Environment

TECATE, Mexico -- Tecate's coat of arms dubs this Mexican town ''Baja California's Industrial Paradise.'' About 30 miles from Tijuana, the city is home to the Tecate brewery and also houses an industrial park filled with assembly plants, or maquiladoras. This ''industrial paradise'' is one of several Mexican border boomtowns that is part of a global production system. Read More

Non-profit environmental justice groups such as the San Diego-based Environmental Health Coalition (EHC), are trying to remove the rose colored glasses and expose the harsh reality of the U.S/Mexico border in an attempt to protect public and environmental health. EHC's battle against an abandoned maquiladora turned toxic dump, serves as a microcosm of what's wrong with border health and how NAFTA, for the most part, has exacerbated the problem. Read More

In October 1998, after years of protest by an unprecedented bi-national coalition, the proposed Sierra Blanca nuclear waste dump was defeated. The proposed site for the commercial nuclear waste dump was just 16 miles from the Texas-Mexico border. Read More

In response to pressure from the maquiladora industry, the Mexican government is now paving the way for the large-scale pulpwood plantations in order to provide industry with raw material to produce cheap pulp and paper. Read More

The best known, most prestigious, and largest keiretsu, is the Mitsubishi Group of companies. Given the size and reach of its diverse activities, and due to the fact that it is more heavily focused in polluting industrial sectors than other keiretsu, the Mitsubishi Group may well be the single most environmentally destructive corporate force on Earth. Read More

Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc, headquartered in New Orleans, is one of the world's largest and lowest cost copper and gold producers, from its Grasberg mine in Irian Jaya. In 1996 it was regarded as one of the ten worst corporations by the Multinational Monitor magazine. Read More

Gold is an intoxicating substance. Witness the rapidity with which investors threw their money into a relatively obscure Canadian mining corporation called Bre-X, when that company claimed to have discovered the largest single deposit of the metal in history. Read More

The SouthWest Organizing Project (SWOP) is a sixteen year old multi-racial, statewide grassroots membership organization in New Mexico. SWOP's mission is to empower the disenfranchised in the Southwest to realize racial and gender equality, and social and economic justice. Our work focuses on increasing citizen participation and building leadership skills in low-income communities composed predominantly of people of color, so that we may play greater roles in public and corporate decision making which affects our lives and determines our future. Read More

A confidential Ernst & Young audit of labor and environmental conditions inside a Nike factory in Vietnam was leaked to the Transnational Resource & Action Center (TRAC) in 1997. This is the first time that an accounting firm's labor and environmental audit of any apparel company has ever been made public. This internal audit reveals that Nike workers continue to work in hazardous and unjust working conditions. TRAC's report, Smoke From A Hired Gun is an analysis and critique of the Ernst & Young audit that shows that things are even worse than Nike admits. Read More