How has NAFTA affected public health and the environment in Mexico and the U.S.?
Mexico, along with most of Latin America, lacks, or fails to enforce, effective environmental laws. The increase in manufacturing along the border region has exacerbated environmental and public health threats in the area. Every day, 44 tons of hazardous waste from the border region is improperly discarded. Due to lack of sewage treatment and safe drinking water diseases, including hepatitis, have increased to two or three times the national average. Since NAFTA, birth defects have increased dramatically. Last December, an employee at a maquiladora in Matamoros that spent five years gluing leather covers to steering wheels until he was fired in 1998,testified at a NAFTA hearing that his son was born with Spina Bifida, a spinal tumor, an enlarged heart, and no kneecaps.
