The ANAVERSA Disaster:
Mexico's Bhopal
by John Ross
Source: Global Pesticide Campaign, December 1997
On May 3, 1991, a pesticide formulation plant exploded and burned in a densely
populated area of Cordoba. in the state of Veracruz. John Ross recently, visited the
area and met with residents of the surrounding communities, who continue to
suffer from the effects of the disaster.
On a rainy night six years after the worst pesticide disaster in Mexican history,
the cinder block house bordering the railroad tracks above the Blanco River
still reeks of chemicals. Overflow from a nearby creek invades the jerrybuilt
homes that dot the hillside, leaving behind a residue thought to contain deadly
dioxin. The wells from which the colony draws its drinking water are said to be
similarly contaminated.
Enriqueta Gonzalez sits on the couch with her hands pressed across her
swollen stomach and recites a litany of health problems. After the blowup at
the ANAVERSA pesticide formulation plant up the hill, the 40 year-old school
teacher suffered convulsions and tremors so severe that she could not hold a
glass-classic signals of organophosphate poisoning. Two years later, her 17
seventeen year-old daughter gave birth to a child with spinal bifada - the child,
also hydrocephalic, lolls in a crib in the bedroom. The daughter has since had
her pre-cancerous uterus removed.
In 1995, the teacher's mother died of multiple tumors. "I'm sick all the time but
when I go to the hospital, the doctors tell me ANAVERSA is a lie," she says
quietly. "Sometimes, I think I'm going crazy..." Enriqueta Gonzalez is a
survivor of Mexico's Bhopal. Unlike that much publicized 1984 disaster in
India, and the 1976 massive dioxin release at Seveso, Italy, the tragedy of
ANAVERSA has remained shrouded. Mexican health secretariat documents
deny any correlation between the illnesses which victims suffer and the
explosion and the agency's administrators argue that no one has ever died as
a result of the May 1991 incident here. By contrast, the association of those
affected by the fire lists 157 deaths of its members in 18 surrounding colonies.
At least 30 deaths of residents not on the Association's registry are also
reported. No indemnity has ever been paid, and sanctions imposed upon the
private parties and government agencies deemed responsible have been
blatantly ignored.
One clue to the cover-up: the officials who licensed and benefited from
ANAVERSA's operation, ranging from former Agricultural Secretary Carlos
Hank Gonzalez to present Veracruz governor, Patricio Chirinos, were all
major players in the administration of now-vilified ex-president Carlos Salinas.
Another explanation of the blackout: the drama of the blast and its tragic
sequelae unfolded during the most intense period of negotiations towards a
North American Free Trade Agreement. Mexico's slipshod environmental
record was a critical opposition issue in the NAFTA debate.
ANAVERSA set up its pesticide formulation plant here in 1969, at a site near
the railroad station, 11 blocks from the center of Cordoba, an industrial city of
300,000. Relations with the neighbors, who complained of foul odors and sore
throats, were never very cordial. Nonetheless, the plant as licensed and relicensed by state and federal officials (although only as a warehouse and not
a formulation plant for lethal chemicals). Although ANAVERSA mixed its
"Dragon" brand on a block it shared with two grade schools, a kindergarten, a
day care enter, a Catholic church and a thriving
street market, the Environmental Secretariat (then initialed SEDUE and under
Governor Chirinos's direction), approved continued siting of the high risk
installation. A December 1990 report by SEDUE's Environmental
Contamination Division listed safety violations but saw no danger to the
surrounding community.
In the weeks before the tragedy, teachers from the adjoining schools
registered their fears with local authorities - heavy chemical vapors were
sickening their students. A small on-site fire was reportedly extinguished by
ANAVERSA employees. Local officials paid little attention to the pleas. Then
the plant blew sky-high. The company claims an electrical short circuit
triggered the blaze around 1:30 on the afternoon of May 3, Holy Cross on the
Catholic calendar-many residents were attending Mass at Guadalupe Church
when the fire began. The blaze was soon out of control. Thirty-eight thousand
liters of deadly pesticides were engulfed in the conflagration -- including
18,000 liters of methyl parathion, 8,000 liters of paraquat, and 3,000 liters of
2,4-D, one of the active ingredients in the Vietnam war defoliant, Agent
Orange. According to a company inventory, over 1,500 liters of
pentachlorophenol, malathion, benzene hexachloride and lindane also went
up in smoke.
Mothers bundled up their babies at the Social Security (IMSS) day care
center across the street and fled in terror. Parishioners poured from the
church. The combustion and intense heat of the blaze fused the chemicals
and generated dioxin, wrote Autonomous University of Mexico toxicological
consultant Dr. Lilia Albert in a private report published soon after the incident.
Plant site samples tested by the U. S. Waste Management Corporation
contained "alarming" amounts of dioxin. A dense black cloud spread out over
Cordoba. Firefighters rushed to the scene with little information about what
might be inside. With a 30,000 liter tank of solvent about to explode. Major
Abraham Aiza turned on the hoses and beat back the flames. But the runoff,
now laced with lethal poisons, could not be contained and ran off downhill
through the impoverished colonies around the railroad tracks, befouling
streams and wells that turned a telltale bright green. The venoms penetrated
Cordoba's potable water system too so that every time a faucet was open,
chemical odors spread through the homes.
In contrast to Bhopal, where 3,000 died in a single night, no one as killed in
the ANAVERSA fire. Over 1,300 residents were evacuated and 221 treated by
the Red Cross for poisoning. Evacuees returned to their homes the next day
and spread the contamination when they tried to clean up. Charred debris
from the factory as thrown into the public dump. Enriqueta Gonzalez noticed
vapors arising from the creek that runs by her house but continued to wash
the family's clothes in the poisoned waters.
"To close up the hole after the baby has drowned" is an old Mexican axiom
that describes government action in the wake of the ANAVERSA tragedy. The
company's license was lifted, and "Closed" signs were posted on the site although the burned-out shell remained open to the public for years (squatters
even moved in for a period). Pigeons perching on the plant walls were seen to
suddenly keel over dead. In the Guillen colony, directly downwind, dogs and
birds were born without limbs, an ominous sign of the scourge to come.
Illness and death soon touched every block around the railroad station.
Thirteen neighbors who lived or worked on the block facing the blast site have
died of diseases that suggest lethal contamination. The first to die was one
year old Nancy Colorado, of leukemia, in early 1992. Eight year-old Israel
Calles, who livcd 800 meters from the plant gate, was another early victim health officials denied any connection between the boy's eye cancer.- and the
ANAVERSA fire. Cases of chloracne and chemical pneumonitis, associated
with dioxin exposure or breathing toxic fumes, were disregarded by IMSS
hospital officials.
One man, "El Azul," whose chemical burns turn blue in the sunlight, is a
neighborhood celebrity. Residents of La. Estacion learned how to pronounce
exotic medical terms like "carcinoma" and "necro-pathological." At least 20
pregnant women had been trapped in the vicinity, of the fire, and babies were
born without arms and with multiple toes and fingers or with spinal bifada, like
the maestra's granddaughter.'
Still, officials under the direction of Jesus Kumate, Salinas's health secretary,
impeded medical treatment of those who claimed ANAVERSA had been
responsible for their condition. "The IMSS agreed to see our patients only if
they did not mention ANAVERSA," recalls Lalo Rodriguez Olivares', a leader
of the Association in Defense of the "Afectados". "We agreed because our
people needed medical attention."
Father Elias Martinez officiates at the Guadalupe Church two doors down
from the ANAVERSA site. In the three years he has been on the job, Martinez
has conducted more than 40 Masses for persons who are thought to have
died from the aftermath of the conflagration. Interviewed after one such
ceremony, the young padre considered that "ANAVERSA is still all around us
here -- I sweep its dust off my roof every day. The people from the
neighborhood come in the afternoon and talk about how depressed they are.
They feel as if they are condemned to die..."
After his mother died of cancer, Lalo Rodriguez, a local storekeeper became
obsessed with the terrible injustice that had fallen upon his neighbors. "One
year we had 22 deaths-it seemed like there was a wake in every house on the
block. It wasn't natural. " Rodriguez sought out the local deputy of the leftcenter Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), Rosalinda Huerta. "How
could the people in the colonies know what was inside ANAVERSA? Now the
government was lying to them and denying them medical attention," adds
Huerta, still outraged.
Association members packed up their sick children and traveled to Mexico
City where they camped out on the doorstep of Salinas's newly-created
National Human Rights Commission (CNDH). "People have a constitutional
right to health and to information so the CNDH was a natural place to go,"
Huerta recalls. Despite Salinas's formulation of the Commission as window
dressing to counterbalance, international allegations of widespread human
rights violations that had begun to trouble NAFTA negotiations, CNDH
ombudsman Jorge Carpizo issued a scathing report, criticizing the licensing of
ANAVERSA as gross negligence, and recommending that both the
Secretaries of
Health and the Environment clean up their act. Nonetheless, six years later,
neither the census of the affected colonies or the epidemiological study called
for in Carpizo's report, has ever been conducted and. indeed, the health
secretariat continues to keep ANAVRSA victims from being counted as such.
Now Huerta has appealed to international tribunals for justice, and the
Organization of American States' Inter-American Human Rights Commission
(CIDH) has agreed to review the ANAVERSA victims' charges in early 1998.
Much as ANAVERSA was the first case linking the environment to human
rights to he heard by the National Human Rights Commission, the CIDH
presentation will be the first time that inter-American body tackles the
connections between human rights violations and environmental destruction.
For the victims of ANAVERSA, the hearing by an international forum is a last
chance for recognition of the havoc wrecked upon their lives.
The disaster that has befallen the victims has hardly changed the way the
pesticide industry does business in Mexico. ANAVERSA itself cashed in a
near-million dollar insurance settlement, and removed salvaged chemicals offsite, reportedly to a plant at Izucar de Matamoros in Puebla state where
neighbors fear the worst. The facility, which features the "Dragon" line, was
inaugurated by Governor Manuel Bartlett, another Salinas-era luminary. Fire
chief Aziz suspects that ANAVERSA-Dragon still has underground operations
in the Cordoba region and estimates that 7-10 such clandestine formulation
plants are located here.
The fire fighters, much critiqued for their role in spreading the contamination,
suffered painful casualties in the blaze-five were severely poisoned because
the volunteer department has no masks or oxygen equipment, and three have
since died. "We still don't have any masks," says Aziz - despite a CNDH
recommendation that the fire fighters be so equipped.
ANAVERSA's legal spokesperson - and of record - Luis Javier Quijano, who is
thought to be a "prestanombre," or standing for politically powerful backers,
claimed in a televised interview that the ANAVERSA operation was entirely on
the up and up. Quijano's chose not to respond to this reporter's questions for
this article. Over Quijano's objections, ANAVERSA was fined 20,000 days of
minimum wages (minimum wage in 1992 was less than $4 a day) - the fine
was cut in half on appeal. Together with 100,000 pesos donated by thengovernor Dante Delgado (now imprisoned, accused of skimming public funds),
the money was placed in a trust fund for the victims. But because doctors
refused medical
corroboration, the municipal president, a member of the long-ruling (68 years)
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), refused to dole out the mysteriouslydwindling funds to victims. The incoming mayor, a member of the right-center
National Action (PAN) party, sunk what was left in an "ecological" park although not as originally planned, on the still highly-contaminated
ANAVERSA site.
The intransigence of Mexican authorities in refusing to recognize the
dimensions of this national Bhopal, demonstrates the power the pesticide
industry wields in Mexico. The industry is an integral partner in global
agribusiness designs to impose export-driven production upon hungry third
world nations. Historically, pesticides first came to Mexico during World War II
as part of the Rockefeller Foundation's so-called "Green Revolution." Along
with chemical fertilizers and "miracle" seeds that soon overwhelmed
indigenous seed stocks, the Green Revolution allowed Mexican produce to
enter U. S. markets, a process spurred by the privatization of farmlands and
the startup of NAFTA, both forged under Salinas's Agricultural Secretary
Carlos Hank, leader emeritus of the PRI's "dinosaur" wing, and one of the
most feared politicians in the land. Although hard evidence is elusive
Rodriguez and Huerta are convinced that Hank was the real ANAVERSA
owner..
"Dragon" made important profits while Hank headed Agriculture" corroborates
Dr. Fernando Mora, a dioxin expert at City Metropolitan University. Mora feels
that the ANAVERSA scandal was swept under the rug because it endangered
NAFTA at a time when U.S. environmentalists were arguing that the treaty
would encourage just such a disaster. Ironically, the bulk of ANAVERSA
deaths occurred in 1993, the year NAFTA edged through the U.S. Congress.
Carlos Hank was the most prominent Salinas associate attached to the
ANAVERSA scandal but not the only one. Governor Chirinos is now in the
final year of his term. CNDH ombudsman Carpizo became Salinas's Secretary
of the Interior and the director of the Federal Electoral Institute during the
critical 1994 presidential elections and is now ambassador to France.
Santiago Onate, who was Salinas's environmental point man during the
NAFTA run-up, when ANAVERSA victims were dropping like flies, became,
first, Salinas's chief of staff, then president of the PRI, and now ambassador to
London.
With such adversaries, the ANAVERSA victims are at the bottom of the
political food chain. "We knocked on every door for six years and they all
slammed shut in our face. Most of the people who started the association
have died," Lalo Rodriguez says wearily, "you lose heart but you can't give up.
Someone always knocks on your door or window and says they are sick or
this one has died. You get angry all over again. We have an obligation to our
dead. Sometimes I think that if we ever stop fighting, we too will die..."