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PART FOUR:
POISONED PACKAGES
Register finds lead-poisoned children in Mexican village where pots are made for candy.

Wednesday, April 28, 2004

By VALERIA GODINES and JENIFER B. McKIM/ The Orange County Register

SANTA FE DE LA LAGUNA, MEXICO – Griselda Maximo Guzman dunks her slender, bare arms into the bucket to stir the yellow glaze called greta. It looks like cake batter.

Pregnant and a little tired on this crisp fall day, she dips hundreds of small clay pots into the bucket.

The glaze is mostly lead, a poison that can cause miscarriage or brain damage when ingested or absorbed through the skin.

But this is how Maximo's mother glazed pots. And her grandmother. And her great-grandmother. Nearly everybody has done it this way in Santa Fe de la Laguna, a village in the central state of Michoacán. This is how they've made a living for centuries.

It's also how the village has been contaminated, becoming the saddest stop along the trail of the $620 million Mexican candy industry.

Each year, families shape pots, glaze them and fire them in wood-burning stoves. Then, thousands of Santa Fe's little pots are filled with candy that turns to poison as it absorbs lead from the glaze.

The candy is a sticky pulp made from the pods of the tamarind tree. Using pots for tamarind candy is a longstanding tradition in Mexico.

The trail of lead-tainted candies extends to border towns like Tijuana and into Orange County. These potted candies are among the most dangerous.

They have been linked to poisoned children for a decade. They rarely are found in Orange County stores today but are readily available in San Diego. As recently as 2002, they were suspected in the lead poisoning of a La Habra child.

Candies poison children on both sides of the border and can cause depressed IQs and health problems. In Santa Fe, school officials believe the lead-based glazes have caused learning problems in children. And women say they've suffered stomach ailments, miscarriages and infertility.

All along the candy trail are problems that could be avoided if health officials would take action, if loopholes in America's food- safety laws were closed, and if Mexican manufacturers stopped producing tainted goods, an Orange County Register investigation found.

But nowhere is the lack of accountability more devastating than in this village of 6,000 people, many living in mud-brick houses, some starving as they try to make a living from the greta-glazed pots fired in their homes.

Without pottery making, Santa Fe's economy would collapse. Villagers say they have to churn out pots with greta because it produces the beautiful shine customers want. Mexican health officials say that they have more pressing health problems in a country where children in rural areas still die from malnutrition. And the village's residents say it is too difficult and costly to use nonleaded glazes.

Besides, many residents believe that lead isn't a problem because the symptoms could be caused by many things other than lead.

"They say it doesn't do damage, and they are fully contaminated with lead," said Virgilio Perez Negron Medrano of the Michoacán Department of Environmental Health. "Here, people who don't work, don't eat. They say, 'Better to die from lead than from hunger.'"

The Register visited the village in October and hired a medical team to conduct blood tests on the village's children. Of 92 tested, 87 were found to have lead poisoning - some up to 6.5 times the level set by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The scope of the problem compares to some of the most serious lead-poisoning cases in the United States.

GRETA'S HISTORY

Santa Fe is a community of Tarascan Indians, where residents speak Purépecha first and Spanish second, if at all. Despite its poverty, the lakeside village has some minor fame in Mexico, as it once was a soap-opera set.

The origins of the Tarascans, who are believed to have thrived as early as 1100 A.D., are unclear. When the Spanish arrived in the 1500s, they found a people at war with the Aztecs, a culture with its own language and specialized skills in metal work. They also found the Tarascans making pots.

The descendants of those Tarascans make all sorts of pots today with greta's distinctive sheen - for cooking, storing food and decoration. They also make them for candy.

One candy business alone buys nearly 260,000 tiny pots a year from the village's potters, whose skill with the lead-based glaze dates to Spanish colonial days.

The Spaniards, trying to make amends after slaughtering thousands of Tarascans during the conquest, introduced greta as a gift.

Even today, the look of a greta-glazed pot is regarded as special, and little is done to reduce the risk to the potter and consumer.

In 2003, the Mexican government regulated the use of the glaze in pottery, but the rules haven't been enforced. An indefinite grace period has been granted to give potters time to adjust.

State health workers are frustrated because they say that businesses promised not to sell the greta used in indigenous communities.

"But we are seeing that the greta is still there," said Perez, the health official in Michoacán responsible for educating potters about the dangers of lead-based glaze in this state of about 4 million residents.

Perez has conducted work- shops to teach potters how to use nonleaded glazes, but with 20,000 families making pots, he hasn't been able to reach more than a fraction of them. He has faced threats and anger from potters afraid of losing their livelihoods.

Hundreds of miles away in Guanajuato at a factory that makes the glaze, workers wear masks and protective clothing and get their lead levels tested every six months.

But most potters in Santa Fe are not tested for lead poisoning. Nobody here wears masks, gloves or protective clothing. Few understand the effects of lead poisoning, even though the bags of greta are printed with serious warnings not to breathe it, to wash hands after using it and to keep it away from cooking areas.

The warnings are in Spanish, a language most of the potters can't read.

Many mothers know greta is bad because their grandmothers shooed them away from it or told them stories about a young child who died after eating it.

But few know that exposure to lead can cause kidney problems, learning disabilities, seizures and infertility. Few know that lead can seep into bones, staying there for years, causing irreversible damage.

And few know that children are most at risk.

CHILDHOOD DANGERS

Potter Griselda Maximo Guzman's son Tariacuri, named after a king of the Tarascans, is a typical 5-year- old. He plays with plastic wrestling figures that litter the dirt floor of his home.

The bright-eyed youngster enjoys drawing farm animals, artwork that his mother proudly displays on the walls. He also plays soccer, throwing his 40-pound body into the game with all his might.

He was born a month premature and had trouble breathing. His mother, who is pregnant with her second child, said that today he's generally a healthy, happy child. His teachers have told her that he's bright.

On this October day, he keeps Maximo company while she glazes pots in their home. In Santa Fe, pottery making is a family affair, with grandmothers crafting the pots by hand, mothers and children glazing them and husbands selling them across Mexico at festivals.

Maximo's husband isn't here to help. He, along with other men from the village, are on a monthlong pilgrimage to the Basilica in Mexico City to pray to La Virgen de Guadalupe, walking by day, sleeping in fields at night.

While Maximo works on the pots, Tariacuri sits nearby. Although he has no apparent symptoms of lead poisoning, his lead levels measured 47.2 micrograms at the Register's October testing clinic.

Lead is measured in micrograms per tenth of a liter of blood. Anything 10 or more is considered unhealthy, and some scientists say that smaller amounts can be harmful.

Children with blood-lead levels like Tariacuri's are at great risk, experts say.

"Unfortunately, with a blood-lead level of 47, a lot of kids may not have symptoms while the lead is insidiously eating away at their intellectual capacity," said Howard Hu, professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. "Some kids may have symptoms, and there will be things like headaches, listlessness, some abdominal pains, irritability - very vague symptoms, which make it difficult for clinicians to suspect."

Of the 92 children tested at the clinic, only five had normal levels, and two of those were borderline. Fifteen tested at a level where IQ, hearing and growth could be affected; 28 at a level where nerves are also affected; 23 at a level that can weaken bones; 10 in the range that also decreases the body's ability to make red blood cells; two at the level that also would cause stomachaches; and nine at the level where problems also could include kidney damage and anemia.

The families were surveyed to help determine the source of lead. Nearly all the families work with pottery, and almost all work with the lead-based glaze. Most have their children nearby at some point while they're working, which raises their exposure.

The clinic's results shocked lead experts in the United States.

"That's outrageous. That is flabbergasting," said Robert Lynch, an associate professor of Occupational and Environmental Health at the University of Oklahoma, who has studied Mexican candy linked to lead.

"Those kids are in severe trouble," he said. "Those kids are going to have marked problems, when you spend your first seven years of life with a lead level of 60. We think that with a level of 5 you now have problems. The level should be zero."

Jose Luis Bautista Cortez, director of one of Santa Fe's elementary schools, says about 70 percent of the 213 students suffer from learning problems. He believes lead may have something to do with it, although many things, including language barriers and poverty, contribute to learning problems.

LEAD STILL SELLS

The problems with potted candies have been known for a decade. California issued a health advisory in 1993, when high lead levels were found in Picarindo candies in glazed ceramic pots made in Morelia, about an hour's drive from Santa Fe. One teaspoon of that candy exposed children to 70 times the Food and Drug Administration's daily recommended limit of lead.

Some changes have been made as a result of state advisories: Fewer potted candies are making it to California than a decade ago, people who used to buy and sell them say.

But factories still grind out the greta glaze and ship it to the potters, who continue to poison themselves and their families. And candy packagers continue buying the lead-glazed pots and filling them with fig-like tamarind jam. A sales representative from one of Mexico's largest candy companies estimates that 15 percent of all tamarind candy in Mexico still comes in the traditional ceramic pots, many of which are made with the lead- based glaze.

In Michoacán, one of Mexico's poorer and more rural states, neither the state health department nor regional hospitals have the resources to test for lead, even though the state is a center for traditional pottery.

Michoacán health officials said they don't need a clinic to tell them there are high lead levels in Santa Fe. They are well aware of the problem there and in surrounding villages.

But they point to limited resources and stretched budgets.

"There are bigger priorities - malnutrition, diabetes, bronchitis," said Joel Nicolas Martinez Cruz, director of the General Regional Hospital No. 1 in Morelia, the capital of Michoacán known for its traditional candies. "In the hospital, we don't have technology to test blood."

In Santa Fe, children still starve. The local doctor says she has 50 cases of malnourished children, five of them so grave they might die.

In response to the Register's findings, the state government plans to regularly provide foods heavy in iron and calcium, which reduce lead absorption, to children and pregnant women in Santa Fe.

Maximo frowns when the doctors tell her about Tariacuri's high lead levels at the testing clinic. They explain the effects of lead poisoning at high levels - slower mental development, stomachaches, kidney damage. They urge her to give him more iron and calcium.

She remains quiet, uncertain. Could greta really be that bad? After all, it's been used by her family for generations. And many Mexicans even use it to cure stomach pains or as a contraceptive.

But it is that bad. The glaze is mostly lead. Four months pregnant, Maximo now is concerned about how it might affect her unborn child.

Maximo, who attended school only to sixth grade, began making pots for candy when she was 12, crouched on a dirt floor beside her mother. They fetched the clay from a field outside the village and then dried it on their sunny doorstep. In the kitchen, they kneaded the clay, flattening it into a tortilla shape and then molding the pots by hand.

People here earn about $2.50 a day making pots. There are 650 family-run pottery workshops. Only five of them use nonleaded glazes, and even they acknowledge that they are losing money because nobody will buy their pots. They don't shine like the pots with greta.

Maximo doesn't know how she could stop using it. The customers demand shiny pots and don't want to hear about lead poisoning. And if she doesn't make them, her neighbor will.

It comes down to supply and demand. And there are definitely people who still want her pots.

Women like Doña Mecha.

VENDOR'S STORIES

One of the most successful people in Santa Fe isn't from Santa Fe. She isn't Tarascan. Doesn't speak Purépecha. And doesn't spend her days crafting or glazing pots.

Mercedes Ramirez Campos, known as Doña Mecha, buys pots from the women in the village and sells them. Originally from Veracruz, she married a local man and set up shop. Her store sits on the highway that cuts through Santa Fe, beckoning tourists with decorated coffee mugs, brilliant plates and shiny water jugs.

The store also is stocked with hundreds of the tiny pots that go to five clients who pack them with tamarind candy mixed with chili powder, another source of lead. Judith Sarmiento, a Michoacán woman, buys 260,000 pots a year from Doña Mecha.

Sarmiento's potted treats, under the name Dulce de Tamarindo La Colonial, are sold in San Diego and Tijuana, where many Mexican-American families go to stock up for children's parties.

The Register hired a laboratory that found lead levels of 26 parts per million in the candy packed into the pot.

To check the effect of leaching from the pot, the lab also tested the candy scooped from the edge of the pot. It had lead levels of 100 ppm - 200 times the limit for lead in candy set by the FDA.

State and federal regulators have not tested La Colonial candy, records show.

A mother of two, Sarmiento is proud of the candy- packaging business that she and her husband have built. They have 12 employees and just bought a computer. They are shocked that their product contains lead.

It comes as no surprise to Doña Mecha, who has heard about lead in greta.

"What are they going to do for work?" she asked. "Because there was a time when people weren't going to work because of the lead, but frankly I felt bad for the people. What are they going to eat? What are they going to do? Because this is their livelihood. Now, they say that it's doing damage, right? ... I have not died. Here I am."

She's a pragmatic businesswoman. She's going to keep buying the pots because they're going to keep making them. The village can't change all of a sudden, she says. Not after all these years.

QUITTING ISN'T EASY

Why don't the potters in Santa Fe simply use nonleaded glazes that are available? It seems so simple.

It's not.

Efforts by Mexican state government workers and nonprofit organizations to get villagers to abandon greta have been unsuccessful.

They pushed the potters to wear gloves, but the artisans insisted they need to feel when the greta has reached the right consistency before glazing pots.

The state holds workshops to urge the artisans to use gas stoves rather than wood stoves, because gas burns at a more even temperature needed for nonleaded glazes. They also demonstrate how to use those glazes.

None of it has worked. Few people attend the workshops. They are battling more than 500 years of history, cultural denial and economic barriers.

Maria del Rosario Lucas is a 40-year-old mother of two who works with a small group of women educating the village about the dangers of greta. The group is called Uarhi, which means "woman" in Purépecha.

The women, with little education, recently learned Spanish so they could give speeches about greta. But not everyone wants to hear them. When they gave a television interview about greta, villagers lashed out at them, saying that business was bad enough already.

The reaction didn't stop the Uarhi members, who say they personally know the dangers of lead.

Lucas and her doctor believe she lost her baby because of lead poisoning. She had a miscarriage in the second trimester. "Lead kills your baby, little by little. Don't use it," the doctor told her.

Another woman in the Uarhi group believes she suffers from infertility because she sells greta from her home.

A third one believes she became sick with daily vomiting and weight loss because she, too, sells greta.

The women began making nonleaded pots, but it was like learning a new craft. They have spent the past year losing oven after oven of pots as they experimented with the nonleaded glaze.

One batch stuck to the racks because they didn't account for different formulas with the new glaze. The next batch came out discolored. And the next looked scratched.

When they tried to sell some of the slightly damaged mugs, they were turned away. The women now sip coffee from these mugs at their regular meetings.

Villagers say the nonleaded glazes are more expensive, not as readily available and need higher, more exact temperatures in gas ovens.

One gas oven costs 60,000 pesos – roughly $6,000 - several years' wages for a family. Nearly everyone here uses earthen stoves that burn wood at much lower and less exact temperatures.

They also say that experimenting with the new glazes is time-consuming, resulting in lost wages and a family not eating for a day.

But Michoacán state health workers dispute this. They say the nonleaded glazes are available, cheap and can be fired in wood stoves.

Perez, the state worker in charge of educating potters, says that residents are simply making excuses.

"No, it's not true. They haven't experimented. It can be learned in two or three sessions. It is an excuse. Those who have experimented will tell you that it is possible," Perez said. "There are other glazes."

The women in Uarhi, meanwhile, have changed their education campaign, focusing on children in elementary schools. Best to start educating the coming generation of artists who might be more open-minded.

"We want a better life than our parents had. We want our children to have a better life than we have," Lucas said.

THE TRAIL CONTINUES

As evening falls in the village, men descend from the verdant hills with their burros, carrying stacks of firewood for their kilns. As they clamber down, they view the misty lake and twinkling lights from a neighboring village.

A candle-lit religious procession snakes its way through Santa Fe's cobblestone streets.

In the plaza, the heart of the village, women sell fish caught from the lake. Elderly men park themselves on benches, while grandmothers bustle past to the church.

Young men are noticeably absent from the village. Most have gone to the United States, to places like California and Oregon, to earn more than they can selling pots. A few young men this evening cluster on street corners, drinking beer and looking bored.

Mothers heading home from the corner store are bundled in traditional striped shawls, called rebozos. Children skip and hop alongside them.

Scores of trucks loaded with pots pass the religious procession. They rumble past the plaza, the elderly men nodding off, the grandmothers fingering their rosary beads, and the young men slouching on the street corner.

The trucks are headed for Morelia, where candy makers will pack the pots with tamarind-chili paste.

Morelia isn't always the final stop, though.

Sometimes, these candies end up in the United States.

Tomorrow: A porous border and conflicting regulations make it easy for lead-laced candies to get into the United States.

Making safer pottery
Looking for solutions

The Orange County Register

The Register asked stakeholders for their ideas about how to solve the problem of lead i n candy

Marcela Tomaya
Activist working to reduce lead exposure in artisan communities in Michoacán

A: There needs to be a sustained campaign on the dangers of leaded pottery. Nike, for example, faced orchestrated criticism over children making its shoes in Third World countries. Such a campaign on pottery could create more customer demand for nonleaded pots, and artisans, in turn, will meet that demand.

Jose Luis Favian Fermin
Elected official and potter in Santa Fe de la Laguna who has opted to use nonleaded glazes

A: A permanent workshop or school should be set up in Santa Fe so a new generation of potters can be taught how to use nonleaded glazes. We have submitted funding proposals to government agencies but have been told there are no resources for a permanent training school.

Lourdes Schnaas
Psychologist with the Mexican government's Department of Perinatology who studies lead issues in Mexico and helped organize the Register's health clinic in Santa Fe

Mom blames illness on candy
La Habra woman learned after checkup that her son, who loved candies packed in pots, had high blood-lead levels.

By JENIFER B. McKIM/ The Orange County Register J

avier Bonilla of La Habra ate five pots of tamarind candy a day - slurping down the sweet and spicy pulp, cleaning out the last sticky traces with his fingers.

Then, he and his three siblings played with the little painted pots, using them to pour and drink water.

The candies were the 2-year-old's favorite until he went for a routine health check in August 2002, and doctors found the level of lead in his blood was high enough to cause hearing loss, and a lowered IQ.

His mother, told by a nurse about the dangers of some Mexican candy, realized Javier's problem stemmed from the traditional candies in clay pots.

"I said, 'My God, heal him,'" said Gloria Bonilla, 37, a single mother who wept at the memory. "If I had known, I wouldn't have given them to him."

California issued its first health advisory about lead in candies in 1993 - targeting candies in clay pots. But the problem has persisted, with family and friends bringing the candies across the border and vendors selling them from ice cream trucks and stores.

In Tulare County, nine cousins were poisoned by tamarind candies in clay pots from 1993 to 1997 before health workers discovered the source, state records show. One of the boys was treated seven times to reduce his blood-lead level. To make him feel better, his family – unaware of the cause – gave him more candy.

Gloria Bonilla, who has a fifth-grade education and works three jobs including cleaning in a hospital and factory work, said she also loves to eat tamarind in pots. Such treats were luxuries when she was a child growing up with nine siblings in a one-room rented house on a Mexican ranch.

Javier was the only one in his family to test high for lead. His level dropped quickly - from 10 micrograms per tenth of a liter of blood to less than 5 micrograms - as he stopped eating the candies. At 10 micrograms, a child is considered lead poisoned, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But some experts argue that lead causes damage at lower levels.

Javier's mother says she sees no symptoms of lead poisoning in her son. She watches carefully.

Still, she is angry with herself for buying the sweets. She said she hasn't seen candy in clay pots in her neighborhood lately. "At least now we aren't tempted," Gloria Bonilla said. Yet, the truck passes by their house daily with other Mexican treats that make her children run for the door. She says she tries to keep them from eating other Mexican candies - but sometimes she can't say no. She estimates they get their way about once a week. Their favorites are tamarind candies in plastic bags, fruit lollipops and Pelon Pelo Rico, a candy that she was unaware had tested high for lead 11 times.

Detailing candy dangers
Answers about lead in potted candies.

The Orange County Register

Candy in clay pots made in Mexico has been linked to lead poisoning in California children.