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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.

Here is an index of correspondence from March to August 1999 between international human rights, environment and development organizations and the Unitd Nations Development Programme's Administrator.

NEW YORK -- In a sharp detour from its mission of serving the world's poor, a key UN agency, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), has solicited funds from global corporations with tarnished records on human rights, labor and the environment.