LATIN AMERICA : Texaco’s Toxic Legacy In Ecuador (COMMONDREAMS)

Texaco’s Toxic Legacy In Ecuador
by César Chelala and Alejandro M. Garro June 14, 2007

It can be considered one of the most unequal battles in the world today. It pits a group of indigenous people in Ecuador, almost totally devoid of material resources, against one of the most powerful oil corporations in the world. The outcome of this battle will impact them for the rest of their lives.

From 1964 to 1992, Texaco (which later merged with Chevron and is now called Chevron) carried out oil exploration and exploitation in forested areas of the Amazon basin in Ecuador. Chevron is now facing a multibillion-dollar suit, accused of polluting significant portions of the Amazon region.

Drilling for oil produces several waste products which are stored in special pits. If these pits are not properly lined, toxic materials can contaminate surrounding areas. Once toxic waste leaks into water basins, rivers and lakes, it kills fish and makes people and livestock ill, and threatens their very survival.

Oil activities conducted by Texaco in the northeast Amazon region in Ecuador have caused significant environmental damage and serious health consequences for the indigenous population. Texaco spilled more than 70 billion liters of toxic waste into more than 600 unlined pits in an area of more than 5,180 square kilometers. This toxic dumping has affected a community of 30,000 and has led to the loss of 1 million hectares of rain forest. It has made of the area one of the world’s most contaminated industrial sites.

The health damage incurred by the indigenous population has been documented in the village of San Carlos, which contains more than 30 oil wells constructed by Texaco. One of the first studies on the effects of oil pollution on people’s health in that village was carried out by two physicians in collaboration with the London’s School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The study, called the “Yana Curi” report (yana curi is the local indigenous term for “oil” or “black gold,”) found that some cancer rates (such as cancer of the larynx) in San Carlos exceed the average by up to 30 times.

For several years the residents of San Carlos had been exposed to more than 3.8 million liters of oil and toxic waste-water dumped by Texaco. Exposure occurred through several routes, including absorption through the skin, ingestion of contaminated food and water, and inhalation of oil and related gases.

According to the plaintiffs’ lawyers now suing Chevron, Texaco used inadequate extraction techniques, in the process spilling waste products into creeks and rivers rather than pumping it back into the ground, as is commonly done elsewhere. Because of pipe breakages, the amount of crude pumped into the ground was nearly double the volume spilled into Alaska’s Prince William Sound by the Exxon Valdez in 1989.

In a letter to Vanity Fair, Donald Campbell, Manager in Media Relations for Chevron Corporation stated, “Texaco did the right thing in Ecuador. It operated responsibly, followed its contractual obligations and the law, made a significant contribution to the economy and to social, health and education initiatives, and carried out an effective remediation program.”

According to Amazon Watch, an environmental and human rights organization based in San Francisco, “Of 45 oil production sites inspected by court-appointed technical experts, many of which were part of an earlier remediation, several show concentrations of carcinogenic chemicals at hundreds and sometimes thousands of times higher than U.S. norms.”

In November of 1993, a class-action lawsuit on behalf of residents of the rain forest area known as “Oriente” was launched in a U.S. District Court in New York. Although the plaintiffs wanted the case to be tried in New York, a federal appeals court in New York ruled that it should be conducted in Ecuador. But in a significant decision, the court also stated that any judgment against the oil company would be enforced in the United States. U.S. courts will also reassert jurisdiction if Chevron refuses to cooperate with the litigation in Ecuador.

The suit charges that Texaco dumped nearly 70 million liters of toxic waste into hundreds of unlined open pits, and from there the waste seeped into estuaries and rivers thus exposing residents to carcinogenic pollutants. The plaintiffs want a through cleanup of the area, an assessment of the long-term health effects of the contamination and damage compensation, which could total $6 billion.

According to the Amazon Defense Front, an Oxfam partner organization, “the waste that Texaco dumped contains some of the most toxic, cancer-causing chemicals known to man, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, so dangerous, not one drop is allowed in any river or stream in the U.S. But tests of the waters polluted by Texaco found levels as high as one part per hundred.”

If Chevron is found liable in a fair trial, it will be not only a victory for the environmental movement but also for thousands of indigenous people whose survival and quality of life have been affected by the careless exploitation of oil on their lands. As Simeon Tegel, a spokesperson for Amazon Watch told us, “This case has the potential to set a legal and moral precedent both for transnational corporations operating n the developing world and for indigenous peoples protecting their lands from the extractive industries.”

César Chelala is an international public health consultant and an award winning writer on human rights issues. Alejandro M. Garro is a professor of Latin American law at Columbia University in New York.

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8 Comments so far
wcdevins June 14th, 2007 12:49 pm

A fine example of the Reagan Republican worldview of free market corporate good citizens acting responsibly and humanely without interference from a meddling government. No need to burden business with regulation forcing them to be good national or international citizens, for they will police themselves. Funny how whenever there are fewer regulations on corporate crimes, corporate greed always exceeds corporate good citizenship. Corporate good citzenship doesn’t exist without strict regulations and watchdog agencies, and even then corporations will challenge and abuse those laws every chance they get. Give them an inch and they will take a mile every time. Love Canal, Bhopal, Ecuador - it happens all over the world. Pollution, cancer, child labor, slave wages - these are the pillars of the global free market.
Esteban Bartlett June 14th, 2007 1:20 pm

I have visited sites in Ecuador where this outrageous arrogance and greed are visible in the destruction of the land and all living things on the land. Julia Butterfly joined other activists in Ecuador to try to stop oil pipelines from being constructed through pristine forest inhabited by indigenous groups for millenium. There are no words to describe the injustice of this! I hope they take them to the cleaners, and teach them a lesson, however temporary that lesson will be. Justice cries out for a massive punishment! Those responsible may never see jail time, but they certainly should! White collar crimes can be so vastly more damaging than your average crime… when you contemplate the quantity of suffering they engender. And yes, absolutely, the so-called free market is really a front for a libertine scheme of giant corporations to do away with common sense regulation!
Siouxrose June 14th, 2007 1:45 pm

Wcdevins: Excellent points. Esteban: Thank you for sharing. We need a film that takes the word FREE out of trade by showing the price paid by those who live near to these zones of environmental extortion. Obviously with WTO this is a worldwide outrage. The same trespassers move from zone to zone and leave the natives with the costs and true expenses of their exploits. Moral depravity dressed up in fancy economic terminology remains what it at essence is: robbery, rape and slow murder. War on an economic scale.
Joe C June 14th, 2007 5:36 pm

If you put a gun to my head and forced me to bet one way or the other: does Texico ever pay a dime or not, my guess is they don’t. Sad, but likely true.
arpip June 15th, 2007 10:01 am

The U$A is driving itself into poverty with its city destroying automobiles. While also creating environmental polution such as smog in Los Angeles in California, the pertroleum extraxtion for these dysfunctional cars is creating environmental havoc and defilement of the most biodiverse areas as found in Ecuador. In an arc of the Andes Mountains descending into the Amazon basin, most prolific in life forms, are the countries of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia all abutting Brasil. Unfortunately this area has considerable known reserves of petroleum. The ravaging of enviroment from urban metropolises to biodiverse tropical rain forests is part of the same process of doing business servicing automobiles. The results are carchitecture, urban sprawl with Walmarts, class homogeneous suburbs and gated “communities, to ravaged wastelands in natural wonderlands.
The cost of all the damage is not included in the price of gasoline and oil. These costs are called externalities which are publically paid for by civil society. The sociopathic corporations are excellent externalizing mechanisms. The direct extractors, producers, and final consumers do not pay for the full costs, that is for taxpayers in general.

Ecuador with a population of less than 14 million has 2.5 million citizens living in other countries. Most are migrant labor. The socially negative effects of
Neoliberalsim has created a backlash resulting in the r