Jeans firms pollute Mexican city with blue dye

By Frank Jack Daniel

TEHUACAN, Mexico (Reuters) - Jeans factories have given jobs to thousands in the city of Tehuacan, the heartland of Mexico's denim industry, but they are pumping blue chemicals into rivers used to irrigate corn fields downstream.

Dozens of industrial laundries, some of which put the finishing touches to jeans for export, discharge a cocktail of bleach, dye and detergents into Tehuacan's wide valley with almost no government controls, residents say.

In just one example of the widespread pollution, a dark blue sludge fills a ditch behind a high-tech Grupo Navarra factory, where jeans are laundered for brands made by Levi Strauss & Co and Gap Inc.

E.J. Bernacki, a Levi Strauss spokesman based in San Francisco, said Grupo Navarra had failed an independent audit of its laundry facilities last year.

"They were not in full compliance and we did give them a corrective action plan," he said, adding that the Levi Strauss policy was to help factories that do not meet its standards to correct the problem.

"If they do not make any changes or show interest in compliance with our regulations we would begin a process of disengagement," Bernacki said.

No one at Grupo Navarra, which is controlled by a Mexican businessman, was available to comment.

Mexico is popular with garment firms because it is close to the United States, meaning a quick turnaround on fast-changing fashion lines.

Since the sector's peak in the 1990s, many firms have left for cheaper China, but hundreds of thousands of Mexicans still work in assembly plants.

In Tehuacan, 118 miles southeast of Mexico City, about 35,000 people work in garment factories.

Water from the denim laundries runs through Tehuacan, where it mixes with municipal sewage and is discharged untreated in a foaming green torrent to a river that feeds irrigation systems in the downstream village of San Diego Chalma.

ITCHY SKIN AND SORE THROATS

Farmer Mariano Barragan, 67, uses the water on his few acres of corn planted in fields a few minutes' drive from the center of Tehuacan.

"Sometimes it comes out blue, sometimes yellow, sometimes black," said Barragan, crumbling between his fingers the bluish gray crust the dirty water leaves on the soil.

"I know when the chemicals are strong because the leaves shrivel and my skin starts itching."