Jose Kahn lives in a tony suburb of San Diego, California. The toxic mess his company created sits 20 miles south, in a squalid industrial park outside of Tijuana, Mexico. But when it comes to making Kahn clean up the site, the businessman might as well live on Mars.
For 12 years, Kahn owned and ran Metales y Derivados, a lead smelter that imported used car batteries from the United States for recycling. Under Mexican law, Kahn's maquiladora was required to repatriate its hazardous wastes to the United States. Instead, Metales stockpiled 6,000 metric tons of lead, arsenic, and other toxics, and abandoned them when Mexican authorities shut down the plant in 1994. Since then, activists say, inadequate containment and heavy rains have let some waste seep into the neighboring colonia of Chilpancingo.
