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ChevronTexaco
suit in Ecuador could set legal precedent
By Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post
DOLORES OCHOA
/ AP LAGO AGRIO, Ecuador — Under a warm setting sun, a half-dozen
children gathered last week around a plastic tub filling with water from
a tube snaking from the ground. Women washed clothes under the spout,
smacking shirts and pants against planks to dry them as the children played.
The makeshift well near the Aguarico River here in northern Ecuador is
part of the dirty legacy of decades of oil drilling in an ecologically
rich region of the Amazon basin, much of it carried out by a company then
known as Texaco.
Although surrounded by rain-swollen rivers, this community of Cofan Indians
now trusts only water drawn from deep in the ground by their tiny well.
For years, they have watched family members and friends grow sick from
drinking or bathing in the contaminated river water.
Now the Cofan — whose ancestral homeland has been severely reduced
by oil-driven development — and thousands of other indigenous Ecuadorans
are finally confronting the huge U.S. company they blame for polluting
their jungle.
In a stuffy courtroom in this dilapidated frontier town, a class-action
trial began last week that could have far-reaching consequences for the
environmental movement, U.S. corporations doing business overseas and
poor Ecuadorans who have never had a voice in their country's judicial
system.
Hundreds of poor farmers and bare-chested indigenous people had traveled
here last Tuesday by bus, foot and canoe. They crammed into a courtroom
and flowed onto the street.
And finally, it happened: the formal opening of their trial against ChevronTexaco,
accusing the U.S. company of polluting their land, poisoning their families
and killing their animals.
"It's a very special day in the history of our people," said
Elias Piyahuaje, a 47-year-old indigenous leader whose people arrived
here in brightly colored tunics bearing dried palm fronds as a sign of
peace.
"For the first time, Texaco has returned to face us."
Important legal test
The case on behalf of 30,000 local residents is an important test in an
emerging area of international law: whether a court in a foreign country
can hold a multinational corporation financially responsible for environmental
damage done in that nation.
ChevronTexaco says that its oil-drilling operations have not been responsible
for poisoning people, animals or the environment of Ecuador. With a few
notable exceptions, U.S. companies sued abroad in the past have not been
held legally responsible for damages; they have either won cases in areas
that residents say have weak legal systems or simply ignored judgments
against them.
But the ChevronTexaco case could be different. The lawsuit, first filed
in the United States 10 years ago, dragged on in preliminary hearings
and appeals until a federal appeals court dismissed it in 2002, finding
Ecuador a more logical site for the trial. But as part of the dismissal,
ChevronTexaco had to agree to abide by the Ecuadoran court's judgment.
That means that the company, if found responsible, may have to pay more
than $1 billion to clean up the damage, an amount that would be one of
the largest such judgments in history. Under Ecuador's complex and paperbound
legal system, no decision is expected for six months to a year.
"This is a historic day for this country because it's the first time
that a large number of vulnerable people have come into a court and had
a lawsuit go against a large multinational oil company," said Steven
Donziger, one of the plaintiffs' attorneys. "It's almost a miracle."
Poisonous legacy
Texaco, which merged with Chevron to form ChevronTexaco in 2001, began
commercially producing oil in Ecuador in 1972, pumping about 1.5 billion
barrels before shutting down operations in 1992. Ecuador came to rely
heavily on the revenue generated, with as much as half of its budget coming
from oil.
During that time, the company disposed of much of the waste water that
accompanies oil production into unlined dirt pits and local rivers and
streams that feed into the Amazon River about 370 miles to the southeast.
The lawsuit alleges that the operations have left a poisonous legacy:
All told, more than 18 billion gallons of waste water dumped and 16 million
gallons of crude oil spilled. The result has been environmental devastation
and increased rates of cancer and miscarriage, according to the plaintiffs'
lawyers.
ChevronTexaco has maintained that one of its subsidiaries, TexPet, was
only a minority partner in the consortium responsible for the drilling,
with the Ecuadoran state oil company, Petroecuador, the majority shareholder.
The company has said that its practices were standard for the time and
that it broke no Ecuadoran laws during its operations.
A company spokesman noted that the company paid out more than $40 million
in a cleanup effort completed in 1998 that included money for local schools
and health clinics. And he rejected any allegations that the disposed
waste was toxic to humans or the environment.
"There has never been any credible, scientific evidence to support
the allegations made," said Chris Gidez, a ChevronTexaco spokesman
who flew into Quito, the capital, for the lawsuit.
"The plaintiffs have offered as evidence only pseudoscience."
Cleanup criticized
As the formal presentation of the suit began in the courthouse here, a
local environmental group, the Amazon Defense Front, unveiled a $100,000
study funded by Petroecuador that sharply criticized Texaco's cleanup
effort.
The study found that 92 percent of 207 waste pits cleaned by Texaco showed
continued signs of pollution. Soil and water tests of the drinking wells
used by local families showed that they contained high levels of petroleum
residue.
And nearly all of the more than 1,000 families living near the pits reported
some type of problem: health issues, dead animals or bad-tasting water.
Gidez, saying he had not seen the study, noted that the Ecuadoran government
had certified the cleanup and released Texaco from any further damage
claims. And he promised that Texaco would respond with "a mountain
of evidence" of its own in the coming days.
"On its face, the study doesn't mean anything. That's up for the
court to decide," Gidez said.
That decision cannot come soon enough for the hundreds of thousands of
people who live in this region, where flames shoot out of smokestacks
24 hours a day and oil pits dot the jungle like a rash.
Paradise lost
In Cofan Dureno, an indigenous village about 15 miles east of Lago Agrio,
tribal elders tell a story of paradise lost. The tiny village of wood
huts with rusted red corrugated tin roofs is accessible only by canoe
across the turbid Aguarico River, an Amazon tributary where downed trees
shoot past in churning brown water.
Jungles once rich with game and rivers filled with fish are now nearly
empty. Several villagers have died of cancer in the past decade, a disease
until recently unknown by tribal shamans.
The fears of contamination are so great that the town's 500 villagers,
living in the middle of a rainforest on the banks of a freshwater river,
have to resort to using an underground well as their source of water for
bathing and drinking.
"Before, people grew up stout and strong," said Carolina Quenama,
as she stood barefoot in the mud in front of her unpainted wood board
home. "But now, we are not the same. ... We cannot hunt. We cannot
fish. There isn't enough food."
Copyright
© 2003 The Seattle Times Company
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