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WORLDWIDE
FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS
Ecuador
Rainforest Pays the Price of Texaco Oil Production
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Forest
Networking a Project of forests.org
http://forests.org/ -- Forest
Conservation Archives
http://forests.org/web/ -- Discuss Forest
Conservation
8/31/99
OVERVIEW
& COMMENTARY by EE
The
petroleum economy is a driving force for rainforest degradation
and
general environmental decline (global climate change, habitat
fragmentation
from roads, urban sprawl, etc.). Some
portion of the
Earth's
biosphere must be off limits from oil exploration and
development. If every rainforest (and other ecological
systems) that
has oil
under it is developed, the Earth's ecological systems and
processes
will be irreparably damaged. Texaco is
being taken to court
in a
class-action lawsuit for a legacy of disease and environmental
damage
in Ecuador. When poorly planned and
implemented oil production
occurs,
the oil behemoths must pay. They very
well may, and
handsomely,
in this case--setting an important precedent.
g.b.
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TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Rain forest pays the price of oil: Suit
claims Texaco
polluted Ecuador
Source: Boston Herald
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for
permission to reprint
Date: August 29, 1999
Byline: David Talbot
Reporter
David Talbot and photographer Justin Ide traveled to the
once-pristine
rain forest of Ecuador to report on a class-action
lawsuit
alleging that Texaco Inc.'s oil exploration there has left a
legacy
of disease and environmental damage on a colossal scale.
Initiated
by an Amherst environmental lawyer and aided in part by Bay
State
experts, the suit could set a precedent for bringing U.S.
corporations
to account before U.S. juries for alleged misdeeds
abroad.
SHUSHUFINDI,
Ecuador - Atop a barren hillock edging the rain forest, a
brownish-gray
pit of toxic waste water is mottled with oily patches.
The air
smells like a car-repair shop, with a sulfurous, rotten-egg
note.
Nearby, pumps roar as they fill tanks with a primordial brew
from as
much as 8,000 feet below the Earth's surface. Crude oil floats
to the
top of the tanks, and the chemical-laced waste water is
continually
piped into the open dirt pit.
Beneath
a blazing equatorial sun, the waste flows down a dirt track
and
into a creek, coated with a light sheen of oil, that feeds a
tributary
of the Amazon River. The waste system is one of at least 300
like it
that dump as much as 4.3 million gallons of the chemical-laced
water
into Amazon tributaries every day. The pits were built by Texaco
Inc. in
partnership with Ecuador some 30 years ago, in a 2,000-square-
mile
swath of rain forest known as the Oriente.
Shushufindi
could hardly be more remote from the lives of average
Americans,
but oil exported from here all goes to the United States.
And the
region is now the focus of a class-action lawsuit against
Texaco,
waged in part by lawyers and scientists based in
Massachusetts.
The
once-pristine wilderness - one of the most species-rich regions on
the
planet - has been transformed by roads, oil wells, pits, pumping
stations,
pipelines and the settlements of colonists who followed the
oil
roads. Production waste flows into rivers lined with Indian
villages,
farming settlements and jungle foliage. Miguel Villa, 55, a
taxi
driver, knows that when cows suddenly die after drinking stream
water,
the government - which now owns the oil infrastructure Texaco
built -
compensates farmers.
``I am
afraid for the future,'' he said, his face bathed in the orange
glow of
an adjacent methane gas burn-off stack. ``I do not know the
consequences
of this.''
To
Amherst environmental lawyer Cristobal Bonifaz, the consequences
are
these: widespread skin, respiratory and other diseases; a rise in
miscarriages;
increased cancer rates and risks for as many as 30,000
impoverished
Indians and settlers; and widespread environmental
damage.
``They
poisoned the rivers, killed the fish and made the people
sick,''
said Bonifaz, an Ecuador native who launched a class-action
lawsuit
on behalf of Oriente residents in U.S. District Court in New
York,
near Texaco's world headquarters in Westchester County.
He
claims Texaco used cheap and dirty extraction techniques, spilling
waste
into creeks and rivers rather than spending more to pump it back
into
the ground, as he said is common practice elsewhere. In addition,
pipe
breaks over the years dumped more raw crude into the jungle than
the
Exxon Valdez spilled into Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989,
he
says.
And he
estimates the cost of fully cleaning sites like the Shushufindi
pit at
$600 million - a figure that would rise to $1 billion with the
costs
of providing health care and clean drinking water systems.
Texaco
says the company acted responsibly and used standard industry
practice
at all times. And the company gave Ecuador $40 million in
remediation
money in 1995, three years after the company pulled out of
the
region, handing over operations to the state oil company,
Petroecuador.
Bonifaz said the cleanup only touched a few of the
sites,
and that in any case $10 million of the funds went missing
after
Texaco gave it to Ecuadorean officials.
``We
have seen no credible scientific evidence to support those
allegations,''
said Faye Cox, a Texaco spokeswoman. ``What we have
seen is
anecdotal, and not what we - or a court of law, in our opinion
- would
consider scientific evidence. There are many other things
affecting
the environment in that region. There's colonization,
there's
agriculture. You can't just look at Texaco's former operations
there
in partnership with Petroecuador and say that is solely what is
affecting
the environment.''
Cox
said Texaco believes the $40 million all went to cleanup efforts,
and
that none is missing.
As
Texaco fights plaintiffs' charges that it inflicted ``cultural
genocide''
in Ecuador, the company in the past year hired a new
general
counsel well-known in Massachusetts, Deval Patrick of Milton,
a
former chief of the U.S. Justice Department's civil rights division.
He
contends the plaintiffs shouldn't have access to U.S. courts, only
those
in Ecuador - a move Bonifaz says would effectively kill the
lawsuit.
Patrick declined an interview request.
``This
has the potential of being a groundbreaking case,'' said Arthur
Berney,
a professor of constitutional law at Boston College Law
School,
who filed a brief supporting the lawsuit. ``It is going to
cause
the corporations of the United States to think twice about how
they
conduct their businesses abroad, whether it be the kinds of harm
that
occurred with Texaco, or in the workplace, as with some of the
footwear
manufacturers in Indonesia.''
From
rashes to cancers
The
problems are very real to Humberto Piyaguaje, a 34-year-old Secoya
Indian
from the Oriente. When big oil came to town, indigenous people
began
suffering from maladies their cultures never knew, he said.
``There
are times when they bathe in the river, their body gets full
of
rashes, and that never happened before. Recently I went bathing in
the
river, and my body got rashes,'' Piyaguaje said, speaking through
a
translator in the jungle town of Lago Agrio. ``The people have a lot
of
problems, but they don't know (the causes) because they don't have
doctors.''
He
added: ``Especially the ones that have the most problems are the
children,
because they love to be in the river. They have vomit and
skin
problems and stomachaches and diarrhea a lot.''
Once
the question of jurisdiction is settled - U.S. District Court
Judge
Jed Rakoff is due to rule soon on Texaco's bid to move the case
to
Ecuador - the plantiffs will face the monumental scientific task of
pinning
blame for diseases on Texaco, the nation's 10th-largest
corporation.
Bonifaz
said, ``People told me it's crazy, you don't want to litigate
against
Texaco, the place is so remote; anyway it will cost hundreds
of
thousands of dollars, and it is going to be dismissed - Bhopal got
dismissed
in the same court.''
Bhopal,
India, was the site of the world's worst industrial disaster:
a 1984
chemical leak from a Union Carbide pesticide factory that
killed
2,000 people in one night and, over time, killed perhaps 6,000
more.
Although lawsuits on behalf of the victims were thrown out of
U.S.
courts, Indian courts assessed damages at $470 million. (In the
Exxon
Valdez case, the company paid $1 billion to settle state and
federal
charges and lawsuits, but is still appealing a civil jury's
record
$5 billion punitive award to 35,000 fishermen and others.)
But
Bonifaz rejected the warnings. Several months before filing the
lawsuit
in 1993, he traveled with a small party of fact-finders -
including
Tony LaMontagne of Jamaica Plain, a researcher at Boston's
Dana-Farber
Cancer Center - to collect jungle water samples and gather
health
information in the Oriente.
``Yes
there is exposure, and yes there are health effects: dermatitis,
cancers,
reproductive effects such as spontaneous abortions. Only a
larger
study - a more in-depth study - would take you further along
the
conclusiveness scale: Did Texaco's oil-waste dumping lead to these
particular
health effects in these particular people?'' LaMontagne
said.
``This
would take a serious epidemiological study that nobody has
stepped
forward to do,'' he said, explaining that such studies are
difficult
in the best of circumstances. ``These are people who have no
health
records. These are people who are coming and going from the
jungle.
These are people who have no voice.''
Last
month, a study carried out in Ecuador, with technical assistance
from
the University of London, claimed that residents of the oil zone
face
three times the general cancer risk of other Ecuadoreans. In
particular,
oil-zone residents suffer 30 times more larynx cancer, 18
times
more bile duct cancer, 15 times more liver and skin cancer and
five
times more stomach cancer, the study said.
Cox,
the Texaco spokeswoman, said the study was preliminary and that
the
company's consultants don't consider it complete enough to even
analyze.
``We need a complete report to give a full scientific
analysis,''
she said.
LaMontagne
said the study, because it compares one region to another,
was not
a full epidemiological study - but provided another reason to
perform
one.
Lacking
hard answers, residents of the region - indigenous families in
particular
- will sometimes turn to superstition to explain odd
diseases.
For example, the Secoya people were mystified at the recent
death
of a healthy 36-year-old man in their community, Piyaguaje said.
``He
had headache and fever, and his face was very pale, like he
didn't
have any blood,'' he said. ``So they give him new blood and he
was
fine, but in two days he was the same. It was like he was leaking
blood,
they give him new blood, and it disappeared in his body.''
When he
died, his body was covered in black spots. Because he had
recently
traveled to Peru, his fellow Secoyas concluded he must have
been
cursed by a Peruvian shaman while there, Piyaguaje said.
Manuel
Silva, an Ecuadorean farmer who became a leader with the
grassroots
Front for the Defense of the Amazon, said one chief Amazon
tributary,
the Napo River, is now virtually devoid of fish. Bonifaz
blames
Texaco's operations; in a separate lawsuit, he is representing
Peruvian
Indians who live downstream along the Napo River. That
river's
fishery has been destroyed, causing hunger among some of the
25,000
affected Peruvians, he said.
``They
base their lives on the rivers, fish in the rivers. And the
Indians
are having a lot of unknown diseases that they didn't know
before.
And the shamans - these diseases are unknown to their culture,
so they
have no answers,'' Silva said during an interview in his
office
in sweltering Lago Agrio.
``Many
people just faint for no reason, and they lose their memory. It
is very
common for people to lose their memory, especially the people
who
live close to the pits and the flares,'' Silva said, referring to
the
numerous iron stacks that burn off natural methane gas that comes
up with
the oil and waste water.
Wild
west in the jungle
Towns
like Shushufindi and Lago Agrio - along with thousands of miles
of dirt
roads lined by oil pipelines - sprang up only after Texaco
discovered
oil in the remote, roadless jungle in 1964.
The job
of these oil crews from places like Texas and Oklahoma was
daunting.
They laid 300 miles of iron pipe up and over the Andes
mountains
to a Pacific Ocean terminal, and drilled hundreds of wells
in a region
that was as impenetrable and full of Indians as when
Gonzalo
Pizarro's party of spice- and gold-seekers arrived in 1541.
Drilling
for crude oil brings up vast quantities of methane and
tainted
water - called ``production water'' - such as the contents of
the
Shushufindi pit. This water, which below ground is intermingled
with
oil, is the focus of much of the pollution concern. It is laced
with
salts, heavy metals and oil byproducts, some of which the
plaintiffs
contend are cancer-causing. Texaco contends the substances
are not
carcinogenic and that in any case, it is subject to extensive
dilution
in rivers and therefore cannot cause harm, Cox said.
Bonifaz
estimates that the equipment Texaco built still dumps 4.3
million
gallons of production waste water into creeks every day - a
figure
that may well be increasing as oil deposits are depleted and
more
water is brought to the surface. He also estimates that broken
oil
pipes over the past 30 years spilled at least 16 million gallons
of
crude oil - about 50 percent more than the 10.8 million gallons
spilled
by the Exxon Valdez.
While
stopping short of denying these figures, Cox said the water
waste
was harmlessly diluted, and that the worst crude oil spill was
caused
by a 1987 quake that severed the main pipeline in a remote
stretch
in the Andes mountains.
Texaco
began pumping oil in 1972 and pulled out as planned in 1992,
leaving
its facilities in the hands of Petroecuador, the state oil
company,
which now operates the infrastructure, including the
Shushufindi
pit. Saddled by a $13 billion foreign debt - brought on in
part by
its own corruption and mismanagement - the Ecuadorean
government
is more dependent than ever on oil exports, and less able
to pay
for environmental improvements.
This
year, inflation sparked Ecuador's worst financial crisis in 70
years,
triggering labor riots that featured tire-burning on major
roadways
to halt traffic. Along the dirt roads of the Oriente, clots
of
protesters timed their road blockades to the shift changes of oil
workers.
Meanwhile,
near disused wells, waste pits lie fallow: black, dead
depressions
in the earth, slick with dirty crude-oil residue. One such
pit
lies across a dirt track from coffee farmer Segundo Ruiz's wooden
shack
in San Carlos, about an hour's drive down an oil-coated dirt
road
from Shushufindi.
Fourteen
children scampered in the four-room shack during a recent
visit.
Women hovered over two babies amid a droning roar of fire.
Adjacent
to the shack, four iron stacks burn off methane 24 hours a
day.
The
members of the extended family are some of the Ecuadorean settlers
who
followed the new oil roads to establish farms - themselves a force
in
hacking down the rain forest. The settlers, along with indigenous
Indians
from five tribes - Cofan, Secoya, Quechua, Shuar, Huaorani -
are
potential plaintiffs in the Ecuadorean suit.
A
company's legacy
As
testimony to Texaco's domination of the region's initial rapid
development
in the 1970s, the town of Lago Agrio was actually named by
the
company. The name is the Spanish translation of the site of
Texaco's
first major oil field, at Sour Lake, Texas.
Lago
Agrio is a town of low-slung concrete buildings and no pavement
on the
streets, where Pentecostal churches pack families in on
Saturday
nights and dirty-faced boys beg for food scraps outside
restaurants.
About
50 miles farther south down a dirt road, at a fork in the Coca
and
Aguarico rivers, lies the town of Coca, which has a long history
as a
missionary outpost. A health clinic there is equipped with an
infant
scale with a fresh towel, a sterilizer, a stretcher. The wall
was
decorated with a poster advertising a nasal decongestant.
``We
can only diagnose simple things here because there is no means to
diagnose
more serious things like cancer. We don't even have the most
elementary
lab for blood and urine analysis,'' said Dr. Manuel Charco,
who
manned the clinic while watching a soccer game on television one
night
recently. ``We all know there are problems, and have been many
problems
over the years, with pollution.''
Outside
the shacks of many farming settlers - who live along the
region's
network of dirt roads lined by feeder oil pipes - a common
fixture
is a rusted black 55-gallon drum bearing Texaco's red-star
logo;
the ubiquitous barrels are commonly used for storage - or even
as
rainwater cisterns.
And in
the towns, there is always money to be made from the oil
workers.
As he stopped for a drink at Papa Dan's, a bar in Coca, Bruce
Bryan,
47, an Oklahoma native working as a tool pusher - responsible
for all
operations of a drilling rig - said he thought Texaco was
getting
a bad rap.
``I'll
tell you exactly how I feel about it. Texaco built all these
roads,
they basically made this city of Coca grow, they built the
station
in Lago Agrio,'' he said. ``And ever since they did it,
Petroecuador
has done nothing but go down.''
Bonifaz
said Texaco was the culprit: ``What we are blaming Texaco for
is they
dug the original wells, they controlled operations until 1992,
they
never reinjected this waste into the ground as they do
elsewhere.''
At the
gated oil camp and pump station at Sacha, near San Carlos, a
manager
with Petroecuador - who gave a reporter a tour on the
condition
his name not be published - proudly showed off new rubber-
lined
pits, which replace dirt pits for the watery waste. Some of this
waste
is now reinjected, he says. Cox said Texaco paid for
installation
of 10 such reinjection systems. Bonifaz said much waste
still
flows into rivers.
Farther
back in the compound, past another chain-link fence, was a 20-
foot
waste lagoon held back by an earthen berm. Clots of brown crude
oil
drifted atop it. Three dragonflies hovered, searching in vain for
a meal
of waterbugs. Through the berm, pipes allowed the waste to
overflow
into a stream.
``We
still cannot process all of the production water,'' the
Petroecuador
official said.
And
still farther back in the complex, a system of pumps and seven oil
tanks
sat idle. They were designed to recover dirty crude oil from
disused
waste pits, cleanse the oil and pump it into the pipelines, he
said.
An
adjacent wooden shack, roofed with corrugated tin, was painted with
the
bold red Texaco star logo so familiar along American
thoroughfares.
Next to the logo was a stylized painting of trees,
clouds
and a bird in flight. The painting was accompanied by an
inscription:
``Potege Tu Ambient'' - Protect the Environment.
The
trouble, the Petroecuador official said, is that the equipment is
not
functioning. After doing some checking, Cox said the equipment was
handed
over in working order in 1992. And that makes it Ecuador's
problem
to fix.
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TEXT ENDS###
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