Environmental Management on the Mexico-United States Border: NAFTA and the Emerging Bilateral Regime

Abstract

Introduction Public concern with environmental management in areas is of fairly recent vintage. What might be called modern environmental activism along the Mexico-U.S. traces its roots only to the mid-1970s with social mobilization on sanitation issues. For example, as late as 1979 in a seminal report on transboundary environmental problems, Howard Applegate--professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas, El Paso, and a pioneer scholar-activist in mobilizing public attention to transboundary environmental problems--failed to single out hazardous materials and toxic waste (HAZMAT) as a distinct health-related issue (Applegate 1979). Obviously, much has changed since then. In the area, rapid urban development is increasingly manifest in a range of environmental threats to public health arising from deteriorating air quality, water pollution, hazardous and toxic waste disposal, and amplified industrial and commercial activities. The intensification of these conditions accounts for the rapidly changing public policy environment we are witnessing today. A useful baseline for examining environmental management trends on the is the United States-Mexico Environmental Cooperation Agreement, signed in La Paz, Mexico, in 1983 (La Paz Agreement). That agreement established an institutional framework that has provided both a forum for the articulation of bilateral public concern and a framework for the negotiation of subsidiary bilateral agreements (Agreement 1983). Since the La Paz Agreement took effect, various of these subsidiary agreements (Annexes) have targeted bilateral management of hazardous substances in the zone. Dissatisfaction with the overall pace of change has likewise fueled public criticism of existing institutions--the Border Cesspool syndrome--galvanizing new national, binational, and multinational efforts to strengthen policy safeguards in this issue-area. Recently, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has added to the arsenal of regulatory tools for environmental management available at the binational and trinational levels. This article traces the modern development of environmental management on the Mexico-U.S. border. It reviews what might be called the and transitional regimes for managing environmental problems, then turns to profile the emerging NAFTA concluding with a brief comment on this new regime's challenges for environmental management in the region. Bilateral Environmental Management on the Border: Old and Transitional Regimes Environmental management in the zone has proceeded in several distinct stages. The first of these stages, what I call the regime, may be chronologically bracketed from about 1930 through 1979. Three features distinguish this regime: first, the lack of discrete bilateral policy instruments aimed at air quality and hazardous waste management; second, a preoccupation with public sanitation issues; and third, reliance on local ordinances and agencies for implementation of health safeguards. The Old Regime. The absence of defined bilateral instruments for dealing with air quality and HAZMATs is a key feature of this regime. Growing urbanization of the community, well underway in the 1930s, led directly to public concern with sewage and sanitation before World War Two. Where binational cooperation was required to address sanitation problems, the old International Boundary Commission (IBC) was entrusted with project development and oversight. In 1944, the Water Treaty with Mexico (hereinafter 1944 Water Treaty) reconfigured the IBC as the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) and entrusted it to solve all sanitation problems (Treaty 1944). The IBWC thus became the first binational agency on the Mexico-U.S. charged with resolving water quality problems, defined as border sanitation problems. …