Foxconn arrival raises stakes for Lomas del Poleo

August 11, 2008

By Neil Harvey
Who will benefit from binational development along the New Mexico-Chihuahua border? This question has arisen once more with the announcement in mid-July of the construction of a new assembly plant in San Jerónimo, an area adjacent to New Mexico’s Santa Teresa port of entry. Foxconn (the trade name for Taiwan-based Hon Hai Precision Industry) will operate the plant and claims that it will eventually employ around 20,000 workers when the project is completed in three to four years. This kind of development has drawn praise from local politicians and mainstream media on both sides of the border, with Doña Ana County well positioned to attract supplier companies to the proposed Santa Teresa industrial parks.
Given the current economic problems of Ciudad Juárez and southern New Mexico, it is easy to see why the Foxconn announcement has generated such interest. The violent battles between rival drug cartels in Juárez have particularly damaged the city’s small and mid-sized businesses as the number of visitors and consumers from the U.S. has declined. Many businesses are closing down or relocating, increasing the need for new jobs. It seems that the maquiladora plants are becoming a kind of enclave economy that offer employment, but on conditions determined by global competition (including low wages and the lack of union representation).
On the New Mexico side, persistently low income levels also provide an incentive to attract new investments through binational development plans. This is the argument used, for example, by supporters of the Verde Realty Group’s proposal to establish two industrial parks and a residential area at the Santa Teresa site that is located immediately opposite the San Jerónimo area on the Mexican side of the border. Verde has developed strong ties to the Mexican business owners who now stand to gain from the arrival of Foxconn. For example, the owner of much of the land in San Jerónimo is Eloy Vallina, who, until last year, sat on the board of Verde. Vallina, together with Pedro and Jorge Zaragosa, two of the most powerful business leaders in northern Mexico, participated in the New Mexico-Chihuahua Trade Commission established by the governors of the two border states in 2003. These connections have been documented by several well-known journalists, including Eileen Welsome and Debbie Nathan (see www.pasodelsur.com).
The problem with this model of binational development is that it fails to take into account the long-term needs of border communities. This is most dramatically evident in the case of Lomas del Poleo, a colonia on the western edge of Ciudad Juárez that will be directly impacted by development at the San Jerónimo-Santa Teresa maquila zone. Although Lomas del Poleo is not situated exactly at this site, it is located in the area that the Zaragosa Group would like to develop as part of a connection between the newly constructed Camino Real and the port of entry at Santa Teresa. As noted in previous articles in Grassroots Press (Oct./Nov. 2007, Feb./March 2008 and April/May 2008), residents of Lomas del Poleo are claiming legal rights to the land they have occupied since the 1970s. The same land is claimed by the Zaragosas because of the potential commercial value of this area as binational plans, such as the San Jerónimo-Santa Teresa complex, begin to materialize. Violent dispossession has been used to intimidate local residents, as witnessed by two of the Doña Ana County commissioners, Dolores Saldaña-Caviness Saldana and Oscar Vásquez Butler, in March 2008. They heard testimonies and saw videos that attest to the heavy-handed tactics of the Zaragosas and their hired guards (see video of their visit to Lomas Del Poleo at www.grass-roots-press.com).
Although some criticized the visit of the two commissioners to Lomas del Poleo, they were simply doing what we may expect of elected officials in a border state – namely, to gain a deeper understanding of all the consequences of binational development plans, for all people involved. Broader attention to such matters had the initial positive impact of reducing the daily harassment and aggressive actions of Zaragosa’s guards. However, the underlying issue has not gone away. The legal claims of residents to the land have still not been recognized by the courts.
Then, on June 20, one of the government-appointed lawyers working for residents in Lomas del Poleo, Carlos Javier López Avitia, was assassinated after leaving the Agrarian Court in Chihuahua City. It is unlikely that the culprits will be found, and his clients are left vulnerable once more to the lack of legal response to their claims. Since December 2007 other residents have argued that López Avitia failed to keep their cases updated and therefore weakened their chances of gaining a legal solution. As a result, they hired an independent lawyer, Bárbara Zamora, to support them. Zamora is a well-known human rights and agrarian lawyer who has litigated on behalf of indigenous and peasant groups in contentious land conflicts in other areas of Mexico. At the time of writing, the residents and Zamora are awaiting confirmation of a date to present their claims at a federal court in Chihuahua. In the meantime, support groups on both sides of the border are raising funds to help pay for the legal costs faced by residents.
The announcement of the Foxconn plant therefore comes at a moment where the future of colonias such as Lomas del Poleo is at stake. By bringing the reality of a new maquila zone that much closer, the incentives for the Zaragosas and their political allies to evict the residents of Lomas del Poleo will become greater.
Must border development inevitably entail dispossession of low-income communities and depletion of local natural resources? Elected officials and citizens on both sides of the border have argued that we need a new approach to binational development, one that takes into account the long-term needs and existing land rights of all communities, not just those of the powerful industrial groups. The arrival of Foxconn will not make this issue go away, but, on the contrary, will demand closer scrutiny of how resources, including land, water and tax revenues, are being used — and for whose benefit.

Neil Harvey is director of the Center for Latin American and Border Studies, New Mexico State University. He can be reached at nharvey@nmsu.edu

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