Subject:  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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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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