The end of the Maquila era.

Two years ago, when I last visited Juarez, most of the maquiladoras, Mexico's export factories, boasted "help wanted" signs and ran three shifts a day. Employment neared 100 percent. An unhappy worker in factory A could quit and find work at Factory B across the street where the wages were five centavos an hour more or had better cafeteria food. That workplace mobility has ended. The once-buzzing factories have transmogrified into misshapen tombstones; industrial parks have turned into industrial cemeteries. Over the last eighteen months, some 250,000 factory workers have lost their jobs in Mexico. Ironically, some of the very factories that moved from the United States to Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s now find the same compelling reasons--lower wages and regulations--to shift operations to Asia.

Creeping weeds and blowing plastic and paper litter now cover what used to be a packed parking lot in front of Quality Industrial Services. A lone security guard shares the space with a scruffy cat and an elusive bird. "It's difficult," the guard told me, "to see maquilas shutting down, moving to China." The man blamed last year's U.S. economic downturn for putting Mexicans out of work.

On the surface, says Chihuahua sociologist Victor Quintana, "the job losses come from the U.S. recession and the post 9/11 shocks, but in reality that's a smokescreen for deeper causes. The U.S. recession was hardly a cold, while we in Mexico developed full pneumonia." The maquila model, Quintana predicts, has exhausted its potential. "Mexico cannot compete with China. But the model has done its damage." Two years ago, he says, "Chihuahua led Mexico in high employment. Today, Chihuahua leads in unemployment." Thanks to layoffs from factory shutdowns or reductions of shifts, Chihuahua has lost more than 100,000 jobs.

According to a June 20 Washington Post story, over the last two years more than 500 mostly U.S.-owned assembly-line factories in Mexico moved to China. Corporate executives have concluded that the wage differential between the two Third World countries more than covers the increased costs of shipping and the inconveniences of distance. In Juarez, a beginning machine operator earns less than $8 a day, whereas her counterpart in China makes only a quarter of that pathetic wage.

For Mexico, the maquilas have been the equivalent of the industrial revolution. Instead of reading about Manchester or Leeds in the 1840s, you could visit Tijuana or Juarez today. You'll stumble upon a Dickensian saga that tells of how a new form of production attracted country folk to cities, wrenched them from the security of their traditional culture, and exposed them to unimagined threats.

In Juarez, the remains of more than 250 women have been found raped and mutilated. Almost all of them worked in maquilas. People from rural communities have made the difficult transition to noncommunity life where each person must suspect his neighbor. These are some of the themes for modern telenovelas.

Ciudad Juarez, across the once mighty, but now trickling, Rio Grande River, has grown cancerously. Yes, growth has little to do with development. Its barren, sandy hills have sprouted colonias (euphemism for hideous slums). Rural families arrive after surrendering to the fact that the land no longer supports them. They find jobs in the export factories, patch together homes from pieces of wood, metal, and plastic, and find ways to tap into the power line (some get fried). They wait for the circulating water and gas trucks blasting "La Cucaracha" on their speakers to bring the needed material for life and cooking. The families often store the water in old metal chemical barrels. The air, once just dusty during the high wind season, now reeks of emissions from factories and the stench of unmuffled auto exhaust. Since the United States tightened border security, the cars sit two to three times longer on the bridges connecting Juarez with neighboring El Paso. The fumes drop on the residents.

In colonias like Anapra and Lago Poniente, the rural folks rapidly acquire urban ways. They try to raise their kids to become academic achievers or send them into the maquilas in their mid-teens to contribute to scarce family incomes. Alarming numbers of young people turn to drugs, prostitution, and gang delinquency.

The shacks in the colonias face unpaved streets where mangy dogs drop their loads and little kids run barefoot through the summer dust. But, says Ana Maria Pacheco Gonzalez, mother of three, at least Juarez meant certainty of employment. She is about to lose her job as an operator at Dometic, a Norwegian-owned factory that manufactures housetrailer parts. The company says it can no longer afford to run the afternoon shift, and Ana Maria does not feel comfortable doing a morning shift, which would leave her kids unsupervised before and after school.

Ana Maria came to Juarez fourteen years ago from rural Vera Cruz, got a job at a maquila, hated it, and went home. "But the pay was even lower there," she says. "Can you imagine? So I returned to Juarez."

Catalina Fuentes Hernandez, mother of seven, came from Durango. "Like most of the people in the village, we couldn't make a living anymore, so we came to Juarez where rumor had it jobs were plentiful," she says. "And by going to school I worked my way up from a simple operator to become a nurse at one of the Dometic factories here. Then they laid me off, saying they were cutting back across the board. And unlike two years ago, the maquilas aren't hiring now. Especially, they're not hiring nurses. We're the first to get cut because worker health and safety are hardly priorities with these companies."

I asked to speak to the manager of Dometic, but the security guard told me he was not available. I then phoned and was told that the company did not speak to the media.

Sociologist Quintana doesn't mourn what he believes is the end of the maquila era. What NAFTA and the whole free trade model did was to "launch a cultural offensive against the majority of the world's poor," he says.

Quintana insists that the maquila represents far more than a new form of production. It "dictates how we relate, how we live, what we do, what we consume. It dictates individualism, breaks apart community, which leads people to ways of avoiding life--booze, crack, and cult religions. It inundates us with its culture that mocks traditional values like cooperation and solidarity. Its only values are individualism and competition." Quintana has little patience with the rich and powerful, like President Vicente Fox himself, who wring their hands about "losing our traditional values" while they eagerly have brought the value-destroying maquilas into the country for economic growth. Fox was an executive for Coca-Cola before becoming president.

Leticia Ortiz came to Juarez from the countryside nineteen years ago. She worked her way up in a large maquila called Industria Lasser to become head of personnel. Then, last September, she received her unceremonious dismissal. The CEOs located in some First World city had decided to move their plants to China.

"Bitter? No, just disappointed," she said. "After working my way up for all those years I guess I foolishly developed a sense of loyalty to the company, a sense that was not reciprocated. They didn't even pay me what they owed me for severance according to the law. But it would take too long and it would be too expensive to fight it, so I accepted their less than generous offer." After receiving her pink slip, Leticia said she went home and cried for hours. "Then, I basically slept for the next six months. I guess you could call it depression."

In 1965, Juarez opened its first maquilas in order to deal with a recently laid off labor force of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers that could no longer work in the Texas cotton fields, thanks to a newly designed machine that replaced them.

U.S. investors led the way into Mexico. Low wages, a productive work force, low taxes, and no environmental regulation or costs related to OSHA-like agencies made Mexico attractive. But, gradually, independent unions, backed by some AFLCIO unions, began to move into the border cities, and their appearance alone produced a rise in wages.

Up until last year, investment in Mexican maquilas had continued to climb. Since 1994, NAFTA provided the kosher stamp for wary investors, and the rate of maquila growth had reached double digits. NAFTA provided tax-free incentives for maquila owners, so U.S. companies now ship raw materials to Mexico and then import finished parts or assembled products tax-free: electronics, electrical goods, automobiles and trucks and trailers or their parts, wood and plastic products, and textiles.

When the maquila experiment began, Juarez attracted a handful of factories. But now almost 4,000 of these mostly foreign-owned export production plants dot the landscapes of border cities like Juarez, Tijuana, Mexicali, Nogales, and Matamoros. And the maquilas have moved into the interior of the country, as well.

Today, the maquilas account for about half of Mexico's almost $150 billion annual exports. But efficient as Mexican laborers have proven to be in global competition, they fall far short of Chinese workers in the low wage department.

What happens now that some of these people have become unemployed? According to Quintana, a few return to the villages they were forced to leave to find gainful employment. Some still try to traverse the difficult obstacles of the U.S. border. Near El Paso, however, since the 9/11 attack, almost no one successfully crosses. U.S. high technology and vigilant border patrols act as overwhelming deterrents.

As a result, most of the newly unemployed will remain in Juarez. The population may have reached three million, speculates Felix Perez, a Juarez environmentalist. "No one has counted. Each day hundreds, maybe thousands arrive at the bus station, looking for work in the maquilas."

"I'm staying in Juarez," Ana Maria says. "It's rough here, but it's impossible where I came from."

Maquila salesmen preach to potential investors that Mexico's work force can still compete for low wages and high productivity with other Third World countries. That's global competition! Which country can offer its people for the lowest wages, can promise polluting industries the least environmental regulation, the lowest taxes, the least workplace monitoring for health and safety, and the least prospect for unionization. The free market at work.

But a few days in Juarez should enlighten any sensitive person to the fact that not only is there no invisible hand, there is no guiding brain, and certainly no heart in this thing they call a free market.

Saul Landau directs Digital Media Arts at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona and is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest film, "Maquila," is available from the Cinema Guild in New York City.