Subject: Ecuador Rainforest Pays the Price of Texaco Oil Production
***********************************************
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.
*******************************
RELAYED 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.
###RELAYED TEXT ENDS###
This document is a PHOTOCOPY for educational, personal and non-
commercial use only. Recipients should seek permission from the
source for reprinting. All efforts are made to provide accurate,
timely pieces; though ultimate responsibility for verifying all
information rests with the reader. Check out our Gaia's Forest
Conservation Archives & Portal at URL= http://forests.org/
Networked by forests.org, grbarry@students.wisc.edu