The Death of Ramon Gonzalez and the 21st Century Dilemma

that was committed to improving the situation, before that government fell to U.S.-
financed military and civilian opposition. Murray concluded that the problem of abusive
pesticide use was generalized throughout much of Latin America and that excessive
reliance on pesticides constituted a fundamental flaw in the models of economic
development applied in the region. xxi Murray, Conroy and Rosset showed that the same
abusive use of pesticides as well as widening social inequalities could be found in U.S.-
financed programs supposedly meant to improve the economic situation and health of
small-scale producers throughout Central America. xxii Mexican researcher Jose Luis
Seefoo, now working at the Colegio de Michoacan, followed up on the fieldwork in The
Death of Ramon Gonzalez with impressively systematic studies in the Culiacan valley
lasting into the early 1990’s that confirmed and deepened the conclusions of my work. xxiii
Scores of articles collected from 1991—2000 from Mexican newspapers and journals
show that the problem of indiscriminate use and ineffective regulation of pesticides
remains a general and serious problem throughout the country. xxiv Though they were
proud of new regulations and training programs, Mexican regulatory officials privately
lamented to me, in 1995 and 2005, the lack of monitoring and enforcement effort that
would reliably and significantly reduce abusive practices in Culiacan.
Since the fieldwork for the first edition of this work was completed, shrimp
farming in coastal lagoons has become a major industry in Sinaloa. Many of these
lagoons receive agricultural drainage from the Culiacan and other Sinaloa agricultural
valleys. Researchers have documented expensive shrimp mortality and high levels of
contamination from pesticides that have contaminated the lagoons from the early 1990’s
through the early years of the new century. They have also found roughly the same mix