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Environmental Health Coalition:
Taking Power Back in the Borderlands.
website: http://www.environmentalhealth.org/
One of the few grassroots binational organizations active today, Environmental Health Coalition has played a pivotal role in exposing the catastrophic impacts of globalization in the U.S./ Mexico border region. Founded in 1980 in San Diego, California,EHC has effectively teamed together organizers, researchers,and policy advocates to carry out community-driven environmental and social justice projects. In the early 1990s, EHC opened a second office in Tijuana,Baja California, and began to actively engage border pollution issues.
"For me, (SALTA) has meant a huge change in my life.
I don't know the word for it... maybe "empowerment."
It has shown me that we can make a change in the
community if we want to, and it has given me hope."
-LOURDES LUJAN
After a lengthy campaign, EHC’s Border Environmental Justice Campaign (BEJC) and its Tijuana affiliate, the Colectivo Chilpancingo Pro Justicia Ambiental (Chilpancingo Pro Environmental Justice Collective), celebrated an important victory in Summer 2004 when the Mexican government signed an agreement with representatives of the Colectivo to complete a fiveyear multi-million dollar clean-up of Metales y Derivados, a U.S.-owned lead smelter company whose owner abandoned 23,000 tons of hazardous chemicals that were contaminating the nearby community of Colonia Chilpancingo. Metales y Derivados is the landmark case illustrating the failure of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in environmental protection.EHC has released a report Globalization at the Crossroads:Ten Years of NAFTA in the San Diego/Tijuana Border Region, in October 2004 (download the report at www.environmentalhealth.org), which further.pdfuments NAFTA’s environmental record.
One of the key factors in EHC’s collaboration with community activists in Colonia Chilpancingo came through an intensive popular education program called SALTA, or Salud Ambiental Latinas Tomando Acción. In 1995, EHC pioneered its first SALTA project in Barrio Log an , a low-income Latino community in San Diego.
The basic premise of SALTA is to build from what the participants already know about their neighborhoods. Participants learn about toxic chemicals by looking at common household products, then move on to industrial pollution and to learning the political and regulatory framework. In the same way, participants are asked to make personal changes to reduce their own use of toxic chemicals before demanding change by industry and government.Within two years,the participants had led a successful campaign to shut down a major source of toxic air pollution and establish a policy to prohibit this type of operation in the area.
EHC continued to develop the SALTA model,adapting it to serve different communities both within and outside the organization. In 2001, the BEJC adapted the SALTA curriculum to its campaign with Colonia Chilpancingo. SALTA proved effective as a community empowerment tool.The participants had long worked with EHC on environmental and social justice issues in the Colonia Chilpancingo community, such as the Metales y Derivados case.The first SALTA in the Colonia culminated with the participants formally establishing EHC’s Tijuana affiliate, the Colectivo Chilpancingo Pro Justicia Ambiental.
One of the unique traits of the “SALTA Chilpancingo,” as it is refer red to, is its treatment of globalization as a central theme in the content.The interview excerpts below are testimony to both the value and challenge of grappling with globalization and free trade agreements in popular education work.
Interviewed below are:Amelia Simpson, the director of the Border Environmental Justice Program at EHC, Magdalena Cerda, an EHC organizer with the BEJC who facilitated many of the workshops and played a key role in building the partnership between the organization and the Chilpancingo community, and Lourdes Luján, a Mexico-based promotora with EHC who has lived in Colonia Chilpancingo for 30 years.