Where the paved road to Colonia Anapra ends dust and ruts take over. Three or four curves up the hill the bumps and grinds straighten out and descend into an amphitheater-shaped valley. Stretched over the tea-dry and scrub-spotted dunes are clusters of makeshift houses - some cinderblock, some sheet metal and plywood, some entirely cardboard - where Anapra's 25,000 residents live without running water or sewage access despite hundreds of millions of dollars available to specifically combat the problem.

The main road through Anapra is sometimes clogged three or four across with buses that come from the maquiladoras, the industrial manufacturing plants that are the lifeblood of the economy in the border city of Ciudad Juarez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Sending thick clouds of dust in the air, the buses run from five in the morning until after midnight, picking up and dropping off Anapra's workers who typically make between five and eight dollars a day.

Vying for access on this busy road are water trucks (ironically called "pipas" Spanish for "pipes") sent by Juarez's water district authority to deliver water to the residents. It costs eight pesos - roughly $1 US - to have one 55-gallon drum filled by the pipas .

Enriquita Morales Luna has lived in Colonia Anapra for eight years. She and her family came from Torreon in the state of Coahuila de Zaragoza, 400 miles to the southeast of Juarez. Enriquita works at the ANSA maquiladora in Juarez, installing air bags for car dashboards. On a chilly Sunday in November, Enriquita and her family were taking in the sun while a flea market was going on all up and down the main road through Anapra. In their front yard, behind lines of barbed wire, are the family's five water drums.

Will Anapra ever get water? "Maybe," Enriquita answered. "Only God knows." As people in the road fried slabs of pork in barrels over wood fires to make carnitas and sold fresh squeezed orange juice, used clothes, shoes, car parts and tools, Enriquita said she worried about her children drinking the water. "They would drink it and then get sick to their stomach," she said. Enriquita's children are now back in Torreon.

Anapra's residents are among the over 1.2 million people along the border that live without running water. Of those, a million live on the Mexican side, with the rest in the US . Health issues such as chronic diarrhea, skin irritation, dehydration, and Hepatitis A arise from the way the water is stored in drums . Most border residents don't have the resources or aren't educated on how to treat their water with chlorine or properly clean or cover their drums, which leads to contamination. The level of Hepatitis A along the Texas/Mexico border is three to four times the national average; if untreated it can lead to severe dehydration and death .

Like the majority of people in the US and Mexico, Enriquita doesn't know that seven years ago, hundreds of millions of dollars were earmarked under NAFTA to bring water and sewage access to poor border cities - money, in effect, to guarantee that places like Anapra don't have to have their water delivered by trucks.

What she does know is that Mexican politicians periodically come delivering promises of water and then disappear after elections are over. "The government hardly ever worries about you," she said. "They only help you whenever they want your vote. They get situated in their jobs and then forget about you."

Enriquita's sister Maria tells of the recent presidential campaign in Mexico, where the country's former ruling party, the PRI, came through the colonia making promises to deliver water and sewage to the large and influential voting block. They even started to dig trenches for the new pipes. As you arrive in the colonia a sign is left over from the campaign. It reads "Agua Para Puerto de Anapra --Sera una Realidad" - "Water for Anapra - It will be a Reality." Campaign boosters delivered two vials of chlorine to the registered, to sterilize the water in their drums.

Now the ditches are slowly filling back in, nobody has bothered to take down the sign, and Maria says that no one has come back to give them more chlorine. When the PRI lost the presidential election to Vicente Fox and the PAN party, Anapra's hope for water was completely forgotten.

All the while, the nearly $450 million available to get clean, safe water to border communities like Anapra sits idle in a bank in San Antonio.

That bank is the North American Development Bank (NADBank). Along with its sister institution, the Border Environment Cooperation Commission (BECC), headquartered in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, NADBank was created under intense political pressure and maneuvering in 1993 when the Clinton Administration was pushing through its plan for NAFTA. To muster enough votes to pass the treaty, which was originally negotiated under the Bush Administration, President Clinton had to not only convince Republicans to side with a president they clearly did not trust, but also had to persuade the historically pro-labor and environmenally conscious Democrats in Congress that the treaty wouldn't drain American manufacturing jobs and ruin the environment in the process . In the end, Clinton succeeded, even surpassing the number of votes needed by 34, when NAFTA - along with an environmental and labor side agreement - was passed on November 17, 1993 .

To date, NADBank has loaned only $11.2 million , or not even three percent of its total, to finance water, wastewater and municipal solid waste projects along the border. While the bank is considered by many of its creators and critics alike as a groundbreaking and important institution because of its joint US/Mexican structure, its focus on sustainable development and its dedication to a 2,000-mile-long international border, there are many problems - chief among them the way its interest rates are structured - that have rendered it functionally incapable of loaning money to help communities like Anapra.

Despite its problems, bank officials say that NADBank is doing a good job in the face of huge economic and cultural obstacles along the border. Recent actions by the bank's board of directors to revise how some of its interest rates are managed and to expand into funding other environmental needs besides water, waste water and solid waste have many people along the border hopeful that more loans will be allocated. Yet with mounting problems and a population that is expected to double within 25 years, hope might not be enough for those currently without water and sewage.

At the heart of the fight to put environmental teeth into a controversial trade agreement was a former Congressman from California named Esteban Torres. Torres, who represented the 34th Congressional district in Los Angeles, was a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in 1993 when President Clinton went on a massive bi-partisan campaign to secure votes for NAFTA . Torres, who came out of the labor movement as an international representative for the United Auto Workers, says he was "vociferously opposed to NAFTA" based on concerns that the trade agreement would send thousands of American manufacturing jobs to Mexico's low-wage market. Yet at the same time, Torres said, Latino politicians began to see NAFTA as a way to address the economic disparity between the US and Mexico.

They particularly wanted to help the border region, which had suffered through decades of environmental, social and economic neglect. When Clinton came calling for votes, Torres realized he was in a position to get official backing behind an idea that had been circulating for five years: a development bank that would be dedicated to erasing the economic inequality between the two nations.

"The only way I was able to push that through was to get the Clinton Administration to agree that they would take this North American Development Bank concept as a part of the negotiation," Torres said. Clinton agreed to the idea, and incorporated NADBank into the environmental side-agreement to NAFTA. "They saw it as a trade-off for my vote," Torres recalled.

In a political portent of things to come, the commitment of $225 million of US taxpayer money for a single Congressman's vote on NAFTA drew a lot of criticism. In what the Washington Post called the Clinton Administration's "orgy of deal-making" surrounding the not-very-subtle vote buying to pass the treaty, Torres' NADBank deal was singled out in editorials and news items across the country . Soon, cries of "nada bank" would surface as the bank got to a slow start and disappointed many in the region that saw the institution as a panacea - or simply as a way to bring potable water and infrastructure to places in need .

The original idea for NADBank was to have it cover the entire North American continent and fund broad economic programs to help equal the income gap between Mexican workers and their American and Canadian counterparts. But during the NAFTA negotiations, NADBank and BECC were scaled down to deal solely with the border region, funding only environmental projects involving water, waste water or solid waste management . The bank was financed jointly by the US and Mexico, with up to $450 million promised and another $2.55 billion available if and when the $450 million was committed to projects .

In a two-tiered structure, BECC serves to certify projects seeking NADBank assistance - it is the screening room and the front door through which any project wanting to deal with NADBank must come. BECC provides technical assistance and design implementation to poor communities to ensure that projects are environmentally sustainable and financially viable. As well, any community seeking BECC approval must be able to absorb the cost of maintenance and operation of its project .

Yet the vagaries of the institutional process were well beyond the thinking of the Clinton Administration in 1993, which was interested in using BECC and NADBank to get the crucial support of Latino politicians and environmentalists in order to pass NAFTA. This political move, many critics say, shows that the administration was never serious about helping the border and also doomed the bank's effectiveness from the start.

"[President Clinton] really didn't care about Mexico," said Raul Hinojosa, a Clinton advisor on NAFTA during the 1992 presidential campaign and the first person to develop and propose the idea of a North American Development Bank in 1988. Hinojosa says that while Clinton understood the policy behind NAFTA and its environmental and labor side agreements, and supported it, to get it past both Democrats and Republicans he had to present a very stripped down version of the environmental parts of the trade bill.

"The institutions as we were proposing them were much more ambitious, much larger" than what got through the NAFTA negotiations, Hinojosa said. "The minimal political capital was expended."

This, Hinojosa said, marked the beginning of the problems with the NADBank. "Frankly, from my point of view, as an advocate, that type of a political approach in the US and Mexico could very easily lead to exactly what happened, which is a relatively minimalist approach," an approach he says does not "address the policy issue."

As such, Hinojosa feels that NADBank is not serving communities like Anapra that truly need help getting clean, safe water. "I think that those types of people [in Anapra] absolutely need NADBank support. These are the people that could be most helped by NADBank - real working-class people along the border."

While many of the promises NAFTA-backers made have not panned out - thousands of manufacturing jobs were lost to Mexico, there has been no discernable rise in Mexican wages, environmental problems still persist all along the border - there was considerable hope in 1993 that this would be the first "green" international trade agreement.

"Nobody thought NAFTA was perfect, but there was a feeling that it was the first step on a ladder of improvement," said Mark Spalding, an environmental lawyer and visiting professor at UC San Diego who was involved in NADBank and BECC negotiations. "We thought that this was a big leap above anything that came before it."

Spalding was working for the National Resources Defense Council in 1993 when the Clinton Administration asked seven environmental groups, the NRDC among them, to directly participate in creating NAFTA's environmental side-agreement . It was an unprecedented move, and according to Spalding one that came out of a lack of environmental expertise among staffers in the Clinton Administration.

"We were feeling incredibly optimistic and excited to be invited to participate in designing these institutions, and it was a precedent setting thing," Spalding said. Within the environmental movement at this time, though, there was a serious split over the merits of NAFTA. The Sierra Club and Greenpeace were vocally against the trade agreement, while the NRDC, the Nature Conservancy and the Environmental Defense Fund, among other moderate environmental organizations, supported NAFTA . "The anger between those that endorsed [NAFTA] and those that didn't grew quite strong," Spalding recalled.

Yet after eight years of Reagan and four of Bush, Spalding added, there was an overriding feeling among the majority in the environmental community that with Clinton, finally, here was a chance to get inside a White House that was more sympathetic to their concerns.

And in terms of NAFTA's environmental safeguards they set the bar high. As Spalding remembered they felt NAFTA "would become the floor below which no future trade agreement would fall."

The enthusiasm wasn't confined to the environmentalists involved, but spread to the trade representatives as well. "We were charting new territory. All these ideas and institutions were new," said Sanford Gaines, a former deputy assistant US trade representative for environmental and natural resources that worked on the NADB/BECC development.

But according to both Spalding and Gaines the time constraint put upon them while drafting the environmental side agreement was intense. "The time pressure was there because the administration wanted to send NAFTA to Congress by the end of 1993," Gaines recalled. As 1993 wound down, the high expectations going into NADBank and BECC took a backseat to just getting the job done.

"There was this feeling that 'gee, I wish I could go do a lot of detailed research and put a lot of thought into this, but there's no time,'" Spalding said.

The fruit of these pressured labors was a first of its kind: an economic development bank dedicated to environmental issues that was bi-nationally funded and meant only for a border region. Among the unique features of NADBank was that it receives its funding fifty-fifty from the US and Mexico, giving each nation an equal say in how the operations should be run. The environmental focus of projects certified by BECC is another first. Unlike other development banks that evaluate projects on their financial merits primarily and do an environmental impact assessment only after those decisions are made, BECC's primary role is to assure that only sustainable projects get its backing.

Another provision of the bank charter, something many now believe is the fatal flaw in NADBank, involved Congress determining its interest rate. The enthusiasm and grand hope of people like Mark Spalding and Sandy Gaines seemed to infect even Congress when it was deciding what sort of strings to attach to the $225 million it was giving the bank.

"We argued so hard on this issue of not making [NADBank and BECC] like other development banks, Congress said 'OK, let's really not make [NADBank] like other development banks and give money away below interest rates [like they do],'" Spalding said. As such, Congress decided that NADBank loans could only be given at interest rates of at least 1% above the prime rate. In trying to make NADBank self-sustaining, possibly even profitable, Congress doomed the bank's effectiveness since poor border communities like Anapra cannot afford that high an interest rate. "It created the seeds of failure for the institutions," Spalding said bluntly.

"The truth is, right now the money is not going to the projects because the bank has an interest rate that is just not possible," said Carlos Rincon, the US/Mexico environmental projects director for pro-NAFTA Environmental Defense (formerly the Environmental Defense Fund). Rincon says that lower interest rates on loans for water projects can be obtained through state agencies such as the Texas Water Development Board. Yet this was part of the reasoning in Congress when it approved the interest rates for NADBank loans - it not only wanted to make the bank self sustaining, it also didn't want NADBank loans to undercut private or state banks with lower-than-market rates .

The lack of potential political payback was also a factor in how Congress set the rates, said trade representative Sandy Gaines. "Congress had to appropriate this money and you had to get a broad base of support from people that had no particular interest in the border," Gaines said.

In defense of NADBank, bank officials stress that pinning the success or failure of the bank on the interest rate alone is naïve, saying that the context of how the interest rates are managed must be taken into consideration. "Our interest rates have always been the most competitive you can get in Mexico," said Lisa Roberts, NADBank's general counsel for the last five years. "To say 'oh, it's the interest rate' is to say that the bank has interest rates out of whack with everyone else." The real problem, Roberts says, is the poverty on the border. Even if the bank provided loans with cut-rate interest, the communities along the border that need water infrastructure still could not afford the loans, she said. Unrealistic expectations of what the bank can do have also led to disappointment, Roberts said. "The interest is not the only reason," she said, "There's definitely a problem of too high expectations of these institutions."

The debate over NADBank interest rates brings out the most vocal disagreements between the architects of the bank and the people that ended up actually running it. Victor Miramontes was managing director and CEO of NADBank from 1997 to 2000, and has weathered some of the harshest criticism against the institution. Yet Miramontes is unapologetic about how NADBank has functioned.

"The loan issue is a red herring," Miramontes said, referring to the criticism that the bank has only loaned three percent of its capital. "While people may perceive that the bank isn't successful because it hasn't lent a lot of money, that perception is totally wrong." Miramontes says that since their inception in the mid-1990s, NADBank and BECC have worked with more communities on more water-related projects than all the projects combined up to that point. He also points to the $254.3 million in grants NADBank has secured through the EPA, money to finance water and wastewater projects along the border that have been certified by BECC .

But the creator of NADBank, Raul Hinojosa, says that that was not the purpose of the bank.

"Big deal, they were successful in getting the EPA to give some money away, but that's not what the bank was initially intended to do," Hinojosa said. "To say that [the grants are] an example of the success of the bank is ridiculous. The bottom line is the bank is supposed to lend money." Hinojosa supports the grants that Miramontes has secured, but he still sees the loan aspect of the bank as primary, saying "It's not a red herring, it's a central issue."

NADBank officials have long realized the problems in the bank's design, but say change comes slowly on the border. "What doesn't work is the original structure [of NADBank] and we're evolving it," Miramontes said. "I knew that the bank, as structured would not work, but on the border you don't just walk away from it, you have to work with what you have."

Even with the hundreds of million of dollars Miramontes has gotten from the EPA, there is a much more central question. The needs of the border are simply swamping NADBank's capacity.

"People see $300-400 million as a lot of money," Miramontes said. "The needs on the border range from $2-10 billion dollars." A NADB/BECC analysis of needed water, wastewater and solid waste infrastructure along the border put the price tag at $3.25 billion .

As opposed to seeing NADBank's inability to give out its $450 million in loans - also known as the paid-in capital - as a failure, Miramontes says that this fact has led to other, positive consequences.

"The paid-in capital produces earnings every year that allow the bank to operate autonomously," he said, which "gives the bank the power to make decisions independent of political pressure. That is very important and powerful because the decisions in these types of situations must be based upon merit and not politics." He also says that the presence of that capital ensures the longevity of the bank. "We're going to leverage that paid-in capital into 10 to 15 years of working with two governments at the national level to continue supporting [the bank]."

Wrapped up in all of this are the differences between how Mexicans and Americans receive and pay for utilities like water and sewage lines. In the US, user fees, in the forms of monthly utility bills, help support infrastructure. In Mexico, water and sewage is subsidized, so Mexicans have never paid for water services . This, everyone agrees, is a huge obstacle to overcome if NADBank and BECC are to help more Mexican communities. Grants and loans can get projects off the ground, but once initialized, user fees are crucial for maintenance and support of water-based utilities.

"It's not only an economic problem, it's a political problem," trade rep Gaines said. Asking Mexicans for user fees is "totally at odds with the way these projects are done in Mexico."

Yet user fees are the furthest thing from residents' minds in Anapra, where the poorest cannot even afford the eight pesos a week to get a drum of water from the pipas. Instead, they drink from a contaminated well on the western edge of the colonia.

The well is actually a big pipe that juts over the side of a small ravine. Its runoff has created a miniature canyon, the descending layers of its walls measurable not by the different types of soil and rock but for the stratospheric array of paper, plastic, clothing, wood, cinder block, glass and metal that lines the dirt edges. The water runs off toward the border. Just a fence and four or five idling Border Patrol jeeps away is Sunland Park, New Mexico.

Though a large, prominent sign by the well says that the water is not safe to drink - it is tainted with human sewage, chlorine, mercury and iron, among other things - many in Anapra don't have a choice. They have to get their water somewhere.

Like everything else tied up with NADBank, there are complex reasons as to why communities like Anapra along the US/Mexico border have not benefited from either NADBank grants or loans.

BECC is structured to evaluate proposals that communities present to it, yet the poorest along the border have no engineers and technicians at their disposal to design and propose projects. With its Project Development Assistance Program, BECC provides outreach in terms of technical assistance and project development. But so far, Anapra has neither been approached for project assistance nor approached BECC on its own.

"We don't shake people to make them submit an application," said Fernando Macias, BECC's general manager. "We educate people to the opportunities that they have to submit a request for assistance and so far all I'm saying is we haven't received one from Anapra." Macias says that BECC has dealt with Juarez in the past on projects like the new two-plant sewage treatment centers opened this year. But in the end, he says, communities must take the first action. "We do a kind of community education program along the border but technically the application has to come from the local community."

Another strike against Anapra is its actual location. Situated atop a reservoir of ground water from the Rio Grande, Anapra is in a delicate area. The threat of contaminating that ground water, which all of the residents of El Paso and Juarez rely on, has kept both Mexican officials and NADBank directors from supporting growth for the colonia.

"Anapra's been on our agenda from day one. The problem is, Anapra probably shouldn't be located where it is," said former NADBank chief Miramontes. "If you take [Anapra's] population and go from 25,000 to 100,000 -- and that would happen if you provided everyone with services today - it would threaten the groundwater for El Paso and Juarez."

But this raises the question of what exactly the NADBank should be funding, if it is not willing to work with poor communities where any form of improvement in terms of running water or sewage lines will of course cause it to grow. And in the case of Anapra, where the poorest have no choice but to drink from the contaminated well, this kind of reasoning goes against public health concerns.

Miramontes realizes the paradox. "It's a dilemma. How do you tell people they shouldn't have piped water?" he asked. "You're dealing with the most fundamentally difficult problem on the border, the poorest, weakest individuals in the most fragile area."

Given the immense challenges facing NADBank and BECC, the last thing it needs, according to some observers, is more responsibility. But that's exactly what the bank's board of directors recently decided in late November when they voted to adopt a plan, called mandate expansion, for increasing the range and type of environmental projects the bank can finance. Now, in addition to funding water projects, the bank may consider, among others, such projects as road paving, home building and hazardous waste clean up. At the same time, the board also voted to lower the interest rate on some loans, according to bank attorney Lisa Roberts.

Mexican President Vicente Fox may have helped spur the board's decision with his strong support for mandate expansion. The bank's board kept Fox and the other Mexican presidential candidates abreast of NADBank developments during the recent campaign, reminding them that hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake. Fox's support for expanding the bank's scope, analysts say, is an effort to guarantee that Mexico retains flexibility in how NADBank money can be spent .

"Mexico was extremely concerned when it wasn't getting the benefit of this money," environmentalist Mark Spalding said.

Where this leaves places like Anapra remains to be seen. The colonia might have to settle for more modest, partial solutions like "dry-flushing" outhouses, or composting toilets, which use a combination of materials like sand, lime, charcoal and sawdust to turn sewage into compost. This system is in contrast to the "pit-latrines" now used all throughout the border, which basically consist of a hole in the ground surrounded by an outhouse. By not putting the waste into the ground, the composting toilets prevent groundwater contamination, a public health risk more serious than lack of running water, according to Veronica Corella-Barud, program coordinator at the University of Texas El Paso's Center for Environmental Resource Management.

While the dry composting toilets do not bespeak the status of their flushing cousins - a factor Corella-Barud says has made it hard to convince some residents along the border to use them - efforts are under way to install them all throughout colonias in Juarez that lack sewage access.

In the meantime, many border residents know that they will have to fend for themselves, as they always have. "For me, to be serious with you," Anapra's Enriquita Morales said outside her house, "The government does not help me at all. I, by myself, do what I can to get ahead."

While Victor Miramontes and current NADBank officials might not like that stark assessment, they are still working to see that change comes to the border.

"The border continues, the relationship between the US and Mexico continues, and the problems continue," Miramontes said. "So let's not focus on what we promised, but that we're capable of progress."