The wind on Chemical Row blows two ways. When the residents of the Esperanza ("hope" in English) and Uniones colonias are upwind from the penta plant, they are downwind from Quimica Fluor, a plant similar to the Marathon HF plant that released a hydrofluoric acid cloud in Texas City in 1987 -- a cloud that left a trail of dead vegetation and seared lungs and eyes before it dissipated.
Even when Idacon's plant operations are suspended, as they were from December 18, 1993, to January 3, 1994, the plant remains a hazard. Behind Productos de Preservacion, liquid flows from both a plastic pipe and a concrete ditch inside the fence into an unlined ditch outside the fence. What is experienced here is not only olfactory, but something far more penetrating. Your eyes water, your chest tightens, and after a while an odd taste settles into your mouth. Slowly, a strange sensation develops, a slight numbness of the forehead and forearms and hands.
"Peripheral neuropathy," Carol Van Strum guessed when I told her what we experienced while shooting photos and talking to neighborhood children who were playing behind the plant. "It's a symptom of penta exposure. But think about the doses the workers in the plant get."
Inside the plant, where we went last month to request interviews, some half-dozen men worked around tanks and pressure vessels. The plant production was shut down for the Christmas holidays; none of the workers wore masks or breathing devices.
In the United States, working conditions for penta workers are monitored by federally mandated industrial health surveillance programs. The U.S. EPA requires Vulcan's Wichita plant to meet strict pollution-control standards. "Our company has been making the product since the mid-'50s and has always met federal regulations," Vulcan plant manager Paul Tobias said in a telephone interview. "It's a good plant and a good product." Environmentalists would disagree with Tobias, but most would certainly prefer to see pentachlorophenol produced -- if it must be produced -- under U.S. EPA standards, and in a corporate climate that is somewhat more open than Mexico's.
But not completely open. For example, don't look for "Idacon" in the Houston Yellow Pages. Nor will you find Productos de Preservacion listed there. Nor "QED Laboratories," another name under which the Delaware corporation has done business. These days it's "KMG Bernuth." Does KMG Bernuth return its toxic waste to the United States, as is nominally required of maquiladoras in Mexico? How much pentachlorophenol does it produce each year? What is the level of dioxin content in its product? When does it intend to leave Chemical Row in Matamoros? Why doesn't the privately held company engage in dialogue with its neighbors, as other, publicly held companies in Matamoros have? For that matter, who actually owns and profits from "Productos de Preservacion" or "KMG Bernuth" or "QED Laboratories" or "Idacon"? Who lies behind the paper trail that begins amid the devastated landscape of Chemical Row in Matamoros, runs through a nondescript corporate office in Houston, and ends with otherwise unremarkable incorporation papers in Delaware?
These are all questions that are more readily answered by corporations whose operations do not straddle borders. And, they are the kinds of questions that will need to be asked more frequently, as we move into the era of free trade in North America.
on Ireneo Sanchez thinks he has the answers to a few of the questions. The septuagenarian, who sells soft drinks from a stand in front of his house, 40 feet from the fence that divides residential and petrochemical Mexico, is no paracaidista. "I came here in 1941," he says, "when all of this was farm land. Then one plant, then another, then another, and now look. And you know what? Reporters and TV cameras and congressmen and photographers all come and go. But these plants stay.
"Some night, everyone in this neighborhood is going go to bed. And in the morning, no one is going to wake up.
