The unregulated expansion of North American trade has made an already heavily polluted border region much dirtier and more dangerous and the institutions created by NAFTA to handle environmental and public safety problems have proven to be wholly inadequate.

Many of the promises made by advocates of NAFTA to relieve the existing environmental pressures, were based on the premise that NAFTA would eliminate the incentive for factories to locate in the Mexican border free trade zone where 2000 companies and ten million workers have crowded largely without residential sewage, water treatment facilities or hazardous waste removal systems. Known as the Maquilador, the area is an environmental and health disaster called a "cesspool of infectious diseases" by the American Medical Association.

But rather than diminish, the Maquiladora industry has grown vigorously in the years since NAFTA took effect, transforming from assembly plants to full-on manufacturing facilities. As both the industrial and border-area populations have grown, so has airborne pollution from industry, cooking and heating fuel and increased commercial and private transportation in the border area. Here plants producing and using toxic chemicals and solvents, and unhealthy operations such as lead smelters and glass factories that burn old tires as fuel, operate without environmental rules.

Citizens on both sides of the border suffer from alarming rates of hepatitis, chronic diarrhea and tuberculosis. Contamination by toxic industrial wastes and chemicals has been linked to the clusters of cancer, rare birth defects like anancephaly where a full-term baby is born with an incomplete or missing brain and/or skull and immunological diseases. From Texas to California, tuberculosis and hepatitis rates continue to climb since NAFTA; from 2 - 5 times the U.S. average. The word's highest rate of Lupus also occurs in the border area.

Other indications of NAFTA's health and environmental hazards include:

• Lower birth weights -- the impact on reproductive health is significant because there are over 350,000 women working in the maquiladoras who are of reproductive age.

• Weakened food safety inspections -- strawberries, head lettuce, and carrots from Mexico have violation rates of 18.4%, 15.6% and 12.3%, respectively, for illegal pesticide residues.

• Ozone depletion has increased steadily since NAFTA opened the U.S. borders to trucks that don't meet U.S. safety standards. Fewer than 1 percent of the 3.3 million trucks entering the U.S. each year are inspected. 50% of those inspected are rejected for major safety violations.

• Labeled an American Calcutta, the rural slums on both sides of the U.S.

• Mexican border. Past studies have shown that by the time colonia residents are eight years old, about 35 percent have been infected with hepatitis -A and by the time they are 35 years old, 85-90% have it. Surveys in 1995 of well water in U.S. colonias revealed sulfate concentrations nearly twice the level considered safe for drinking water, and high levels of arsenic, bacteria and fecal coliform. Waterborne diseases remain a leading cause of death in many of the colonia communities.

The NAFTA clean up plan for the U.S. Mexico border has failed, generating only 1 percent of the promised cleanup money. Commissions created by NAFTA partners such as CEC [Commission for Environmental Cooperation] and the BECC [Border Environmental Cooperation Commission] have been heavily criticized by pubic citizen groups who note they are rendered impotent by conflicts of interest, a lack of funding and organization, no power to investigate independently, and capital funds rendered inaccessible to the poorest communities by high rates and a payback requirement.