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In the spring of 1989, when I was an Associated Press correspondent in El Paso, Texas, I started hearing and reading about something called "green rocks." Children and adults across the border in El Paso's sister city of Juarez, Mexico, were crushing these mysterious rocks and sniffing the resulting fumes. I went in search of these rocks.
My search took me to the huge garbage dump for the city of 1.1 million. I followed
a dump truck on the service road that led to the middle of the depository. I watched
as dump truck after dump truck arrived at the margin of trash and emptied its load.
About a dozen barefoot boys and girls, some as young as 5, scampered around the garbage.
Older youths stood at the rears of the dump trucks, catching trash as it fell out
of the back. Sometimes they shoved each other over choice pieces such as hubcaps,
unsullied sheets of cardboard, wearable clothes, and plastic industrial buckets.
Garbage-pickers specialize. Younger kids tend to collect clothes. Older kids take the buckets.
Adults mostly go for construction materials and metals. Hungry people snatch rotting food.
When you drive the dirt roads on the outskirts of the Juarez dump, you pass cardboard
and scrap-lumber sheds with their rears to the landfill. Each shed specializes in one commodity.
One will have license plates, another will offer flattened cardboard boxes, another washing machine motors. The proprieters make their meager livings by selling these items.
The father who I interviewed for the story lived pretty well. He had a two-bedroom
adobe shack with a back patio the size of a basketball key. He had one electrical
outlet, somehow connected to a nearby streetlight. In the dirt out front, a gigantic
hog lay in a chickenwire cage that was barely bigger than the pig. I can't remember what
kind of trash the owner picked for a living.
Following is a condensed version of the story. I can't find an original copy, so here is the boiled-down version that appeared in the Dallas Morning News.
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- Gilberto Campos was alarmed when
he discovered his sons sniffing the green rocks that kids carried away from the municipal
dump.
Fourteen-year-old Luis and 18-year-old Jose lurched and stumbled in the unpaved streets, occasionally pulling a stuffed sock out of a pants pocket and sniffing it. The socks were stuffed with a bright green, rocky substance that smelled like airplane glue or spray paint. When crushed and sniffed, the green rocks had the same effect as those cheap highs.
After they surfaced in March, the rocks quickly became the drug of choice around the vast dump, an area where the well-off live in cinderblock houses and others make do with cardboard huts.
"It makes people stupid and aggressive - more aggressive than a drunk," said the 39-year-old Campos, whose sons shoved and hit him when he confronted them about their drug use.
Campos and his sons were victims of toxic-waste dumping by a maquiladora - one of 275 U.S.-owned factories in Juarez that take advantage of cheap Mexican labor. Mexican environmental officials have said they suspect maquiladoras improperly dispose of half their hazardous wastes. That would be hundreds of tons a year in Juarez alone.
Around the same time Campos confronted his sons, a woman walked into the Centro de Integracion Juvenil, a drug treatment center for children, and told psychologist Raul Bueno that her 10-year-old son was sniffing green rocks.
She gave a sample to Bueno, who sent it to SEDUE, Mexico's beleagured equivalent of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. SEDUE discovered the green rocks were solidified Kaltex, an industrial solvent containing toluene, a petroleum derivative that can cause permanent lung damage.
Campos said a doctor told him that the Kaltex did more than that to his sons. "When they get married, they can't have children," he said.
Residents said neighborhood toughs known as cholos were jumping onto the backs of trucks turning off the Avenue of the Aztecs and onto the dirt road leading to the dump. The cholo gangs would toss 10- and 20-gallon buckets of promising-looking industrial waste off the trucks to collect and sell later.
SEDUE traced the Kaltex to Outboard Marine de Mexico, a U.S.-owned maquiladora that makes parts for boat engines. Factory manager Tim Anklam said the company had the Kaltex removed from the dump. He declined to comment further.
SEDUE has 10 inspectors in Juarez to monitor 275 maquiladoras and at least 100 Mexican-owned factories. Faced with a crushing national debt, a severe housing shortage and a population boom that adds 1 million people to the work force every year, Mexico's government has not been able to make environmental protection a high priority.
Inspections don't seem to be working. Luis Hernandez, the dump's foreman, said he doesn't know what's in the scores of trucks that deposit waste in the landfill daily. Neither do the drivers, he said.
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