http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2869-2003Oct22.html
Showdown
in the Ecuadoran Jungle
Rare Class-Action Pollution Trial Pits Indians
Against U.S. Oil Company
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign
Service
Thursday, October 23, 2003; Page A18
CAPTION:
"Plaintiffs' attorney Steven Donziger speaks to indigenous
women
on the opening day of a class-action trial against ChevronTexaco."
(Dolores Ochoa -- AP)
LAGO AGRIO, Ecuador,
Oct. 22 -- Under a warm setting sun, a half dozen
children gathered Tuesday 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 Inc.
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
Ecuadorians 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 Wednesday that could have far-reaching
consequences for the environmental movement, U.S. corporations
doing business overseas, and poor Ecuadorians who have never
had a voice in their country's judicial system.
"Always we have
counted on water from the Aguarico, until it was
contaminated," said Toribio Aguinda, a Cofan leader from
the
riverside village of Cofan Dureno, 15 miles east of here.
"We have asked them for help in the past. But they have always
forgotten us."
Lawyers for ChevronTexaco
Corp., formed in 2001 from the merger
of Texaco and Chevron Corp., deny the company is liable. "We
think
that the allegations against the company are false, and are not
backed up by credible evidence," Ricardo Veiga, vice president
and general counsel of ChevronTexaco Latin America Products,
told reporters Wednesday in Quito, the capital.
The trial, which follows
a decade of legal maneuvering in the
United States, convenes at a time when hostility to free trade
and foreign corporations is rising in many parts of Latin America.
Last week, the president of Bolivia was driven from office by
protests over his free-market economic policies.
The oil case was originally
filed in New York, but was sent here
in August 2002 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit,
which ruled that the Ecuadorian judicial system's decision would
be legally binding on the parent corporation in the United States.
Environmental attorneys say it is among the first cases worldwide
in which a U.S. court has recognized as binding a foreign court's
jurisdiction over a U.S. company for damaging the environment.
The plaintiffs are
30,000 indigenous Ecuadorans who allege that
their lives and livelihoods were damaged by Texaco's operations
here from 1971 to 1992, a period in which the company extracted
1.5 billion barrels of oil from the region.
The plaintiffs, a few
dozen of whom rallied here Tuesday wearing
traditional red face paint and feathered headdresses, estimate
that the cleanup costs they seek from the company would exceed
$1 billion.
The central allegation
of the case is that Texaco failed to use
"accepted industry standards" to dispose of 18.5 billion
gallons
of wastewater in a region of virgin jungles, tropical wetlands
and broad Amazon tributaries.
As part of an international
consortium , Texaco drilled 323 oil
wells and dug 627 pits for use in the drilling or production
process during the period in question. Most of the pits were
unlined, both sides agree, and the plaintiffs allege that toxic
waste leeched into the streams and rivers that most of the
500,000 people who live in the region rely on for household
water.
At the time, Ecuador
had no environmental protection law
specifically governing its oil industry, which today accounts
for 20 percent of its economy and generates most of its foreign
exchange. The national legislature passed a measure in 1999
that holds oil companies responsible for cleaning up pollution
from past operations; the company says it intends to challenge
the retroactive application of the law.
In 1992, Texaco sold
its stake in the enterprise to a fellow
member of the consortium, Petroecuador, the state oil company.
In 1995, Texaco paid out $40 million to clean up 207 pits holding
toxic wastewater. That work was later certified by the Ecuadoran
government, which the company holds up as proof that it fulfilled
its obligations here. The company is also arguing that the
plaintiffs cannot sue a company that ceased to exist after
its merger with Chevron.
Oil industry experts
hired by the plaintiffs say the practice
of dumping wastewater into unlined pits was outlawed in the
United States in the 1950s and 1960s, and accuse Texaco of
continuing the practice here to increase profits.
It was Texaco that
was running the operation, it was Texaco
that designed the system, and it was Texaco that profited,"
said Steven Donziger a New York attorney helping to represent
the plaintiffs.
Company lawyers say
Texaco's local subsidiary, TexPet, run by
a succession of U.S.-based executives during the the two decades
under examination, earned roughly $500 million in profit in that
period. Plaintiffs' attorneys say that does not include proceeds
from sales on the international market, which they estimate brought
Texaco billions more in profits. Ecuador produces roughly 400,000
barrels of oil a day, most of it bound for the West Coast of the
United States. The northern Oriente region that borders Colombia
is the richest in oil. But little of the royalties returns to
the
community in the form of schools, health clinics or modern plumbing.
Instead, many indigenous leaders contend, the highways and industry
built to support oil development have ruined more than 2 million
acres of pristine jungle and traditional ways of life.
Oil production "did
huge damage to our natural resources,
[and] it also brought colonization," said Elias Piyahuaje,
47,
a leader of the Secoya Indians who rallied outside the courthouse
in a lavender tunic, red facial markings and a length of walnut
shells across his chest. "It is something that changed the
world
of the Secoyas."
In a court filing Wednesday,
the plaintiffs submitted a survey
financed by Petroecuador that attempted to assess the human cost
of the oil production. Of 1,017 families surveyed, 957 said they
had been "affected" by the oil industry, a category
encompassing
illness, loss of land and livestock, and contamination of natural
resources.
The courthouse here
seems an unlikely venue for what environmentalists
have called "the trial of the century."
It is old and run down,
and as the trial got underway, chants of
"The criminals, contaminators of Texaco. . . . Leave now!"
filtered
in from the street past a cordon of riot police.
The courtroom is up
four flights of stairs, and is roughly half the
size of a tennis court. A fan buzzed over the voices of attorneys
who sat behind small metal desks on either side of the cramped
room.
The judge presided from a dais, a garish painting of waterfalls
and
jungles behind him.
Donziger described
the legal process as something from "early 1700s
France." Each side submits witness lists and questions to
the judge,
who decides who to call and what to ask. The trial will include
a
field trip by the judge to some of the sites, including those
Texaco
says it cleaned up but which Donziger says a recent study conducted
for the plaintiffs shows are still polluted. A ruling by the judge
will likely take months; appeals could follow.
Along the rushing Aguarico
River, where Cofan Indians have lived
for 80 years in a village carved from the jungle, Aguinda will
wait
out the trial impatiently. Frustration has boiled up from the
community in the past -- once in 1986 when residents blocked
construction of a nearby oil-industry highway, then again five
years ago when they occupied a nearby oil installation to demand
that the state clean up their land.
On a recent afternoon,
the village seemed a peaceful place of
scampering children, plank homes on stilts, and banana groves.
But food is scarce for the village's 82 families, several residents
said, with fewer fish in the rivers and development scaring off
monkeys and other game from the jungle. Intestinal ailments persist
among villagers, they said.
"Nature is our
God," Aguinda said as he strolled along a soccer
field with bamboo goal posts that serves as the village square.
"What we want is all of this cleaned up because all of this
is
contaminated."
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