Distressed Denim Trend Costs Mexican Farmers the Earth

Mariano Baragán looked down at the blue-grey crust peeling off the field he irrigates from a canal. Nearby factories were the problem - dozens of them, which are dedicated to doing to jeans in hours what used to take years of wear.

"As well as being blue, it burns the seedlings and sterilizes the earth," the 67-year-old subsistence farmer said. And the cause? A wry smile hovered on his lips. "It's the fashion."

Fashion is no stranger to suffering, as the peasants in the Tehuacán valley in central Mexico can attest.

Overlooked by volcanoes and laced by underground waterways, the city of Tehuacán was once famous for its mineral springs and spas. The "city of health" was already in decline by the time the area became a hub for the global denim industry in the 1990s.

More recently competition from Asia and Central America has closed some factories, but Tehuacán still has more than 700 clothes manufacturers. Many of these produce jeans for big US brands as well as lesser-known local labels, which copy the new styles set by the bigger players.

"Jeans were born to be used by workers," said a local activist, Martín Barrios. "Now they can cost thousands of dollars and are produced on the backs of exploitation and environmental destruction."

Mr Barrios and his colleagues in the local Human Rights Commission spend most of their time defending workers' rights in the factories, which range from large well-established facilities to clandestine sweatshops that disappear at the first hint of inspection.

Of most concern environmentally are the laundries where the clothes are sent for distressing. There, jeans are sandpapered, marked with mechanical tools and faded with large quantities of potassium permanganate - a bleaching agent once commonly used to trigger illegal abortions.

Then there is the stonewashing, fabric softening and a final crescendo of washing and rewashing. The clean garments are left ready for sale, while in many factories the chemicals used to treat them are left to flow away in bright indigo waste.

Over the years consciousness-raising campaigns, aided by US-based international solidarity groups, have persuaded the multinationals to pressure Tehuacán's most established factories to fulfil minimum international standards.

Last week inspectors sent by Gap were in town to visit Grupo Navarra - the city's biggest manufacturer, which supplies the multinational - prompted by a dispute involving a group of workers who say they were sacked for trying to form an independent union. The company is one of the few with a water treatment plant on site.

"The contamination is mainly the fault of the companies that act outside the law," said Juan Carlos López, the firm's chief of health, hygiene and the environment. He points to the transparent water flowing from his plant. "We are always getting inspected. Nobody inspects the others."

But activists claim the government is simply not prepared to take on the economic interests of the factory owners.

A substantial array of institutions at local, state and federal level have some degree of responsibility. Those contacted all recognised that the problem is serious, but claimed they were doing everything within their jurisdiction while implying that other authorities were not.

"We don't think that the problem is wearing denim," Mr Barrios said, standing on a small mountain of blue pumice stone beside the waste canal leaving Tehuacán's Lavacolor laundry. "The problem is the toxic styles imposed by the big brands."

In pictures

Joe Tuckman visits the factories allegedly polluting the local water supply in Tehuacán.