NY Times, Sept. 17, 2002 U.S. Will Get Power, and Pollution, From Mexico By TIM WEINER
MEXICALI, Mexico, Sept. 11 — American companies have long faced intense resistance to big new power plants from communities crying, "Not in my backyard." Now they have a big new backyard: Mexico. Here on the edge of Mexicali, a few miles from the California border, two huge power plants are rising in the desert, near a graveyard and a clutch of hovels. They will generate billions of watts for millions of Californians, a handful of jobs for Mexicans and pollution on both sides of the border. They are "what free trade is all about," says an official of InterGen, the company building one. But a California congressman calls placing the plants in Mexico a form of environmental imperialism. The plants will be the first of many built in Mexico specifically to provide power for the United States, says Mexico's energy secretary, Ernesto Martens. And that represents a new phase in relations between the two nations. First came the labor of migrant workers. Then, in the 1990's, came the maquiladoras, the assembly-line factories providing cheap Mexican labor for American and multinational corporations under the North American Free Trade Agreement. Now these 21st-century plants — call them energy maquiladoras — represent a new way to generate wealth and power by capitalizing on the economic and legal differences dividing Mexico and the United States. Mexico's environmental law enforcement is weaker, its government less transparent, its desire for foreign capital bottomless. California's energy demand is enormous — as big as its citizens' resistance to huge power plants. These projects are the first result. "Building anything on the Mexican side is much cheaper, mostly because of the regulatory system," which is less stringent than in the United States, said Ernesto Ruffo, President Vicente Fox's border commissioner. full: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/17/international/americas/17MEXI.html Louis Proyect www.marxmail.org
