Imagine a community ravaged by chemical pollution; a community where the soil is laid waste by decades-old concentrations of toxins; a community where kidney failures, tumors, cancer and skin problems devastate not just individuals but generations. Imagine a struggle for justice spanning decades; a struggle of minorities marginalized within capitalist discourse; a struggle led by women in a patriarchal society. Imagine irresponsible corporations, an unresponsive administration, and a legal settlement that barely scratches the surface of suffering. Shades of Bhopal?

Welcome to Mission, Texas, a small city of about 48,000 people approximately 4 miles from the Mexico border near Rio Grande. AID–Austin volunteers visited Mission, a predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American community, to widen the horizons of support for the Bhopal campaign.

In the 1940s, 34 chemical companies including Union Carbide and Shell, set up chemical factories to manufacture pesticides, fertilizers and other chemical synthetics in Mission. Mission residents at the time welcomed the prospective of better jobs. Till the late 1970s, the factories continued as significant employers. They also continued their harvest of venom. By the time the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) arrived in 1980, the soil of Mission, Texas was contaminated enough to merit a Superfund cleanup.  While the soil and real estates values get cleaned up by the EPA, the residents await relief.

The earliest workers in Mission’s chemical factories barely realized the impact of the factories three generations later. We met Alberto, a war veteran, who is suffering from symptoms of Agent Orange, even though he never went to Vietnam. We met Salina and Ronaldo, who suffer from kidney failure and have to undergo dialysis three times a week. Ronaldo has also had two kidney transplants, which were rejected by his body, and was operated on for brain tumors.

Many residents have been pushed into poverty by monthly medical expenses even after part of these expenses are paid by Medicaid and non-profit groups. In every neighborhood, we saw former plant sites alternating with houses. We saw a mixing plant which spewed its exhaust through a vent instead of a stack directly into neighboring houses.

The residents’ lawsuit languishes in the courts. Some 68 per cent of an early settlement of $1.5 million went to attorneys. Compensated residents got checks ranging from $3 to $3000. The correlation between the documented levels of contamination and the medical malaise in the community continues to be legally in dispute.

AID-Austin makes friends in Mission Texas.

Photo: Sandhya Govindaraju

For AIDers in Austin, Mission, Texas is like a Bhopal in their backyard. The similarities are sobering. Many of the activists are women in a strongly patriarchal society. And there is an additional hurdle in Mission, Texas: to convince the community that it is no coincidence that each family has a member afflicted with chronic illness.

Equally sobering lessons come from the demonstrated limitations of site cleanup as a solution. Since site cleanup has been a major demand in the Bhopal struggle, a re-evaluation seems in order. Are relocation and rehabilitation the only viable options?

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Sandhya Govindaraju is an AID volunteer in Austin.