Shuttered buildings greet visitors arriving here after a drive down a desert road that seems like a stretch of forever 90 miles southeast from El Paso.
On the left is the Snack Shoppe, a former gas station; on the right is the old Chuck Wagon Cafe.
In the heart of downtown, a silent two-lane main street features another abandoned gas station over here, a boarded-up movie theater there. Sierra Blanca, population 600, isn’t a ghost town–it only feels like one.
The town also is the focus of an international, racially charged controversy that some analysts think could influence the U.S. presidential election in 2000.
Sierra Blanca, 16 miles from Mexico, is where state officials propose to build a low-level nuclear waste site to take radioactive material from Texas, Maine and Vermont. The site, about 5 miles from town, is ideal, they say, because of its location in the Chihuahua Desert and because it is sparsely populated.
After a 20-year search, a state commission is expected to approve project Thursday.
The proposal has strained relations between the U.S. and Mexico, with protests in Mexico City and along the border almost daily.
On Saturday, a group of Mexican senators and members of Congress representing various political parties planned hunger strikes in protest. Officials in Mexico say they do not want the U.S. to look at the border as a dumping ground.
New York City already ships treated sewage–400 tons every day since 1992–to a 128,000-acre ranch outside Sierra Blanca. “When people in New York flush,” a local joke goes, “they say, `Viva Texas!’ “
At an annual meeting of the U.S. and Mexican Congress over the summer, the issue that dominated the debate was Sierra Blanca, not drug smuggling and immigration. Mexican officials argue the project violates a 1983 agreement known as the La Paz accords signed by both countries to “prevent, reduce and eliminate sources of pollution within 60 miles of the border.”
U.S. officials counter that the project is environmentally sound, that the waste would be encased in concrete barrels and stored underground, and that La Paz does not give Mexico or the U.S. veto power over specific projects.
Some analysts think the matter could affect the presidential ambitions of Republican Texas Gov. George W. Bush, depending on how Latinos across the nation view his handling of Sierra Blanca.
Supporters of the project say it would create about 36 jobs in a region where work is scarce and the per capita income is about $8,000.
Sierra Blanca has reaped some rewards, including a new football field, a library, a medical clinic, a new firetruck and ambulances from the tax money turned over to Hudspeth County after its decision to accept the waste.
Opponents say people’s lives would be in danger, alleging the site is over an earthquake fault, above an aquifer and near the Rio Grande.
The inventory at the Sierra Blanca site would include radioactive medical waste and parts and machinery from nuclear plants. What has made the issue particularly sensitive is that opponents here and in Mexico have charged U.S. and Texas officials with environmental racism.
They say the only reason the authorities are pushing the project in Sierra Blanca is because two-thirds of the population is Mexican-American, poor and poorly educated, with no political clout–and because the site is close to Mexico.
“If this material is so low-level, so safe, why are they trucking it 3,000 miles?” asked Carlos Camacho Alcazar, a member of Mexico’s Congress who represents a district in the state of Chihuahua across from El Paso. “Why not leave it at the Canadian border?”
Texas officials insist the project is safe and vehemently deny charges of racism, saying that if the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission grants the state the license to build and operate the facility, that it is a matter of science not politics.
Bush appointed the three members who make up the commission.
The administration of Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo also has concluded that Sierra Blanca is safe. According to the president’s office, Zedillo has not addressed the subject publicly.
Lee Mathews, general counsel for the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Authority, the entity charged with selecting a disposal site since the early 1980s, called the racism charge the “least meritorious of all the arguments.”
He characterized it as “fashionable.”
When asked about charges of environmental racism, Linda Edwards, a spokeswoman for the governor, told a reporter to ask former Gov. Ann Richards why she had approved the project.
Bush, who is expected to beat his Democratic opponent in the Nov. 3 elections, so far is favored among Hispanic voters. Analysts say a good showing would show he could win a crucial voting bloc at a time when Hispanics are becoming the largest minority in the nation.
“This (pollution) issue resonates with our community,” said Raul Yzaguirre, a Texan and president of the Washington-based National Council of La Raza, a leading Hispanic civil rights group. “All the dirty stuff has been put in our communities over a period of time.”
Edwards said Bush is comfortable with his position. “Most Hispanics would agree with Gov. Bush when he says, `If the site isn’t safe, it won’t be built,’ ” she said.
Bush, however, helped lobby Congress to drop an amendment that would have limited waste at Sierra Blanca to Texas, Maine and Vermont. If the project is approved, other states eventually could ship their waste to Texas. Under federal law, Congress had to approve the compact among the three states.
Mathews said Sierra Blanca was selected partly because the area has little rainfall, a small population, and because the groundwater beneath the proposed site is about 600 feet deep.
As for fears that the project would be built above an earthquake fault, he said state officials aren’t sure that this is true. Scientists, he said, characterize the area as “an inferred fault,” suggesting some anomaly, not necessarily a fault line.
Opponents say that in the last 50 years, earthquakes of magnitude 3 or greater have occurred in the area. An earthquake measuring 6.4 hit south of here in 1931, and the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City caused ground fissures in Sierra Blanca.
Mathews noted that the nuclear waste would decay in about 500 years. If the Rio Grande were to become contaminated as a result of Sierra Blanca, he said it would be over tens of thousands of years, “not any time soon.”
In Sierra Blanca, the issue has turned neighbor against neighbor.
On a recent afternoon, Eutimio Salgado, 64, a county street worker, was over at the courthouse for a town fiesta.
As giant speakers blared Tejano music, Salgado addressed the controversy.
“I suffered a lot and raised six children,” he said, noting that after 20 years with the county, he still earns a little over $8 an hour. “Now, they want to bring this and kill them.”
Salgado echoed what the Mexican congressman said about leaving the waste up north. “We’re poor people,” he said. “We can’t do anything about it.”
Billy R. Love, however, a businessman, a former county judge and a long-time Sierra Blanca resident, said he supports the project because it would create jobs.
“Why should I think it’s dangerous?” Love asked. “It’s all stuff being made up by people who don’t know what they’re talking about.”
