Cross-border cooperation: Activists work to stop nuke dumps
by Philip M. Klasky

In January, 1999 at the United States Embassy in Juarez, Mexico, amid the lines waiting for travel and work visas, nearly two hundred Mexican and US activists gathered for song, dance, and talks about threats to their lands and people. Young Tarahumara Indians from Copper Canyon in southern Chihuahua danced, photographers from the Mexican press swarming around them.

Horacio Echeverria, a Tarahumara activist and educator, explained that his people are being driven out of their homelands by well-armed narcotraficantes. The canyon lands are taken by force and used for growing opiates. The Indians are caught in gang crossfire with no protection from the government.

Donaciana Antonio Almaraz, a human rights advocate from Oaxaca, spoke about how her village was destroyed and her people detained, tortured, and killed by the infamous caciques, land barons, and their gangs who clear-cut their forests and steal their water.

Bill Addington followed, veteran of a ten-year battle to stop a nuclear waste dump near Sierra Blanca, Texas, sixteen miles from the Rio Grande. Professor Manuel Robles of Chihuahua organized thousands of people to block the border bridges. The dump proposal was defeated after President Ernesto Zedillo lodged an official protest.

These people came together to help stop another nuclear dump at Ward Valley, California.

Chairwoman Nora Helton of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe spoke next. "We are the Bipa Aha Macav, the Keepers of the River. The Creator gave us the job of protecting the river. We have lived along the Colorado River since time immemorial. We believe that the proposed nuclear dump is an act of environmental injustice against our people, our livelihood and our way of life."

Wally Antone led three other men in traditional Quechan Bird Songs, and Mojave/Mohave elders dance, as they did months ago at a demonstration against the Sierra Blanca dump. The rally ended with the spirited songs of Alfredo Figueroa, one of the original leaders of the United Farm Workers movement.

Ward Valley activists were invited to Mexico by the Coalicion Binacional Contra Tiraderos Toxicos y Radioactivos (Bi-national Coalition Against Toxic and Radioactive Wastes) and the Sierra Blanca Alliance to gather with other indigenous and environmental groups and meet with Mexican government officials.

Ward Valley is in California's Mojave Desert. America's nuclear industry plans to bury radioactive waste there in shallow, unlined trenches above an aquifer, eighteen miles from the Colorado River, in critical habitat for the endangered desert tortoise, on territory sacred to the Fort Mojave, Chemehuevi, Quechan, Cocopah and Colorado River Indian Tribes. A coalition of environmental and social justice activists and Native Americans has fought the dump for ten years.

On January 29, representatives of the five Mexican border states of Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Nuevo Leon, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas passed a strongly-worded resolution against the Ward Valley dump. The danger to their water supply from a nuclear waste dump in California is a threat to Mexican sovereignty. Mexico receives 1.5 million acre-feet of Colorado River water each year.

In 1981, the US and Mexico signed the La Paz agreement on environmental quality along the border. The agreement is up for renewal in the next year and both countries have invoked it to criticize projects that degrade air, land, and water. Mexican officials have raised the issue of the threat of nuclear waste dumps along the Rio Grande and Colorado River. The border area is home to the Mohave, Quechan, Cocopah, Mixteco, Zapoteco, Tepehuana, Pima, Maricopa, Warojio, Yaqui, and Tigua people.