This week a landmark trial has opened in Ecuador, where rainforest peoples are seeking to force ChevronTexaco to clean up the environmental contamination left behind from Texaco’s drilling operations.
The case is being billed as the oil industry’s “Trial of the Century” as the destruction represents the worst ongoing ecological disaster in the Western Hemisphere - with the amount of toxic waste dumped into the environment three times that of the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. An estimated 50,000 men, women, and children are affected, many of them belonging to one of the five indigenous peoples in Ecuador's Amazon region.
The case, first filed in New York in 1993, has been delayed for years because Texaco refused to accept the jurisdiction of the American court. But in an astounding turnaround, the American court last year ordered that ChevronTexaco accept jurisdiction in Ecuador (the company for years had argued it was not subject to jurisdiction either in the United States or in Ecuador) and be forced to pay any judgment that an Ecuadorian court impose. The case represents the first time in history that an American oil company will be forced by a U.S. court to pay a judgment coming out of a Latin American country where it no longer has assets, according to Cristobal Bonifaz, the lead American lawyer on the case.
In the lawsuit, the rainforest peoples charge ChevronTexaco with systematically destroying their homeland through massive dumping of highly toxic wastewater and crude oil over the two decades of the company’s operations in Ecuador, which ended in 1991. The case will be heard in a small courthouse in Lago Agrio, a remote town in the heart of Ecuador’s oil operations.
Recent epidemiological studies, including one conducted under the auspices of the prestigious London School of Tropical Medicine, indicate skyrocketing rates of cancer and other health problems in the area where Texaco drilled. The primary reason is that residents have no source of drinking water other than the swamps and rivers that were used by Texaco for the disposal of toxic wastewater that is the byproduct of oil drilling. In the United States and other countries in the world, this toxic wastewater is reinjected deep into the ground where it cannot impact the environment.
“This type of destruction is something you would never see in the United States,” said Alberto Wray, the Ecuadorian lawyer on the case. “Texaco reserved this type of dumping strictly for remote and vulnerable people in Ecuador.”
The case also is being closely watched by lawyers, multinational corporations and the international human rights community for potential problems. The U.S. State Department has cited Ecuador’s long history of judicial corruption, and its civil justice system has never imposed a judgment of more than $1 million on an international oil company despite environmental damage in this case estimated to exceed $1 billion. Just last week, a key Texaco executive, Ricard Veiga, was in Ecuador meeting with government officials and claiming a 1995 clean up of the damage was adequate, an assertion that the plaintiffs dispute.
The lawyers for the rainforest peoples also criticized Veiga’s assertion that the case will damage prospects for foreign investment in Ecuador. “Texaco’s idea of foreign investment in Ecuador is dig oil out of the ground and dump the toxic waste,” said Steven Donziger, another of the lawyers. “If this case hurts prospects for that type of foreign investment, that would be to the benefit of Ecuador.”
Sources: Amazon Watch, Acción Ecológica
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Ecuador's Black Plague 
