"Families put up with the environmental problems because they are focused on survival," says Rodriguez. "I just try to improve the quality of their lives a little, and help them help themselves." In faded blue letters, Rodriguez's clinic calls itself a dispensary, but since she has few medical supplies to dispense, she spends most of her time educating women about family planning, environmental health, hygiene, and nutrition.
Rodriguez's favorite saint is Angela Merici, who founded the Saint Ursula Society in 1535. Angela was a radical in her time because she took a path that led neither to the nunnery nor the altar. In an age when cloistered seclusion was promoted for women who did not marry, Angela believed that a life of faith should be lived in the streets, and the women who joined her society walked directly into the social web of their communities. "In order to educate," wrote Saint Angela, "first of all one has to respond to the more urgent material needs." Though Rodriguez is married to a lawyer in Matamoros (who calls his wife a dreamer and idealist), much of her work is suspiciously reminiscent of Angela's. She works with Brownsville's Ursuline nuns, who pay her "an irregular stipend," based on donations, to run the Derechos Humanos clinic.
Ursuline sister Maria Teresa de Llano first met Rodriguez when they worked together for Mano a Mano (Hand to Hand), a nonprofit cross-border organization that trains community health workers. "She's effective because her whole heart and soul is in her work," says Sister Maria Teresa of her friend and colleague.
When funding ran low in 1997, Rodriguez left Mano a Mano and soon began working with Sister Maria Teresa and others on a health outreach and education program called Organizacion de Comunidades pro Vida Digna (Communities Organized for Life With Dignity). When asked why she would choose that work rather than private practice, Rodriguez answers simply, "I have food; I have shelter; I have family." When pressed, she adds, "I don't consider myself political, but it's hard not to see that we live in a time when money has become the most important thing. It's not. For me, what's important is improving things for others. My way is through service." She speaks softly, but her impeccably made-up eyes are intense.
"She's not just a medical doctor," says Sister Maria Teresa. "She's willing to do whatever needs to be done to help people." The day I visit, Rodriguez is planning a community effort to pick up mountains of trash among the rats. When she invites me to help, there really is no option.
I had been to Derechos Humanos the day before with Sierra Club Board members, who were in Brownsville to learn more about the massive environmental problems faced by border communities like Matamoros. As the number of assembly plants rises--along with toxic waste, air pollution, and water contamination--so does the population. But between NAFTA's passage in 1994 and 1999, wages in the manufacturing sector fell 13 percent--from $2.18 per hour to $1.89. Purchasing power shrank by 39 percent. The promised boon for Mexican maquiladora workers has not materialized, but still they come. Political camps disagree about whether NAFTA accelerated this race to the bottom in terms of wages and inflation. But the trade pact's role in exacerbating population pressures at the border is unmistakable: When trade barriers to imports of U.S. corn were lifted and Mexican subsidies eliminated, hundreds of thousands of small-scale Mexican farmers could no longer compete. During the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign, independent candidate Ross Perot talked about the "sucking sound" that would be created by U.S. jobs being pulled to Mexico if NAFTA passed. What has proven devastating for the border's environment and for Mexico's agricultural sector in general, however, is the sucking sound of thousands of subsistence farmers being pulled northward from Mexico's interior to the maquiladoras.
