The Maquila's March to Modernity

When Mexico began its Border Industrialization Program in 1965, few could have imagined the social and environmental ills that open markets and prosperous free-trade deals would spawn three decades later. Mexico's maquiladoras (also known as maquilas) are foreign-owned assembly plants that produce cars, electronics, and garments for export to the First World. The passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which relaxed tariffs on goods moving across North American borders, made the maquila a profitable tool for U.S. companies. Even prior to NAFTA, repeated recessions and peso devaluations in the 1980s, combined with drought and chronic poverty in many of the northern and central agricultural states, brought both multinational companies and desperate migrant workers to Tijuana and Ensenada in Baja California, Nogales in Sonora, Matamoros in Tamaulipas, and Ciudad Juárez in Chihuahua.

Shantytowns sprang up, most of which are still lacking in clean water, sanitation, electricity, and other basic infrastructure; companies and city governments have had no legal obligation, no financial incentive, and no revenue to provide for inhabitants. With time, the living conditions have improved marginally in some areas, but even with meager allowances for housing or health care, workers here are still exploited. And because NAFTA has only an impotent Commission on Environmental Cooperation (CEC) to evaluate, but not enforce, the safe environmental procedures outlined in the agreement, hundreds of maquilas regularly dump hazardous waste along the border. It's estimated that less than half of American maquilas follow Mexican law and return their toxic waste to the United States.

Though the maquila industry created hundreds of thousands of jobs, it effectively threw a grenade in the midst of rural Mexico's family mores and values—for better and worse. Academic studies chart devastating social disintegration, but Mexican women—who for the first time earn a wage and decide what to do with it—are viewed by many to have finally found some liberation.

Ciudad Juárez sits above anonymous swathes of the huge state of Chihuahua, just over the Río Bravo (or Rio Grande) from El Paso, Texas. Over the last three decades more than a million souls have come to toil in the maquilas. Juárez became a magnet for young women, lured from the interior of the country by plentiful jobs. As it turned out, though, not only was their labor cheap, but so were their lives. Since 1993, there have been more than 370 officially recognized murders of young women. Hundreds of others have disappeared and are presumed dead. The maquila murders in Juárez have become a scandal of international proportions, and although most cases remain unsolved, local, state, and even international protest is beginning to mount.

The maquila zone poses problems with no easy answers, which still look a long way from resolution. Every day hopeful young men and women are carted in from their rank little huts to make gadgets for others, before they can make a life for themselves.

-Barbara Kastelein