By Tom Moore

Alejandro Queral
photo by Tom Moore

Environmental activism on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border has been strengthened through a support initiative established by the Sierra Club, the most influential environmental organization in America. That initiative, the Mexico Project, is designed to support newly-begun Mexican and U.S. border grassroots environmental organizations working at the community level to fight air and water pollution and workplace toxins from the unregulated expansion of the maquiladora industry along the border. The year and a half-old Project is also intended to involve Sierra Club volunteers in supporting Mexican environmental activism.
Sierra Club border representative Alejandro Queral, coordinator for the Mexico Project, works with citizens' groups, helping them get organized. Stationed in Austin, Queral has been traveling along the border doing fieldwork for the last five months.
"We're working with communities and groups in Matamoros, Reynosa, Juarez, Tijuana, and with their counterparts in the U.S., trying to increase binational cooperation, a cross-pollination of ideas and approaches to many of the same problems," he said.
Queral was in Laredo recently to confer with local environmentalists. "I'm meeting with people who have a sense of what the environmental problems are and get a sense of the history of the environmental movment in the area, where things stand, who are the key players, what the Sierra Club can do to support these players," he said.
The most prominent concerns were interest in protecting the health of the river and the growing birding industry, Queral said. "They are shared by many communities along the Río Grande. The Sierra Club offers help to address these problems, and offers its support by establishing local Sierra Club groups."
During his visit in the area, Queral met with Dr. Jim Earhart, director of the Río International Study Center, and María Eugenia Guerra, owner and publisher of LareDOS, as well as with the environmental group Tierra Nuevo in Nuevo Laredo. The three-year-old Tierra Nuevo works on issues such as river water purity and illegal dumping.
"I think there is good hope here that we can identify priorities and begin addressing them jointly," he said.
"In other parts of Tamaulipas, we were working to stop a toxic incinerator, built by a Mexican company -- TAS de Mendez, put togther by TSD de Mexico -- which takes in a significant amount of toxic waste from maquiladoras. TAS de Mendez has not been very forthcoming in sharing its environmental impact statement," Queral said.
"We don't really know what is being buried and stored, how it's being processed. We don't know what health impacts they've considered. All the information has been stashed away and it's not being shared with members of the community. What you see along the border is a lack of information for communities," he said.
"So you have no information, no capacity to communicate, no encouragement on the part of governments, especially on the Mexican side. The government should have some interest, but they ignore it, they turn it away, they bypass it altogether. There is a public participation element in which the city has to form a citizens' committee for citizens to protect and represent their communities. What we have seen is this mechanism has been completely ignored or bypassed by people who have no interest in the communities," he said.
"In the case of Mendez, this community is pretty isolated. By coming in and helping them get organized, we're helping raise the issue to a higher level. In my opinion, this company is happy to get no press time whatsoever. Many of these companies love to work in the dark, love to work as far away from public scrutiny as possible," he said.
"That really is the core of the program," he said, "increasing corporate responsibility. Corporations are getting more rights, and having fewer and fewer responsibilities to society as a whole."
Queral has been with Sierra Club for the last three years. "I'm a biologist by training so this has been a shift in my career," he said.
Formerly the director of Human Rights and the Environment, a joint program with Amnesty International working to protect the human rights of environmental workers, Queral graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in Environmental Sciences, and earned a master's in Ecology at Northern Illinois University. He is a native of Selaya, Guanajuato, Mexico. At 15 he came to the U.S. to attend the Scattergood Friends School, a Quaker-run school in Iowa, "which I think influenced a lot of the work I do now -- environmental issues, social issues," he said.
Helping organizations acquire the capital and other aid necessary to continue such work is also part of Queral's brief. "I help groups fundraise, get scientific and legal advice, get connected with academia in the U.S. and other forms of support beyond financial support," he said, adding that grant guideline and deadline information is available on the Sierra Club's website at www.sierraclub.org.
Queral admits that bringing about change is a slow process, but he remains optimistic for the long term. "I think that there has been progress. I've seen groups go from two or three people to being more organized, having more members," he said.
"There has been little progress in terms of the kind of projects that have been set forth. The problems are very big. There's been more progress on a smaller scale, in terms of educating the community. There has been progress on a number of levels, progress in terms of the groups, in term of projects, pressuring municipal governments to enforce environmental laws. There are a lot of environmental laws in Mexico but they're seldom enforced. I'm expecting to see a lot more progress in the next two or three years, when the groups are growing stronger and getting the communities on their side."