Maquiladora pioneer dies in Tijuana

Enrique Mier y Terán, a pioneer of the maquiladora industry in Mexico and an early champion of cross-border relations, has died at age 76.

Mier y Terán suffered a heart attack in Tijuana on Thursday while attending a monthly luncheon of the city’s consular corps. In recent years, he had served as honorary consul from South Korea in Baja California.

Mexico’s maquiladora program had not yet been created in 1960 when Mier y Terán opened a Tijuana factory, assembling women’s pin-curl clips for the U.S. market. Today, the export-oriented manufacturing facilities known as maquiladoras employ more than 2.4 million people across Mexico.

Mier y Terán, sometimes described as “father of the maquiladora,” was one of the first to embrace the concept under which companies could import materials duty-free for assembly in Mexico.

Dating to the mid-1960s, Mexico’s maquiladora program initially was seen as an opportunity to develop Mexico’s northern border region by attracting foreign companies interested taking advantage of lower-cost Mexican labor.

The industry has since evolved as Mexican professionals and engineers have come to play a greater role in recent years, and companies open plants in different parts of Mexico. Today in Tijuana, maquiladoras manufacture everything from electronics parts and textiles to aerospace components to medical equipment, primarily for the U.S. market.

Mier y Terán “always had a strategic vision, he always was looking toward the future, at new technologies, where there would be the most added value, which processes could best serve the city,” said Jorge Carrillo, a professor at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, a Tijuana-based think tank.

During his years in the maquiladora industry, Mier y Terán took on a range of challenges, from managing a large U.S.-owned electronics assembly plant to opening new markets for Tijuana-made electronic products in Latin America and Europe. At the time of his death, Mier y Terán owned a Tijuana industrial park, Tecnomex.

Born in Mexico City on July 15, 1940, Mier y Terán moved to Tijuana in 1954. He soon began working alongside his father, Juan Mier y Teran, selling calendars to businesses in Baja California, said his daughter Alejandra Mier y Terán, executive director of the Otay Mesa Chamber of Commerce.

His formal studies ended in sixth grade. But throughout his life, he was served with an outgoing personality and entrepreneurial spirit. “He believed in creating jobs for people,” said his daughter, who remembers playing on the plant floor of the Plantronics maquiladora in Tijuana when her father was the plant manager.

Among his closest friends was José Galicot, the founder of Tijuana Innovadora, a nonprofit group created to promote the city. Mier y Terán “achieved his goals through negotiations,” Galicot said, and always had a joke up his sleeve “so that the session would go better.”

In interviews with the Economist and the Tijuana newspaper Frontera, Mier y Terán described an eye-opening trip to California when he was 19 years old.

He said he was initially amused when a new acquaintance told him about his Los Angeles hair pin factory, but he soon got the idea that he could open his own plant in Tijuana using lower cost labor.

Though the maquiladora program had not yet been created, Mier y Terán was able to take advantage of a free trade zone near the border, the Economist reported, and circumvented U.S. import duties by saying the pieces were going south for “repair.”

As the maquiladora industry blossomed over the following decades, he played an active role in the industry’s expansion.

He was a founding member and president of the Tijuana Maquiladora Association, and served as the first president of the national maquiladora association that is now known as the National Council of the Maquiladora and Manufacturing Industry.

He was a key connection for Samsung Electronics, which in 1988 opened a color-television factory in Tijuana, becoming the first South Korean manufacturing plant to officially open in Mexico.

Mier y Terán in 1989 was a founding member of the Tijuana Economic Development Corp., known as DEITAC, and served as chairman of the board from 1993 to 1995.

He was among the first to champion the idea of jointly promoting Tijuana and San Diego as a single economic region, and was fond of the phrase “San Tijuana”, his daughter said. He was active in organizations such as San Diego Dialogue.

“I recall him sharing the vision of San Diego-Tijuana as a single region many years ago, long before it was popular,” said Denise Moreno Ducheny, a former California state senator and currently a senior policy advisor at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California San Diego. “He was a mentor for all of us who ever got involved in cross-border issues.”

Mier y Terán is survived by his wife Minerva, of Tijuana; their children, Enrique, Alina and Alejandra, of Chula Vista; and eight grandchildren.

A funeral service was held Tuesday in Tijuana.

sandra.dibble@sduniontribune.com