Mexico Lax on Ecology Laws, U.S. Report Says : Environment: The GAO study addressed a major concern of those opposing the proposed free trade agreement.

By JUANITA DARLING

Oct. 12, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

MEXICO CITY — A U.S. government report suggests that Mexico is not adequately enforcing laws aimed at preventing pollution from new factories--a major concern of those opposing the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement.

The recently released report could revive worries that the agreement to eliminate trade barriers among the United States, Canada and Mexico will encourage U.S. and Canadian companies to move factories to Mexico, where enforcement of environmental protection laws is weaker.

On Wednesday, when negotiators for the three nations initialed the agreement, which must now be ratified by their national legislatures, Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari repeated a vow that his country will not permit new industries that are not accepted in the United States and Canada because they damage the environment.

However, the report stated that Mexican environmental officials told investigators from the U.S. General Accounting Office that there is widespread failure to comply with government standards for opening new factories.

“The present system for ensuring that new activities that significantly affect the environment are approved in advance is not working,” the report quoted Mexico’s director of environmental norms and regulations as saying.

“I find that difficult to believe,” said Rene Altamirano, director of pollution control and prevention at the National Ecology Institute.

The unwillingness of U.S. investigators to reveal the names or other details about the companies they interviewed for their reports makes it difficult for Mexican officials to detect where lapses, if any, occurred, Altamirano added.

The GAO officials concluded that enforcement is inadequate.

Their report--based in part on a sample of six new U.S.-owned border assembly plants, or maquiladoras , with medium and high potential to be polluters--found that none complied with Mexican regulations. The requirements include filing an environmental impact assessment or receiving a letter from environmental officials that such an assessment is not necessary.

Without those documents, new factories are not supposed to receive the Mexican Commerce Ministry permits required to operate. However, none of the companies in the sample had the required documents--and all had permits, as evidenced by the fact that GAO investigators obtained their names and addresses from Commerce Ministry lists.

Only one of the companies had attempted to obtain a decision on the need for an environmental impact assessment, and officials at the company could not recall whether they had received a reply from the government.

The report stated that a Mexican environmental official told investigators that the companies’ failure to obtain a decision on the environmental impact of their factories violated Mexican law.

However, Altamirano said that even though the factories were classified by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency staff members as potentially high or medium polluters, it is possible that they are in industries that do not require federal approval of environmental impact documents.

Because he was not told which factories were visited, he does not know whether they fall into those industry categories, he said.

Although the sample was small--barely 5% of the 116 U.S.-owned maquiladoras opened between May, 1990, and July, 1991, a Mexican official told the U.S. investigators that the companies’ failure to follow the rules is not unusual.

“He further said that there is widespread noncompliance with the (environmental impact assessment) requirements among many sectors of Mexico’s economy, both public and private,” the report stated.

The GAO report was prepared between July, 1991, and April, 1992, before Mexico reorganized its environmental protection agencies, creating a prosecutor’s office for environmental enforcement.

Since the office was inaugurated this spring, it has aggressively enforced regulations for the existing 2,000 maquiladoras , inspecting 138 and closing down 116, mainly temporarily, for failure to comply with environmental regulations.

“The process of environmental enforcement is a complex problem,” said Altamirano. “I would not doubt that in the mere three years since we began to require environmental impact assessments that we have not yet closed all the loopholes in our laws or the gaps in our regulations. But remember how many years and millions of dollars that you in the United States have spent to get where you are in environmental enforcement.”