Photo - File, Valley Publishing Co

Image -Frontera NorteSur

Editor's Note:

Upper Valley Beacon will continue to provide insight and analysis of the ongoing prospect of a re-opening of the ASARCO refining facility located in the middle of the Westside of El Paso, Texas. The following is Part II of a series presented by Frontera NorteSur.

THE BATTLE OF ASARCO: PART TWO  

Editor’s Note:  

Part two of the special series about environmental controversies swirling around the old American Smelting and Refining Company’s plant in El Paso will discuss the issue of lead and heavy metals contamination in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. Future coverage will look at the battle over the refinery’s application to renew its air quality permit and commence new production.      

ASARCO’S LEGACY IN EL PASO AND JUAREZ  
El Paso-Ciudad Juarez  

Built just across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juarez and almost smack dab against the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), Asarco is blamed by environmentalists for the high amounts of lead and arsenic which have been detected on neighboring properties. For more than a century, from 1887 to 1999, the smelter processed lead, cadmium, zinc and copper and employed up to 25,000 workers. Operating through world wars, political revolutions, presidencies, and technological changes ranging from the introduction of the telephone to the high-speed internet, the plant showered tens of thousands of tons of emissions of the substances onto nearby communities. From 1968 to 1971 alone, the smelter belched 1116 tons of lead, 560 tons of zinc, 12 tons of cadmium, and 1.2 tons of arsenic into the atmosphere, according to the El Paso City-County Health Office. Those were the days when travelers pulling into El Paso from the west would be greeted by the sight of billowing, blackish clouds drifting from Asarco and blanketing the border. Welcome to the Paso del Norte.    

By the dawn of the first Earth Day, El Paso officials and residents decided something had to change. In 1972 Texas authorities shut down El Paso’s historic Smeltertown colonia, a neighborhood settled by Asarco workers, after high levels of lead were found in the blood of the settlement's children. Ruling on a legal dispute between Asarco and local and state authorities in the same year, a Texas state judge ordered the company to install a new sulfuric acid plant and pollution control equipment valued at approximately $20 million dollars, conduct air quality monitoring, and provide medical services to children in Smeltertown and Old Fort Bliss for a 30-month period. The judge enjoined Asarco from emitting any heavy metals “as to be injurious to human health, animal life or vegetation.”                    

In 1985 Asarco ceased processing lead, focused its business on copper and subsequently outfitted the plant with updated pollution-control technology costing almost $100 million dollars. Nowadays, Asarco officials are quick to point out that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) selected the plant as a pollution-control model under the Clean Air Act’s toxics control program. “If you want to smelter in the country, you have to model after us, boasts Lairy Johnson, the El Paso environmental manager for Asarco. In 1999 Asarco was purchased by the Mexico City based-Grupo Mexico, one of the world’s largest mineral resource companies. Blaming low copper prices, the company idled the plant the same year.  

But troubling reports indicated that contamination connected to Asarco’s past operations persisted in the environment. In 2001, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sampled five sites at the UTEP campus and found lead ranging from 428 parts per million (ppm) to 2,000 ppm. Quoted in the El Paso Times, Texas State Senator Eliot Shapleigh, who represents the district near Asarco, said sources claimed other samples taken from UTEP detected as much as 10,000 ppm of lead. Arsenic, which has been linked to cancer, was detected in samples ranging from 34.8 ppm to 138 ppm, according to the El Paso Times.

The current Texas clean-up standard is 500 ppm for lead and 46 ppm for arsenic.  

Beginning in 2002, the EPA began a clean-up program of hundreds of homes with high lead levels near Asarco, though hundreds of other properties remained to be tested.

Sen. Shapleigh has waged a so-far unsuccessful battle to obtain Superfund status for the Asarco site, a designation which would net greater federal aid for a clean-up that’s likely to run into tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars. His position is opposed by El Paso’s lameduck mayor and city council, who recently agreed to file suit against Asarco to force the company to directly pay for remediation costs.  

Meanwhile, a lead exposure study by the Texas Department of Health examined 37, 795 El Paso children between 1997 to 2002 and found elevated lead levels (above 10 micrograms per deciliter) in the blood of 463 of the study’s subjects, with higher lead levels corresponding to children residing closer to the Asarco plant. Lead poisoning has been long linked to development difficulties in children.   

Spurred by the lead discoveries, as well as Asarco’s application to renew its air quality permit and restart the refinery, new homeowner, community and UTEP student groups took to the streets. Sometimes in the hundreds, they have marched, rallied and petitioned during the last two years demanding that the lead and other contaminants be cleaned up and Asarco not be allowed to reopen. A recent poll of El Paso voters conducted jointly by the El Paso Times-KVIA-ABC television tallied 48 percent of the respondents as opposing Asarco’s reopening and 42 percent as favoring it. Supporters cited additional jobs as the main reason for their posture. Ten percent of the polled voters were undecided.  

Asarco spokespersons deny their company is responsible for the contamination in adjacent zones, blaming instead the use of arsenic-containing pesticides, lead-based home paint and smelter-waste materials used in two nearby, privately-owned crushing operations. Their argument received some support in a 2004 paper presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. Authored by Dr. Nicholas Pingitore, Dr. Maria Amaya and others, the paper noted that previous researchers and the EPA considered Asarco to be the culprit of heavy metals contamination in El Paso, but cited other reasons the core area near Asarco could be laden with high amounts of lead, including the prior use of unleaded gasoline and old, vintage homes brightened with lead paint. According to Pingitore and associates, the various factors “confound one’s ability to distinguish the relative contributions of Pb from the smelter point source and from the local areal sources.”  

Doctors Amaya and Pingitore are associated with a six-year, $1.7 million-dollar National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences-funded study of lead exposure in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. Although the authors presented preliminary, general findings about El Paso at the 2004 American Chemical Society meeting (which also showed higher lead findings on blocks closer to the smelter), they did not do the same for Ciudad Juarez. Phone calls seeking comment from Dr. Amaya, lead investigator for the project, were not returned.                            

ASARCO AND CIUDAD JUAREZ    

In Ciudad Juarez, questions prevail about the true impact of Asarco’s historic operations. The working-class neighborhoods of Bellavista, Altavista, Ladrillera, Cazardores, Felipe Angeles, and Puerto Anapra are within close proximity to the old smelter by the river. A recent report by Mexico's Attorney General for Environmental Protection (Profepa) stated that lead levels in Juarez neighborhoods near Asarco did not exceed permissible amounts, but the results drew more questions than answers . "How come in Juarez Profepa can say there is no lead?" questions Marianna Chew, an organizer with the Sierra Club's Beyond the Borders program in Juarez-El Paso. "Just a few meters (El Paso) from where they found lead. It's illogical-scientifically, socially and politically."  

Indeed, the Profepa study contradicted an earlier Mexican study, which just like the Smeltertown probe, also detected high levels of lead close to Asarco and in the blood of children aged one to nine years old living in neighborhoods close to the plant. The 1974 study for the federal Sub-Secretary for Environmental Improvement (SMA) and the Chihuahua Coordinated Public Health Services showed elevated lead levels in the blood of more than half the children living within one mile of Asarco and in about 14 percent of children residing up to 2.5 miles from the plant. The study also found high amounts of lead in household dust sampled at residences closest to the plant, averaging 1,322 ppm, while lead samples in the soils of homes nearest the smelter averaged 492 ppm.  

Covering 704 families and 752 children, the study estimated that the health of as many as 8,000 children could have been adversely impacted by Asarco. Notably, the SMA-Chihuahua study was performed almost 11 years before Asarco ceased processing lead, and before many new residents arrived to a border city undergoing an economic and population boom. Completed more than three decades ago, the report has been gathering the proverbial dust ever since.  

The Sierra Club’s Chew has been meeting with Ciudad Juarez residents and activists to put Asarco back on the burner. Chew says she faces an uphill task of informing a new generation about the company’s history. “People have been there for 5 or 6 years,” says Chew. “They don’t know what Asarco means, so we have to educate them.”                              

Decades ago, however, it was a different story. In 1976 elections, the opposition National Action Party (PAN) raised Asarco in its campaign, demanding that the company accord the same treatment to Juarez residents as it did to those of Smeltertown . Namely, the Panistas wanted Asarco to pay for the cost of evacuating residents nearest the smelter, and the government to prohibit residential development in zones likely to be affected by Asarco’s fumes.  

In December 1977 Juarez PAN leaders reiterated the demands in a letter to SMA Delegate Guillermo Quijas Cruz, requesting that a binational U.S.-Mexico commission be set up tackle the Asarco issue. Invoking the names of “8,000 Juarez children,” the letter contended that Asarco “isn’t a political problem, but a grave social problem that requires the intervention of all Juarez residents.”  

None of the PAN’s proposals were translated into public policy, even under subsequent

PAN municipal and state administrations. Instead of staying away, many new Juarez residents settled in the neighborhoods close to Asarco. Few probably knew about the 1974 study. Unlike El Paso, where the EPA is cleaning up homes near the smelter, no remediation efforts are underway in Juarez.  

Alberto Torres, a former mayor pro-temp of Juarez and a signatory of the 1977 letter to the SMA, says efforts to get action were stymied by “power structures” in the U.S. and Mexico. As government faltered, some turned to the courts.  

In 1981, Texas lawyers filed a class action civil lawsuit against Asarco on behalf of Ciudad Juarez residents in El Paso’s U.S. District Court. The plantiffs in the case, Ontiveros vs. Asarco, included the family of a child whose death was blamed on toxic poisoning from the plant. The plantiffs’ lawyers used a novel argument in the case, accusing the smelting firm of trespassing on their clients’ well-being by emitting heavy metals that fell to earth and provoked “physical and mental pain.” The plantiffs requested no less than $10,000 dollars each in compensation, but settled out of court for an unspecified sum.  

Asarco’s battle with one group of Ciudad Juarez residents was over, and the bigger problems pertaining to the company’s possible, wider impact on the city’s environment were not flushed out in public. Largely forgotten, the old smelter controversy briefly simmered again in 1992 when Alberto Torres’ daughter, Clara Torres, wrote the Texas Air Control Board about Asarco’s pending air quality permit. Protesting the fumes, she contended that no soil and air samples had been taken and no lead levels in blood checked on the Juarez side. “Air has no ownership and boundaries,” noted Torres.            

In the 21st Century, Asarco is once again an issue in Juarez. Cipriana Jurado, the director of the Worker Solidarity Research Center and the Juarez representative for the Southwest Network of Environmental and Economic Justice, says she wants more medical studies and remediation programs in affected neighborhoods. “(Asarco) should clean them up, because they are ones who caused the pollution,” contends Jurado.  

Larry Johnson, who has worked as Asarco’s environmental manager for more than five years, says no Mexican government agencies have made any formal demands for Asarco to help pay for or clean up the company’s alleged pollution. The environmental manager says Asarco is frustrated by such accusations at a time when it is trying to be a good corporate citizen and help boost the border economy. “It’s kind of disheartening when we live in one of the poorest areas of the country,” he says. According to Johnson, a restarted El Paso plant would provide up to 400 jobs and generate $300 million dollars annually to the border economy.  

However, a growing number of Juarez residents, want Asarco to remain inactive, and several plan to participate in the public trial scheduled for July 11 in El Paso to decide whether or not Asarco’s air quality permit will be renewed. Hundreds of signatures have been gathered on a Juarez petition that calls for Asarco to not reopen. “It’s important that the Mexican people are mobilizing” muses Alberto Torres. “I think (Asarco) should never open again. They’ve been here for 100 years and have been polluting both sides of the border.”    

Kent Paterson

Frontera NorteSur (FNS): on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news
Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

For a free electronic subscription, email fnsnews@nmsu.edu  

Send feedback to:

Editor, Upper Valley Beacon

© Copyright 2004-2005 Valley Publishing Company: All Rights Reserved.
For questions or comments concerning this site, contact: webmaster@valleypublishinginc.biz

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.