Oil, Ecuador and its people

In a small, spare courtroom in the Amazon region of Ecuador, Chevron Corp., California’s largest company and one of the world’s largest oil producers, will soon face a day of reckoning. After 16 years of litigation, a case the company inherited in a merger, Aguinda vs. Texaco Inc., is nearing an end. The legal battle that began in the United States in 1993 and resumed in Ecuador in 2003 has pitted the multinational against an unlikely adversary, a coalition of indigenous tribes and communities. A verdict is expected early next year. The plaintiffs are poised to prevail, and Chevron acknowledges that it is likely to lose.

The case is historic by several measures.
Never before have indigenous peoples brought a multinational oil corporation to trial in their own country. Moreover, a victory would mark a turning point in the relations between native populations around the world and the foreign corporations that do business in their homelands. And the potential damages are staggering: A court-appointed expert has determined that they could run to $27 billion, almost 10 times that initially awarded to plaintiffs after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Today, a swath of the Ecuadorean Amazon the size of Rhode Island remains contaminated beyond imagining. At one site after another, oil hangs in the air, slides on the water’s surface and saturates the land. Pipelines and waste pits left behind years ago still drip and ooze. Advocates for the plaintiffs have called the former Texaco concession area the “Amazon Chernobyl.” Were it in the United States, it would easily qualify as a Superfund site. Neither side in the case disputes the devastation, only who should pay for it. Chevron says it is the state-owned oil company’s responsibility; the plaintiffs say it is Chevron’s.

The plaintiffs are seeking unspecified damages for environmental cleanup, reforestation and healthcare. (Under Ecuador’s legal system, they cannot receive individual compensation.) In addition to reams of documents and hundreds of soil and water samples, the case has generated abundant ill will. Chevron maintains that it’s the victim of a scheme to plunder its deep pockets and make it pay for pollution caused by Petroecuador, the state oil company, which took over after Texaco’s operations ended. The plaintiffs contend that the pollution was caused by the faulty infrastructure Petroecuador inherited from Texaco; as with a faulty car, to use their analogy, it is the manufacturer, not the driver, who is to blame. Entire communities, they say, have been plagued with devastating illnesses as a result of oil waste in their drinking and bathing water, and their suffering has fallen on deaf corporate ears. Their resentment runs as deep as the oil Texaco once drilled.

Los Angeles Times