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Maquiladora workers voice constant fears about their safety on the job. In the electronics industry alone, workers are exposed to a variety of substances which include xylene, trichloroethylene, zinc and lead oxides, and nitric acid. Not only electronics assembly but other industries as well expose workers to the materials used in thinners, paints, solvents, resins, solders, dyes, flux, and acetone. Exposure to such substances without proper protection can cause cancer, reproductive problems, skin diseases, vision problems, respiratory impairments, gastrointestinal and nervous disorders, and headaches and fatigue.

TECATE, Mexico -- Tecate's coat of arms dubs this Mexican town ''Baja California's Industrial Paradise.'' About 30 miles from Tijuana, the city is home to the Tecate brewery and also houses an industrial park filled with assembly plants, or maquiladoras. This ''industrial paradise'' is one of several Mexican border boomtowns that is part of a global production system.

What exactly are maquiladoras? What do they produce and do they pay a living wage? Which companies operate on the border? These are just a few of the questions answered in our fact sheet and map.

For women working in Mexican assembly plants, known as maquiladoras, insisting on their legal rights takes what are colloquially referred to as cojones. It indicates that Mexico's low wage feminine labor force may not be as docile as foreign employers would like to believe. It also is a harbinger of an incipient movement inside Mexico's expanding export-processing sector.

Guadalupe Aguirre had recently moved to Ciudad Juarez, a US-Mexico border city known for a NAFTA-fed manufacturing boom -- and dozens of murders of poor working women -- and she was frightened and frustrated.

TIJUANA -- For two weeks, Tijuana has teetered on the brink of official lawlessness, as city and state police continue to defy Baja California's legal system. Raul Ramirez, member of the Baja California Academy of Human Rights, warned last week that ''the state is in danger of violating the Constitution and the Federal Labor Law... as it succumbs to the temptation to use force.''

India (and South East Asia) are a huge market for tobacco. Cigarette companies are also targetting youth between 15-25. Two countries where tobacco sales are expected to zoom up are India and Indonesia.

First hand accounts of two workers who sued a San Diego-based medical manufacturer after a workplace accident.

It wasn't just the politically provocative photographs that got Fred Lonidier's exhibit at Tijuana's public university taken down. It was the fact that he had the audacity to leaflet maquiladora workers outside the factory gates and invite them to the gallery that got his show yanked.

In the mile-high mountains of the Sonora desert, just 25 miles south of the border between Arizona and Mexico, over two thousand miners have been locked in a bitter industrial war since mid-November. Here Grupo Mexico operates North America's oldest, and one of the world's largest copper mines -- Cananea -- in a town which has been a symbol of anti-government insurrection for almost 100 years.