Tijuana Straits Read Online Free PDF

part time, taking night classes in environmental law at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, situated on the Mesa de Otay, within sight of the banks and shopping centers of the Zona del Río, the new Tijuana. It was what she had wanted. Each day was a reminder here, each commute a trip in time, a consorting with ghosts.

    The sky had begun to color by the time she reached the mesas. The factories were changing shifts and she fell in behind a convoy of buses, which were ubiquitous. Day and night they chugged in and out of the mesas like so many gigantic blue insects with their loads of workers, from the colonias to the factories and back again. She sometimes thought of the foreign-owned factories as the parts of some monstrous organism dropped from the heavens, settling its tentacles into the arid ground, reaching deep into the heart ofher country. With the advent of NAFTA, the monster had grown stronger and fatter, with more factories, more pollution, greater abuse of the workers—the very things she had come to fight, in her mother’s name, in the name of the planet. She thumped the steering wheel with the butt of her hand, blowing her horn. The buses made no attempt to let her by. They lumbered on. Magdalena looked at her watch. She honked a few more times just for the hell of it then settled back, resigned, inhaling exhaust. It was all too perfect. While the buses fouled the road in their efforts to feed the monster, she rushed to join the residents of Vista Nueva in mourning what the monster had wrought.
    The community in question occupied a tract of land at the foot of the mesa. Above it hunkered the remains of Reciclaje Integral, a deserted smelting and battery recycling plant. For years the residents of Vista Nueva had reported skin ulcers, respiratory ailments, birth defects. A number of children had died. Magdalena was proud to have had a part in getting the factory shut down. It was her first year at the university and the attorney she worked for was handling the case. And the case was going well.
    When it became apparent that charges would be brought against him in a Mexican court, however, the owner, an American, simply filed for bankruptcy in Mexico, left the factory as it stood, and withdrew across the border, where he continued to prosper. Magdalena had never seen him face-to-face, only in pictures—a middle-aged man with silver hair. His name was Conrad Hunter. He lived in a million-dollar house somewhere in San Diego County while his deserted plant continued to poison the residents of Vista Nueva. And of course the government of her own country, always a friend of business, did not think it their job to pursue the culprit, or to clean up the mess he had left behind.
    In tears, she had gone to the attorney she worked for, a woman by the name of Carlotta. They had taken coffee on the little patiobehind the office, sitting together in wrought-iron chairs as the sun crossed a corner of sky.
    “There’s a story to make you crazy in every quarter of the city,” Carlotta had told her, “on every block.”
    “Right,” Magdalena had said. “But what about this guy Hunter? We’re just going to sit here?”
    “We are appealing to the CEC.”
    The CEC was a secretariat of NAFTA: the Commission for Environmental Cooperation. The point of the appeal, as Magdalena understood it, was to expose the CEC as little more than a toothless lion. It was an exercise. She said as much to Carlotta.
    “A necessary exercise,” Carlotta said.
    “But still an exercise.”
    Carlotta had arranged her fingers like the peaked roof of a tiny church then looked at Magdalena across their tips. “There is a point of American law,” she said. “It’s called Minimum Contact. It goes something like this: If we could establish a connection between this guy in San Diego and some other business here, in Mexico, it might be possible to go after him over there, bring charges against him in the States.”
    “Then