Oil Discovery in Ecuador Ecuador, a country the size of Colorado, exports oil to the United States.  In the 1960s, the U.S. Government decided to explore the Amazon for oil and found a lot of it, so companies like Texaco and Shell went over to Ecuador with a plan to gain access to the forests there.  The U.S. sent economic "specialists" to Ecuador, who wrote up grandiose plans for infrastructure-development projects. These projects would be managed by American firms like Haliburton, Bechtel, Brown and Root, and others.  We presented these plans to Ecuadorian leaders, discussed the large sums of money that would line their personal pockets, not to mention  the economic gains for their country, and soon convinced these leaders to borrow large sums of money from global monetary funds to pay for these projects.  The money from the bank loans went directly to the pockets of contracting firms, who went to work building dams, roads, and electrical power plants.  The roads enabled the oil companies to drive their trucks into the Amazon and start seismic oil testing. By the time the Ecuadorian government realized that it could not repay the loans it took out to pay for all the infrastructure projects, oil was already a profitable business. Our government simply negotiated a deal to take part of Ecuador's oil profits to pay down the loan - which meant less money was earned for social programs, the poor, schools, and other projects that would benefit the people of Ecuador.  Many smaller oil companies came and went, but Texaco's presence in El Oriente will be remembered for decades to come.  Texaco engineers first arrived and searched for oil in the late 1960s.  From 1967 to 1992 the company sliced roads through the forest, laid down piping, and dug huge waste pits to hold waste by-products of the oil.  The indigenous communities saw the impacts of oil exploration immediately. Oil executives would fly low to the ground in helicopters scoping for new locations. Trucks and tree cutters would slash through the forest. This and the noise from the seismic operations reverberated through the forest.  By the time a black oily substance started flowing downstream through their rivers, killing amphibians and fish, it was too late. People started getting sick, complaining of headaches and stomach pain.  Their symptoms were exacerbated by Texaco's practice of spraying the dirt roads with petroleum to keep the dust down.  The oil companies merely gave local tribes compensatory items like new tin roofs for their shacks or low-paying jobs with the oil companies and told them there was nothing to worry about.   
The Slow Extinction of a People
 
News stories document the travesties that the people of El Oriente have experienced. For example, Marco Jimenez, a school teacher in Shushufindi, does not use a bathroom to wash himself. Like everyone else there, he bathes in the oily, blackened river that flows near his home.  Rusty pipes carrying petroleum cross over the river in certain places - a common sight in Ecuadorian Amazon Rivers.  Jimenez' infant child has a chronic cough, his wife's stomach is in chronic pain, and family members' skin is covered with red spots that never heal. He is one of thousands who report of similar conditions.
 
To save money in their drilling practice, Texaco decided not to line its waste pits, pits like the one in back of the Jimenez property - a marsh of sludge bigger than a football field. That pit, dug around 1987, to this day contains a toxic slurry with contaminants, like Benzene, that are known human carcinogens.  When questioned about the black sludge in the water, oil-company mangers told a tribal leader, who reported the response in a 2005 article, that the sludge was "full of vitamins."

 

Waste Pit Behind the Home of Marcos Jimenez in Shushufindi, Ecuador
Photo by Leslie Lowe, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility

According to Amazon Watch, at least 438 people have died from cancer in the Amazon. All of those people were exposed to known human carcinogens present in the toxic slurries left behind after Texaco (now Chevron) left in 1992. 
 
All told, 2.4 million acres of jungle disappeared. The Amazon is now a criss-cross of oil roads and waste. Pipelines snake through towns and school yards, in front of churches and health clinics, gathering the oil from hundreds of wells in territories claimed by the Cofan, Huaorani, and other tribes. Today, people have illnesses that were never reported before, and many cannot afford to take the three-hour journey to Quito.  Populations of indigenous groups have dwindled as their forest has been cut up. The way of life for these people, much like the life of the Native American in the United States, has been compromised to the point that its pristine, unspoiled spirituality is virtually gone.
 
Yet with the help of environmental organizations, these people are fighting to win one of the biggest human-rights cases in the world. Representatives from these tribes and others have gone to Quito, met with the oil companies, attended protests, or showed up at oil-company meetings.  While some indigenous tribes won small battles here and there, it was clear they were losing the war.  Today, almost 40 years after oil exploration began in the Amazon, thousands of indigenous people are dying a slow death from exposure to chemical-causing compounds left by oil companies. In some tribal nations such as the Cofan and the Secoya, only a few hundred people survive. Despite the fact that drilling ceased 16 years ago, the forest is still speckled with large waste pits, covered by dirt, that still ooze waste, and the people describe how they must still obtain water from nearby streams "laced with paisley rainbows of petroleum residue."    
 
The Lawsuit of Lawsuits
 
In 1993, 30,000 indigenous people and a few environmental groups filed a class-action suit against Texaco (now Chevron, as Chevron bought Texaco in 1992) for dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon, abandoning more than 1,000 open waste pits, environmental neglect in their oil practices, and poisoning the people of El Oriente.  As Amazon Watch describes this case "Chervon is accused of causing the most extensive oil-related contamination on the planet."  To support that claim, environmental assessments conducted by remediation expert Dave Russell were stark in their conclusion. He characterized the damage to the El Oriente as "the worst ongoing environmental catastrophe in the world today after Chernobyl."
 
This case, which is still ongoing, has been epic in many ways. First, it went to courts in New York City - unheard of for an international case of this nature, since the damages occurred in Ecuador.  Unfortunately, Chevron did what it could to keep the case tangled up in the courts with little or no movement forward, long enough for a corrupt judge to take the stand. In 1998, the judge who allowed the case to proceed in the U.S. suddenly passed away and Judge Rankoff, who was later taken off the case for reportedly attending lavish events hosted by the oil company, demanded that the case be heard in Ecuador. Unfortunately, this decision stood, despite appeals from the plaintiffs, (the Ecuadorian communities).  The ruling was made, and the case was forced to be heard in Quito. Fortunately, the plaintiffs had access to American council, a lawyer by the name of Steve Donzinger, who has been fighting diligently for the rights of these people.  In 1988, before the case was moved back to Ecuador, a subsidiary of Texaco, TexPet, paid about $40 million in clean-up costs. This involved TexPet throwing dirt on top of the waste pits, much like the one in Marco Jimenez' back yard. The money was used for clean-up only, and none of the indigenous communities were compensated. 
 
Meanwhile, oil giant Chevron has refused to admit fault in Texaco's oil practices, even though, according to Amazon Watch, it admitted to deliberately dumping the waste.  Chevron claims that Texaco's waste-disposal techniques at the time were consistent with oil-industry practices, and that their operations were controlled and approved by the Ecuadorian government. Further, their drilling practices were similar to those used in other tropical countries, including Colombia, Niger, and Brazil - countries in which mass pollution and human-rights violations have occurred at the hands of Chevron.  

According to several articles, Texaco did not employ required protocols, which required injecting waste back into the ground. Instead, it was looking to conduct its oil-exploration practices as cheaply as possible. To manage waste byproducts, Texaco merely dug more than 600 waste pits to store the byproducts of crude oil extraction - a messy toxic sludge that can easily seep into the porous forest soils and rivers if not properly contained.  Further, Texaco did not line the pits with a plastic coating - a pollution-abatement step that would have cost pennies on the dollar.
 
Steve Donzinger, the American lawyer who provides support and counsel to the indigenous tribes, has stated that Texaco's actions in the Amazon were criminal and intentional, and that the oil giant took advantage of a country that did not yet have environmental legislation and used that situation to do whatever it wanted.
 
Chevron has called "bunk" the environmental assessments that proclaim high contaminant levels for toxic compounds, including known human carcinogens, and the human-health reports that demonstrate a proliferation in cancer, miscarriages, and skin lesions.  Report after report demonstrates high concentrations of petroleum compounds, some of them 2,500 times what is acceptable by the EPA. Chevron continues to denounce these reports, calling them false, and refuses to acknowledge any scientific accuracy shown to them by toxicologist, engineers, and researchers alike.
 
The Case Still Lingers
 
On May 28, 2008, victims of human-rights abuse showed up at Chevron's annual general meeting in Sam Ramon, CA, accompanied by Amazon Watch and other partner groups. Two indigenous community representatives, Emergildo Criollo and Mercedes Jaramillo, traveled for days to get to the meeting. According to Amazon Watch, when each of them stood to share accounts of sickness due to the oil contamination, Chervon CEO, David O'Reilly turned their microphones off.  For Mr. Criollo, who is a tribal leader, this was especially painful, as his children have already died due to exposure to waste contamination.
 
Earlier this Spring, however, the damage assessment for Chevron has increased.  Where it was once valued at $6 billion, the company has, rather than admit defeat, paid large sums of money to keep the case from closing. Today, however, the clean-up costs are valued at $17 billion - but there is still no future date for any rulings on the case.
 
Becoming Knowledgeable about Our Oil-Dependence
 
We all know we are dependent on oil, but we also need context to understand how we can make changes.  Petroleum is a naturally occurring substance classified as a flammable liquid. It is found in rock formations in the earth that consist of a complex mixture of hydrocarbons of various molecular weights, plus other organic compounds.
 
Oil has been around for thousands of years and was first discovered in China, although Americans are credited with first refining it in 1859 in Pennsylvania before there were cars.  Back then, oil was used primarily for medicines.
 
Fast forward about 60 years to 1908, when William D'Arcy, the founder of Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later to become BP), discovered a huge quantity of oil in what is now Iran.(1) In the period from 1908 to 1946, oil's importance grew exponentially.
 
By the mid 1950s and during our industrial era, oil became the world's most important source of energy. It is also the raw material for many chemical products, including pharmaceuticals, solvents, fertilizers, pesticides, and plastics, most of which are produced from the 16 percent of oil not used for energy production.(2)  Petroleum products are a part of almost every single thing we use, and even ingest.
 
By the late 1960s, oil soon became our manifest destiny. On five continents, Chevron has been reported by Amazon Watch as being responsible for horrendous human-rights violations on account of its oil practices.  Just as the West had to be "won" in America - and we imprisoned Native Americans on reservations to take land we thought rightfully ours, so has similar injustice been dealt to indigenous people on every continent in the pursuit of oil.
 
It is Our Responsibility to Lead the Revolution to Change
 
Americans use a lot of oil and people in other parts of the world are impoverished and ill because of it. While we may never be able to help these people directly, we, as consumers, have the ultimate control - a control we don't always exercise. 
 
One of the easiest practices we can employ is to simply not buy things. If we all stopped buying bottled water, that industry would fold and we would stop using petroleum to make billions of water bottles filled with a resource that is free out of the tap.
 
While we might not be able to get off the grid and retrofit our house for solar power, or go out and buy a hybrid, we can very easily stop purchasing products that we really don't need.  If we struggle to remember to fill up a water bottle at home with filtered tap water instead of buying a $2 bottle of water at the convenience store that we must drive to, if we forget to bring cloth bags with us to the market, or if we are in opposition to composting because we think it might be a hassle, then we can surely motivate ourselves by remembering the sacrifices made by the people of Ecuador. 
 
References:
 
1. First Oil.
http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9014440&contentId=7027520

 

2. History of Petroleum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum

3. Asphalt Jungle:

 

4. Ecuador bears crude legacy of Texaco's thirst for oil http://www.corporations.org/pipermail/corporations_corporations.org/2003-December/000074.html

 

5. Ecuador's Tribes Fight Big Oil http://www.mariri.net/content/view/33/1/6. Ecuador seeks U.S. Justice Dept. intervention in Texaco Oil Spill Case http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_1997_Jan_22/ai_19047799

 

7. ChevronToxico - www.chevrontoxico.org

8. "Systematic Human Rights Abuses Dominate Chevron Annual General Meeting, Casting Shadow over CEO and Record Profits - www.amazonwatch.org