News of the Anaversa tragedy would not have been helpful to the now-reviled Salinas who put the clamps on the story. In addition to the dioxins, the Anaversa fire fused just such a coalescence. The CNDH eventually issued a scathing rebuke of the health and the agriculture secretariats for their treatment of the Anaversa survivors. The agriculture agency was then under the direction of agro-biz tycoon Carlos Hank Gonzalez, a powerful political boss who Huerta claims had a financial interest in Anaversa. When, as usual, the CNDH's recommendations were ignored by authorities, the Anaversa damnificados appealed to the Organization of American States' Inter-American Human Rights Commission, the first time that the commission had ever considered the violation of human rights as being the consequence of environmental disaster.
Oil is the most global fluid and Mexico is the sixth largest producer on the planet.
When the Mexican peso collapsed in 1995, then president Ernesto Zedillo was forced to deposit the nation's considerable oil export revenues in the U.S. Federal Reserve as collateral on a multibillion dollar bailout engineered by Bill Clinton. Pipeline blowouts, fires, and toxic leaks ruined cornfields and fruit tree groves through which the pipelines snaked. Once again, issues of human rights violations, agrarian struggle, and environmental disaster converged around the globalization of resource exploitation. The U.S.-based GTE Data Systems was quick to seize the opportunity and the Mexican government cheerfully obliged. The resource at stake here was water.