The maquiladoras: back door pollution.

Home for Domingo Gonzalez is Brownsville, a pleasant community of 130,000 people in south Texas. It is a well-managed, lush place, complete with clean lakes and a bustling downtown. But, as Gonzalez points out, crossing into the Mexican industrial city of Matamoros "is like going from paradise to a wasteland." Canals are black with dangerous chemicals. Waste management is almost non-existent. Tires, plastics and even unknown chemicals are burned in the city dump and in backyards.

Here and elsewhere along the 2,000-mile border, foreign-owned manufacturing plants known as maquiladoras are thriving, particularly since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect in 1994. They make everything from consumer electronics to car parts, with the U.S. as their prime market. The pollution they produce doesn't stay south of the border, either: It freely travels across to poison U.S. border towns.

In Matamoros, 129 maquiladoras employ 58,351 people, according to a recent estimate in the trade magazine Twin Plants, up from 76 facilities and 38,268 workers just before NAFTA. In Mexico as a whole, 948,658 people work in maquiladoras, double the number in 1993.

Although Mexico's poor welcome the jobs, the big winners are clearly the corporations. Paying sustenance wages to start with, many companies have actually cut compensation since NAFTA, even in the face of the recent peso devaluation. And environmental conditions have worsened, according to many watchdog groups. Mexico's failure to enforce its environmental laws seems to be an actual benefit of doing business there.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, clusters of babies on both sides of the border were born with partial brain development, or anancephaly, and spina-bifida, a crippling disorder of the spine and nervous system. The release of chemical solvents from the maquiladoras is frequently cited as a cause, and in 1975, several companies reached a $17 million out-of-court settlement with more than two dozen parents of anancephalic babies.

A 1997 report by Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, the Institute for Policy Studies and the Sierra Club focused on health problems along the border, noting that Hepatitis-A occurs at five times the national average in the region. Border-area wells have been contaminated with dangerous levels of sulfate and arsenic. In cities like El Paso, ozone levels are soaring.

Although the Clinton administration urges patience, and says progress is slowly occurring, many environmentalists disagree. Global Trade Watch's Chris McGinn says that NAFTA has resulted in industrial growth only along the border, and Mexican enforcement of environmental laws continues to lag, as does funding. "We thought that some of the worst cases would at least be dealt with, if only for public relations," McGinn says. "But even that hasn't happened."

Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth, says that, if anything, the environmental problems caused by the maquiladoras are worse than ever. "It's not right to treat people that way, or degrade the environment that way," he says. "We should face the fact that NAFTA is not going to produce beneficial results for those people or for the environment." CONTACT: Texas Center for Policy Studies, PO Box 2618, Austin, TX 78768/[phone].