The Prosaic Violence of America Abroad

While Donald Trump threatens to destroy Iranian civilization and probably will try, let’s not also forget the everyday violence that America’s existence creates in the rest of the world.

Mexico is facing a “toxic crisis” and has become a “garbage sink” for the US, exposing Mexican communities to dangerous pollution, a UN expert has warned.

In an interview with the Guardian and Quinto Elemento Lab, an investigative outlet, Marcos Orellana, an environmental specialist, said pollutants ranging from imported waste to dangerous pesticides are affecting people’s right to live healthy lives.

Orellana, whose title is UN special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, conducted an 11-day investigative mission in Mexico last month to learn about toxic threats facing its population. He said he found lax environmental standards and a lack of oversight, which have allowed pollution to accumulate over the years.

“Where standards are weak, what you get is legalized pollution,” he said, adding that imports of hazardous and plastic waste from the United States are worsening the situation.

“US overconsumption and economic activity are using Mexico as a garbage sink.”

The rapporteur said there were more than 1,000 contaminated locations officially recorded in Mexico’s National Inventory of Contaminated Sites, many of which he said had become “sacrifice zones”, where diseases such as cancer, and medical events such as miscarriages, were normalized.

In a preliminary report summarizing his visit, he cited factories spewing hazardous waste into the Atoyac River in Puebla, massive industrial pig farms contaminating drinking water on the Yucatan Peninsula and a decade-old mining chemical spill that continued to affect health in communities around the Sonora River.

This is the daily feature of American neo-imperialism, the slow death from cancer, the elimination of species, the destruction of the planet. None of it has to happen. But it happens in Mexico, so no one cares.