The Pepenador
Patrick Oster
"The Mexicans. A personal portrait of a people"
2002
ISBN 0060011300
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The Santa Fe garbage dump is no more, and therein lies a story. For me, the story begins on a personal note. Santa Fe was where my garbage went after the rumbling behemoths of the city garbage service picked it up. But I did not discover the story of Santa Fe by following the trucks. I followed my nose.
What little wind there is in the Valley of Mexico, where Mexico City and its suburbs are located, prevails from the northwest. That meant that the wind generally blew away from my house toward the thousands of tons of crud suspended in the valley's polluted air each day. But every once in a while, the wind would turn around and blow toward me. The first time it did, I noticed not only noxious auto-exhaust fumes but a terrible stench. I asked someone what that horrible smell was. "That," I was told, "is Santa Fe."
The smell alone was enough to draw even the mildly curious out to Santa Fe. But my first visit to the dump to end all dumps was made for professional, not personal, reasons. In September 1985, while I was reporting on the aftermath of the two killer earthquakes that had hit Mexico City that month, I discovered that much of the rubble was being trucked out to Santa Fe. I had heard that scavengers who worked the dump often made a good living recycling odd bits of garbage. I thought it might be a good story if someone was benefiting from a disaster that had inflicted so much misery.
I drove out to Santa Fe one weekend, although some friends had warned me that the local denizens of the dump had just beaten up a Mexican reporter. They hadn't liked what his newspaper had written about them. I had a hostile reception, too. My car was surrounded by a knot of scavengers who apparently did not want me to see what was going on inside the dump. I managed to persuade them to let me talk to their leader so he could decide if I would be allowed to stay. The leader, Pablo Téllez Falcón, was drunk as a skunk, so I talked to one of his lieutenants, Felipe Castillo. He said I could come back in a few days when "Don Pablo" might be feeling better.
Santa Fe sat atop the same ridge of valley foothills as my house. But it was higher up and afforded a more spectacular view of the valley and the mountains and volcanoes that ring it. At least it was a great view on that handful of days each year when one could see the valley and peaks through the smoke, ozone, and suspended particulates that made it the most polluted urban landscape in the world. Santa Fe itself presented a view of a different sort. It was a vast tableau of garbage. Sprawled across 150 acres of land was garbage as far as the eye could see. In manmade landfill pits, noisy bulldozers pushed mountains of garbage from here to there. What garbage was not in these manufactured canyons had been tossed down the sides of every available hill and slope, as if garbage-truck drivers had had to dump their loads in a hurry, like drug traffickers spotlighted by the authorities. Garbage was strewn along the dusty access roads that led to the heart of Santa Fe. In fact, the road into Santa Fe had been built on garbage. My car, I was told, was sitting on about 230 feet of garbage, the accumulated detritus of nearly five decades of dumping at Santa Fe.
The shocker was that some 2,500 people were living on all that garbage. By day, they scurried over mounds of newly arrived refuse like hungry ants at a picnic. By night, they slept on compacted garbage that had provided a steady income for three generations of scavengers. At first, it was hard to imagine that anything of value could be found amid this gargantuan collection of trash. I looked and saw rotted fruit, cracked eggshells, fetid meat, crushed milk cartons, crumpled aluminum foil, broken soft-drink bottles, discarded clothes, half-eaten tortillas, split banana peels, dried chicken bones, and soiled paper diapers. The trained eye of the scavengers looked and saw money. Lots of money.
In Mexico, scavengers are called pepenadores. In Mexico's version of Spanish, 'pepenar' means to scavenge or pick up things that are scattered about. That's what the pepenadores did. Their name derives from the nahuatl (Aztec) word pepena. Thus, pepenador is a term used almost exclusively in Mexico. The brand of garbage picking in Mexico is pretty singular too.
In the 1940s, a few families, desperate to earn a living, surreptitiously moved into Santa Fe and a few other city dumps and claimed them as their own. They were the lowest of the low. They were hoping to find a little something of value that had been tossed out by the more fortunate. No one rushed in to dispute their claim. Garbage-dump squatters don't have many rivals. Eventually, people got used to them. City officials, who did virtually nothing to treat the capital's solid wastes, came to realize that the pepenadores performed a service. They sorted out trash that could be recycled: glass, aluminum foil, paper, cardboard, copper, bent steel rods, and the like. What could not be used the pepenadores would burn to make room for the next day's waste. A modus vivendi developed. In a crude way, the pepenadores became part of the establishment. They even joined the ruling political party and became stalwarts.
Over the years, the pepenadores developed an intricate system for deciding who had the right to sort out the various types of garbage and who would get to sell it. Mexicans say a "mafia" came to control the garbage business in the valley. Certainly the garbage men who came to my door had all the characteristics of mobsters. If I wanted my garbage picked up, I had to give them a "tip." No tip, no garbage pickup. But I found the pepenadores' system more feudal than criminal. The pepenadores are like a medieval clan. Their rights to scavenge are based on heredity. With few exceptions, one has to be born into a pepenador family to become a pepenador. Like the Middle Ages, those who hold power within this tight-knit clan are the meanest, most ruthless, most cunning of the lot. The baddest of them all was Rafael Gutiérrez Moreno, who in his time ruled with varying power over some fifteen thousand scavengers at seven open-air garbage dumps in the city. His subjects and the Mexican press called him the King of the Garbage Pickers. He used the political clout of his clan-and the group's absolute loyalty to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)-to become a member of the national legislature. In the process, he became a very rich man. He took in an estimated sixty million pesos (fifty-five thousand dollars) a month, according to court records at the time of his murder in March 1987.
Gutiérrez, who was born and died in a city garbage dump, acted like the king he was. He left a legend that is the stuff of soap operas and Balzac novels. He died in spectacular fashion too. He was murdered in his sleep at about 2:00 A.M. on March 19, 1987. At the time of his death, he had ruled the pepenadores for about twenty-five years. The courts found that his onetime common-law wife, Martha García González, had hired Juan Carlos Roque Sáenz to kill Gutiérrez after he had informed García that he was going to take another common-law wife. Garcia promised Roque Sáenz six million pesos ($5,500) for the job, giving him 300,000 pesos as a down payment. After the murder, there was a mad scramble for the fortune that Gutiérrez had left. A strongbox was found in a sauna at his lavish home at the Santa Catarina damp. Accounts differs as to its contents. But it contained as much as 3.5 billion pesos' ($3.2 million) worth of loot, according to another of the king's wives, Guillermina de la Torre Malváez. She made an attempt to become the queen of the garbage pickers after Guitiérrez's death created a power vacuum. She cited the twenty two years she had lived with the king-and the eight children she had borne him-as basis for her claim. Gutiérrez was also thought to have had bank accounts in the United States and Europe with other money he collected as king of the garbage pickers. It's hard to say how much Gutiérrez was really worth at his death. But the squabble over his riches set off a probate fight that kept the Mexican press buzzing for months. Scores of children came forward to claim they were Gutiérrez's sons or daughters. The courts recognized twenty-seven children as legitimate heirs Residents of the Santa Catarina dump, where Gutiérrez had reigned, insisted that he and his many wives had fathered more than a hundred children on his way to achieving a personal goal of 180 offspring. If local lore can be believed, Gutiérrez also exercised droit du seigneur, sometimes demanding that the wives and daughters of Santa Catarina's pepenadores be sent to him to spend the night in his bed.
If Gutiérrez was the king of the pepenadores, one of his dukes was Don Pablo Téllez Falc6n, whose realm was Santa Fe, just as it had been his father's before him. When I came back to Santa Fe after my first, unsuccessful visit, Don Pablo, a short, heavyset man with eyes like coin slots, was indeed sober. Once I was announced, Don Pablo, just up from a post-lunch nap, came out to greet me. He was still wiping the sleep out of his eyes as he emerged from the darkness of his shack into the brilliant sunshine of late afternoon. Don Pablo took a seat on a tree stump under a canvas awning that jutted out from the side of his ramshackle house. As I explained what I wanted, he stroked the enormous head of one of his dogs, an aggressive female mutant malamute. Don Pablo got very testy at my questions. I had it all wrong, he said. All the pepenadores were getting from the earthquake sites were huge clumps of concrete and twisted steel that had once been the floors or walls of now-destroyed buildings.
"You can't sell those things to anyone," said Don Pablo, who said the rubble was being used as a base for a new soccer field that the pepenadores were building on top of sifted garbage. Don Pablo said he wasn't surprised that I thought the way I did. Pepenadores are very misunderstood characters in Mexican society. They are the butt of exploitational newspaper stories that depict them as some kind of garbage-eating savages. Just because pepenadores lived on garbage amid blankets of flies, hundreds of junkyard dogs, scores of bloated pigs, and the odd defecating horse or cow, did not mean they were without dignity. Pepenadores had built their homes with their own hands. They had a grammar school, sports facilities, electricity, and community water facilities. They voted regularly. They made an above-average wage, although no one got rich, Don Pablo was quick to point out.
I looked around. I certainly did not see wealth, but I didn't see much dignity either. I saw dirt-floored homes with walls made of flattened oil drums and roofs of corrugated metal and sheets of turquoise garbage bags. On my previous visit I had seen a little smudged-faced urchin, who had offered me a choice of fruit or vegetables from a sack of dirt-encrusted bananas, oranges, apples, and carrots that someone down in the valley had thrown out a few days before. I saw people coughing and wheezing, the effects of breathing in the contaminants that so much garbage generated. I saw desperation.
Don Pablo saw something different. He saw decades of survival and a way of life. At the time, the members of his group, which he described as a social organization, were making between 1,300 and 1,500 pesos a day. That was slightly more than the 1,260peso-a-day ($2.65) minimum wage that the majority of workers in the valley were making at the time.
"Sometimes it's more, of course," chirped Castillo, "like when you find a gold medal or something valuable in the garbage."
Finds of treasure weren't occurring much anymore. Since mid1982, Mexico had been gripped by an economic crisis. Even the quality of the garbage had gone downhill. People, particularly the maids of the city, were picking over the garbage before it got to Santa Fe. The garbage from the valley's rich areas was the worst, said Castillo.
"It seems all we get from them is grass clippings," he complained.
To compound the pepenadores' problems, Mexico was at last coming out of the Dark Ages in its attitude toward the environment. A small band of ecologistas, or environmental activists, was demanding that the federal and city governments do something about the pollution that was choking the Mexico City area. At the top of their list was shutting down Santa Fe, or at least modernizing its operations through sanitary procedures or closed-oven burning. Bacteria and parasites were proliferating in the rank putrefaction that could be found all across the mammoth damp. Germs or viruses were carried into the valley by millions of fleshy black flies that fed on the garbage. Other poisons were carried into the atmosphere by the winds that blew across the site. Spontaneous fires spewed infectious material and acrid smoke into the air, creating an acute health danger for many of the valley's eighteen million residents. The health of the pepenadores was a scandal, too.
"These people don't understand us," Don Pablo told me. "If we had to burn the garbage or do what they say, we couldn't make a living. We need all the garbage we can get. Garbage is our life."
Don Pablo and the pepenadores did not win that fight. With orders from President Miguel de la Madrid and Mexico City mayor Ramón Aguirre, it was announced in December 1986 that Santa Fe would be closed. Santa Fe was the last of the city's open-air dumps to be shut. But shut it was.
In March of 1987, Don Pablo's pepenadores began working a new landfill site, just up the foothills from their old home. It is called Los Prados de la Montaña, or "the Meadows of the Mountain," which sounds a lot nicer than it looks. Los Prados is a gaping seventy-foot-deep hole, excavated out of the side of a mountain and spread out over about fifty-five acres. It is expected that it will be filled up in about five years, if the current delivery of 2,500 tons of garbage a day continues. Then the pepenadores will have to move even farther outside the valley to the Barranca de Tlapizahuaya, a deep gorge whose holding capacity is supposed to suffice for what city officials call the medium term.
At Los Prados, which can't be seen from the valley, many of the old pepenadores' rules are the same. Certain families have the right to sort out aluminum foil or cardboard containers or glass bottles. Certain families have the right to buy bags of such items and to sell them in bulk to recyclers. But other rules are different. Open fires, for example, are banned. The garbage is not allowed to sit and rot as a festering point for flies and disease. Each night, bulldozers level out what is left of the day's trash after the pepenadores have picked over it. The refuse is covered with a special type of dirt that packs well and is supposed to provide an impermeable seal between one day's garbage and that of the next. If the garbage graders do their job well, the contaminants of Los Prados's stored solid wastes will never again seep into the valley's underground aquifer as pollutants did for some fifty years at Santa Fe.
The pepenadores have to leave when the bulldozers arrive. They have from 7:00 A.M. until 7:00 P.M. to collect what they can. No longer can they live on the garbage. Across the road, in an area called Tlayapaca, the city has built modular homes for them, much like the temporary housing that thousands of victims got after the 1985 earthquakes. The new scavengers' village is to have regular electric, water and sewage service, its own market, a grammar school, a children's garden, a medical dispensary, and recreation areas.
In March of 1988, the government instituted a new get-tough environmental law aimed at curbing polluting businesses and cars. The government, in the midst of a presidential campaign, was doing a lot of crowing about how much they had accomplished to clean up the environment. Their critics were expressing a lot of doubts. I had not been back to Santa Fe since my talk with Don Pablo after the 1985 earthquakes. I thought the reported crackdown on Santa Fe might be a good indication of how serious the government had really gotten about the environment.
When I arrived at Santa Fe, I found that most of the pitiful shacks in which the pepenadores had lived for generations were still standing. However, the open-air landfill sites that had so alarmed environmentalists were gone, covered over with the special dirt that city officials said would protect people from the leagues of garbage below. The city was building a park on top of the new dirt. Apolonia Martínez de Correa's two-room shanty was still standing, but not for long, she said. The govemment had told her she and her family of ten children would have to move out in about two months. She didn't know where she'd be going. Her husband had hereditary rights to buy used milk cartons and other cardboard items from pepenadores who extracted such things frcqn garbage at Los Prados. But the family didn't make enough money to buy one of the 510 new modular homes that the government was building at the Tlayapaca site. Mrs. Martinez de Correa had been told that a new house there would cost between two and three million pesos ($833 to $1,325). Her husband paid her and each of their children a weekly salary of 50,000 pesos. That was a little more than the 8,000-pesos-a-day mandatory minimum wage that the majority of workers in the valley made for a six-day week in 1988. But 50,000 pesos a week did not make one rich. The dirt-floor Correa house had only a little kitchen and one room where all twelve Correas slept, ate, and socialized. There was electric service, but no bathroom. Water had to be hauled by plastic bucket from a community tap toward the center of the pepenadores' village.
Two million pesos for a new house was the equivalent of forty weeks' pay for any of the Correa clan. If they could save all the money the entire family earned in a week, they could come up with that sum in about three and a half weeks. But that, of course, was impossible. The family needed what it earned just to survive. The Correa family was better off than most in that respect. Everyone was working. The national unemployment rate was about 18 percent of the work force, so there was that to be grateful for. But not everyone was in good health. Mrs. Martinez de Correa said she was having trouble breathing. Maybe it was all those years of inhaling garbage fumes, she said. One of her little boys had a heart problem, too. Even with the family's above-average finances, there wasn't much she could do for him.
By birth, everyone in the family had the right to work at Los Prados and at any landfill site the government might open later. But where was the family going to live, asked Mrs. Martínez de Correa, a plump woman with graying streaks in her jet-black hair. "My family has been here for a very long time-fifty years," she said. "Where will we go?"
By her count, some 208 pepenador families had already moved out of Santa Fe. Some had moved away from Mexico City. They were looking for new jobs elsewhere in the country. They would be pepenadores no more. Others had moved to a poor neighborhood called San Antonio. It was farther from Los Prados than the model village at Tlayapaca But people could afford the housing. As they had so many years before, they could build their own homes on cheap land. Maybe she would go to San Antonio, too. But right now, she said, all she was thinking about was sorting out milk cartons. She and her brood had bought bags of such cartons from fellow pepenadores earlier in the day at eighty pesos a kilo, less than two cents a pound. By day's end they had to flatten the cartons out so they were ready for the recycler who would come and pay them eighty pesos a kilo plus a tidy profit that financed the family's wages.
"We have no plans," she said of the inevitable move from Santa Fe. "We will have to go somewhere. I don't know where. Right now we are working day to day."
It had been an act of political courage for the government to bring the curtain down on the long saga of Santa Fe. There had, of course, been political pressure to do so from do-gooder groups such as the Mexican Ecological Movement and the Group of 100, a collection of poets, artists, writers, musicians, and other Mexicans who had grown tired of breathing poisoned air. But the ruling PRI party, which has been synonymous with the government since 1929, doesn't have much of a record of responding to public complaints It had shown even less inclination to turn on a loyal political ally such as the pepenadores, who had always voted for PRI candidates as the price for informal government recognition of their squatter status.
The action against Santa Fe was a little surprising. The government had been slow, even resistant, about doing anything about Mexico's undeniable environmental problems. Even when it could deny the problems no longer, it argued that environmentalists had exaggerated them. Then something unexpected happened. In the winter of 1985-86, Mexico City suffered the worst thermal inversions in its history. Since the 1970s, these aberrational layers of upper-level warm air had kept a lid on all the contaminants that the capital's cars and factories had put into the cool, low-level air of valley mornings. But the government had always been able to rely on a rising morning temperature to lift the inversion before noon. That winter, however, the inversions stayed in place, putting an airtight lid on the bowl-shaped valley and creating a pressure cooker of pollution. People with enough money took their children to the countryside. Marchers took to the streets. The government realized it had not just an environmental problem on its hands but a political one. Slowly and begrudgingly it began to act. The federal environment ministry, known as SEDUE, began to issue dally reports on the level of the leading pollutant in each quadrant of the city, as well as for the downtown area. A rating of 0 to 50 for each pollutant was considered "Good"; 51 to 100 was "Fair"; 101 to 200 was "Poor" (100 was the internationally recognized tolerable maximum); 201 to 300 was "Very Poor"; and 301 to 500 was "Dangerous." From the beginning of the program, a rating of 50 or under was very rare anywhere in the city and 100 to 200 was a typical reading during the May-October rainy season. The level would have been higher, but daily deluges in the rainy season washed much of the pollution out of the air, leaving its corrosive residue on people, houses, and cars. In winter, when particularly cold morning air sometimes kept thermal inversions in place later than normal, one could regularly see readings of 200 to 300. At that level, environmentalists warned that people should not exercise outdoors. They said people with respiratory problems-and there were hundreds of thousands of them in the valley-should stay indoors. That was fine for some, but many had to go outside to work in order to eat.
The government told the public that the valley's 2.5 million cars, most of them badly in need of a tune-up and few equipped with emission-control equipment, were the main culprits in creating the most polluted environment in the world. It announced that Pemex, the state-owned oil company, would offer a new low-lead gasoline to replace the leaded regular gasoline that Mexico had used for years, notwithstanding the widespread switch elsewhere to unleaded regular. A new gas, "Nova Plus," did replace the old regular gas. But a strange thing happened. The pollution got worse. Ozone levels soared. Environmentalists had the explanation. After independent studies of samples of the new gasoline, it was discovered that it still contained a lot more lead than U.S. unleaded gasoline-and a lot more hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons were added so Mexican cars could still run smoothly without the high-performance lead additive. But the hydrocarbons also produced ozone. If the hydrocarbons had been processed through a catalytic converter, ozone levels would have been lower, environmentalists said. The government insisted there was no real proof of this. It refused to provide environmentalists with details about the new gasoline's formula. It also refused to require catalytic converters on cars until 1988-and then only on new-model cars. One reason why the government dragged its feet on emission controls may have been that catalytic converters would send car prices up, a politically unpopular act. But the government may also have been concerned about whether Pemex could supply enough truly unleaded gasoline for Mexican cars. "Nova Extra," an unleaded gasoline made available for tourists who drove cars with catalytic converters in Mexico, was often in short supply. At times, it had to be imported from abroad, an embarrassment for a country that celebrates the 1938 nationalization of Mexican oil fields as a national holiday.
The government seemed to be more concerned about the reaction of Mexicans as car owners than Mexicans as beings who breathe. There may have been some political sense to this. Although pollution levels are published daily in Mexico City newspapers, more city residents read comic books than newspapers. Most people get their news from the radio, which reports little about the environment and does not give pollution readings. With such limited dissemination of information about pollution, it's not surprising that Mexicans have not developed much of an environmental consciousness. The sad part is that if they knew what pollutants such as lead were doing to the mental and physical development of their children, they would be enraged. Maybe that explains why the government-influenced press doesn't tell them.
Mexicans do know about cars, however. A car is a symbol of social status and, in some cases, the difference in whether one gets to work or not. Just as their U.S. counterparts had, Mexican environmentalists ran up against this love affair with cars in efforts to clean up Mexico City's air. One campaign in particular was a fiasco. Under the slogan Un día sin auto ("One day without a car"), environmentalists set up stands all over town to get capital residents to give up use of their cars one day a week in hopes of reducing pollution levels. The campaign goal was to sign up half a million of the valley's 2.5 million car owners. About 400,000 Un día sin auto bumper stickers were handed out. But program officials estimated that only about 75,000 persons put them on their cars. And no one knew how many drivers had actua11y reduced the use of their cars. The program also got negative feedback from testy Mexican car owners, including an outburst of bumper stickers that read: "I drive every day, I pollute every day, and I don't give a damn."
Notwithstanding a generally listless public concern about the environment, what criticism there was did rise notably as the 1985-86 thermal inversion crisis became apparent to everyone. President Miguel de la Madrid apparently sensed trouble and moved to head it off. In addition to ordering the low-lead gasoline, de la Madrid, who had created Mexico's first Environment Ministry, fired his environment minister. The minister was already under a cloud because of charges of corruption. De la Madrid issued a twenty-one-point statement of plans for improving the environment. City buses were to be outfitted with less-polluting engines. Car owners were to be asked to submit to voluntary emission testing. In míd-1988, testing became mandatory for some used cars, after complaints from environmentalists about the ineffectiveness of voluntary testing. The government said it would close open-air dumps, such as Santa Fe. As part of a plan of decentralization, some government agencies and some of the worst-polluting factories would be moved out of town. Some polluting cement factories were closed. Others factories, including a Pemex refinery north of Mexico City, were forced to switch to less-polluting natural gas as their chief operating fuel. Government workers planted twelve million new trees in the valley to create more "green lung" areas. Most of the trees died.
Despite all these efforts, the following winter the pollution seemed worse. Undaunted, de la Madrid's new environment minister, Manuel Camacho Solis, said in January 1987 that the government would take one hundred more steps to improve the environment. But when the rainy season began that May, pollution had gotten so bad that even the daily deluges did not help. The steely gray that Mexico City children had come to think of as the natural color of the sky had become a permanent fixture.
The government had clearly awakened to environmental problems. But in many cases it talked a much better game than it played. Camacho promised to institute an emergency drill to close down Mexico City factories or force them to reduce operations if pollutions levels got too bad. In 1987, as far as he was concerned, that was never necessary. Not until February of 1988, when some pollutant levels hit 298, did the government shut some factories and then only for a few days. Not surprisingly, when the government's self-described, get-tough environmental law went into effect in March 1988, many critics didn't have much faith in it. Its requirement of mandatory emissions testing for passenger cars would be undercut by Mexico's tradition of bribing police to avoid laws that cost too much to obey, they said. The law's required fining or shutdown of polluting factories would be effective only when the government got tough with the employer most responsible for pollution: itself.
Many of the worst polluters among the valley's thirty thousand factories belonged to state-owned industries. That was a key part of the problem. The government could, of course, shut down its own factories without the legal fight it might encounter from private enterprises. But to do so would put thousands of people on the streets at a time when the crippled Mexican economy already wasn't able to create enough jobs for those who wanted them. One third of all the jobs in Mexico were in the valley. Alfonso Ciprés Villareal, president of the Mexican Ecological Movement, said it best when he told me: "The truth is, there is more interest in Mexico in the economy than in the environment. A man would rather have a job in a polluted city than have no job at all."
That was the crux of it. Cleaning up the environment would cost money. Americans had discovered that distasteful fact in 1970 when the U.S. environmental movement got off the ground. U.S. businesses had dragged their feet when cleanups were demanded. U.S. firms had argued that cleaning up the environment was a luxury that would cost jobs and add little to production.
Mexico was going through the same process in the late 1980s. The difference was that Mexico had a lot less money to spend on cleanup and a lot more people out of work.
The magnitude of Mexico's environmental problems was greater, too. Mexico City, which some local wags called "Make-Sicko-City," was the worst of all. No one had to tell you about how bad the air pollution was. All you had to do was breathe. Water was wasted at an alarming rate. The city, which drew much of its water from underground aquifers, was sinking a few inches each year. Uneven sidewalks and sunken building floors could be found all over the capital. And yet home owners or their maids continued their mindless ritual of watering down their sidewalks each morning, even in the rainy season. Noise pollution from unmuffled cars and buses was beyond belief in some neighborhoods. It was a key contributor to a widespread, environmentally caused depression that people jokingly called "chilango neurosis," after the nickname used for residents of the capital. Acid rain was killing what few trees were left. Land use had become so saturated that the city had run out of places to bury people.
While the enormity of problems was greater in the capital, the immature, uninformed, self-destructive environmental attitude that one found there was hardly the exception. In Tijuana, one found slow-moving progress in dealing with acute water pollution. It plagued not only the one million residents of that huge, growing border town but San Diego as well. The attitude could be seen in the state of Veracruz, where the white-elephant Laguna Verde nuclear power plant was being foisted on the people, even though environmentalists warned the plant was unsafe and could be come the next Chernobyl. One saw it in the apocalyptic skies above the Pemex refineries of Minatitlán, on the Gulf of Mexico. It could be seen in the disappearing rain forests of Chiapas and in the deforestation of thousands of acres of Mexican trees by poor people who needed wood to heat or cook, or by unscrupulous land developers. Wondrous species of fish and fowl were becoming extinct with barely a whimper. In Mexico's farm fields, campesinos were using DDT, Paraquat, and other pesticides banned throughout the world. In factories across the country, workers were being maimed or killed because no one cared about industrial safety or the proper disposal of toxic wastes.
With this type of attitude, it wasn't surprising that Mexican environmentalists had few positive things to say about the government's environmental performance. But they did praise the program to wipe out Santa Fe. Some doubted whether the dirt used to cover the garbage was really impermeable. Others lamented the health hazards that pepenadores still faced by working in garbage all day without the benefit of even a simple paper face-mask. They pointed out that thousands of tons of garbage were never making it to sanitized landfills such as Los Prados, that thousands of small, clandestine, open-air dumps still existed in the valley, that enormous amounts of garbage just sat rotting at the curb. But what had been done at Santa Fe, the most notorious and obnoxious of the city's dumps, they said, was impressive. Maybe, just maybe, some optimists began to say, Mexico was growing up environmentally.
I wondered what Don Pablo might have to say about all this. I went to see him the same week I talked to Mrs. Martinez de Correa. He was running a little late, the guard at the gate of the Los Prados landfill told me. I waited, and around 10 A.M. a garbage truck pulled up with Don Pablo in the passenger's seat. Dressed in dirty tan pants, an army fatigue jacket, and a baseball cap, he slid out of the truck and landed with an unsteady plop on the ground. He was drunk again. I introduced myself and reminded him of our interview in 1985. I told him I wanted to talk with him about what had happened to his pepenadores since our chat.
"I'm not talking to anyone, you pinche cabrón ["fucking cuckold''],'' said Don Pablo, weaving a tipsy path toward the landfill's new office complex. Don Pablo never made it to the office. He was just too drunk. Two officials of the city's solid-waste office, who had taken the place of Felipe Castillo and Don Pablo's other lieutenants, put Don Pablo's slack arms around their shoulders and carried him back to the truck. Hector Samano, a city engineer who had become one of the new bosses of the area's garbage operations, told the driver to take Don Pablo home.
Samano was clearly nervous that I had come to Los Prados. He didn't want to talk much about what had happened to Santa Fe. I came back a couple of times, but he kept coming up with new excuses as to why he couldn't give me an interview. Los Prados was clearly an improvement over Santa Fe. Mrs. Martinez de Correa had summed up the difference nicely: "There are a lot less flies." But Samano didn't want to tout the government's achievement. I thought I knew why. To do so, he would have to talk about the fact that, slowly but surely, the government was putting an end to the embarrassing existence of the pepenadores.
A year before, the death of the king of the pepenadores had given the government the opening it needed to move against the ever-loyal pepenador clan. Through his political clout, the king had blocked the government's plan to close Santa Fe and other polluting dumps. His death ended the political protection he had so long given the pepenadores. It also cleared the way for environmentalists to push for a program of supermarket-based collection centers where people can sell the cardboard, glass, plastic, and other items that had so long been the lifeblood of the pepenadores. To me, all this spelled the end of an era. But no one seemed to want to talk about it.