http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=1766
Scroll to end: click web view. Mrs. Mcmurray 's obtained proof Asarco smelter poisoned El Paso TX through what the EPA & US DOJ said was illegal burning of illegal hazardous/radioactive wastes 1991-98. (see 73 page 1998 conf. for settlement purposes only DOJ EPA Asarco doc,10/06 nytimes) We have never been told what actinides, forever chemicals, dioxins etc are present from illegal Asarco actions see "Asarco secret document"
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
The New Wave of Border Activism
Social Movements Crossing Frontiers
by Kent Paterson"....
Reality Tourists in a Border City
Another highlight of the BSF was a "reality tour" of low-income Ciudad Juarez neighborhoods and industrial sites. Halting on the banks of the Rio Grande in the Felipe Angeles colonia, reality tour guests peered directly across the river at the mothballed Asarco copper smelter located in El Paso but also only a couple of miles from the southern New Mexico city of Sunland Park. The old smelter is a rusting emblem of how environmental issues affect communities on both sides of the border.
Shut down in 1999, the plant is at the center of a fight between Asarco's owner, Grupo Mexico, and environmental groups and political leaders from Mexico and the United States over the company's plans to renew its Texas state environmental permit and restart production. The Carlyle Group associated with George Herbert Walker Bush is a principal investor in Grupo Mexico.
Asarco opponents maintain that a revived smelter will degrade an already polluted binational airshed, and they blame the transnational company for decades of lead, arsenic and other heavy metals contamination of neighborhoods in El Paso, Ciudad Juarez and Sunland Park — a problem the company denies was its fault. Immediately preceding the BSF, the Sierra Club [well, it was a Sierra Club member, but the actual news came from EPGTLO and SPEG] released a memo from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) it obtained through the Freedom of Information Act that reported Asarco had been illegally incinerating hazardous wastes during the 1990s. The document did not spell out exactly what Asarco burned.
Mariana Chew, the Sierra Club's El Paso–Ciudad Juarez field organizer, retorted during the reality tour that the environmental organization wants answers about what was burned and why the information was concealed from the public. "They knew it and they didn't tell us," Chew affirmed, adding that the Sierra Club demands the permanent closure of the Asarco site and the cleanup of its environs.
In a press statement, Asarco minimized the incineration revelation, contending that the company had merely recycled materials and had cleared up the matter with the EPA years ago. But Jacqueline Barragan, a member of the Students Against Asarco group at the University of Texas El Paso, which is situated behind the old plant and afflicted with "hot spots" of lead contamination, was aghast at the news of the EPA memo. "I felt violated, and actually it wasn't a surprise either that the city has covered this up and that these environmental agencies that are supposedly out there to watch out for our health aided in covering up this terrible secret," Barragan fumed....."
see:
http://newspapertree.com/politics/1094-epa-memo-adds-fuel-to-asarco-fire
MEXICAN AMERICAN WOMEN THROUGH FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHY
LENSES INTO THE PAST: RECOVERING THE HISTORY OF
MEXICAN AMERICAN WOMEN THROUGH FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHY
SMELTERTOWN, TX 1915-1950
Monica Perales
Smelter Vocational School students, ca. late 1920s.
Luz and Lorenzo Personal Photograph Collection, in the possession of the family, El Paso, TX
http://www.smu.edu/SWcenter/PeralesBB.htm
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
The U.S. Department of Justice demanded Monday that mining company Asarco LLC...
Portfolio Media, New York (June 5, 2007)--The U.S. Department of Justice demanded Monday that mining company Asarco LLC, which filed for Chapter 11 in 2005, address pollution at a group of its mines in California as a condition of its reorganization.
The DOJ's brief, filed on behalf of the acting Assistant Attorney General for environment and natural resource, added that the costs associated with compliance ought to be given administrative priority in Asarco's reorganization plan, which is due in...
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