"One of the problems with modern society is that it places more importance on things that have a price than on things that have a value. Breathing clean air, for instance, or having clean water in the rivers, or having legal rights - these are things that don't have a price but have a huge value. Oil does have a price, but its value is much less. And sometimes we make the mistake". - Pablo Fajardo I write from Quito; a city that winds itself through several valleys high in the mountains of Ecuador - green peaks rise majestically on all sides; mists frequently seep over, blanketing parts of the city in a fine grey mesh... it is the beginning of the dry season here, but the rainy season clings to us with its long thin fingers, drowning the city about every two days in downpours that rival those of Equatorial Africa. The streets turn to rivers and water gushes through everything, making the world seem very damp - a bit like living inside a wet sock periodically thrown through a tumble dryer with intense days of hot sunshine. Like all South American cities, there is a stark North / South divide: the wealthy and powerful live in the North, wearing European designer clothes and driving expensive vehicles; the impoverished and powerless gravitate to the South, working in menial jobs for subsistence wages, or through the "black economy" which seems a very strong force here.
But my mind is focused on one thing at the moment: Oil. And contamination. I have just returned from a journey to the Northern Oriente, near the border with Colombia, an area previously virgin rainforest in one of the most biodiverse parts of the Amazon, inhabited solely by indigenous tribes who lived sustainably governed by one God: the Jungle. Unfortunately however, this God harboured a dark secret deep within his folds - oil. And a lot of it. Beneath the Amazon lies vast fields of crude - and this piece of previously undisturbed earth was violently disrupted in the mid-1950s, firstly with American Christian missionaries - sent in in helicopters to pacify the indigenous tribes, and shortly thereafter, in 1964, with helicopters bearing huge machinery for the exploration of oil sources in the jungle. Leading this exploration was the Texan oil giant, Texaco (now Chevron), who signed an agreement with Ecuador's then "government" (an incompetent and corrupt military regime) for the exploration and extraction of crude. It didn't take long for Texaco to find the black gold, in 1967 it struck oil near Lago Agrio and soon discovered vast oil fields throughout the far north and north-east of Ecuador. Massive infrastructure was then developed, with roading systems and oil pipelines constructed in record speeds, assisting the colonisation of the area with peasants from the coast of Ecuador who were encouraged to move to this remote area under an incentivised system of land ownership where for every one hectare of rainforest clear-felled, the settler would receive 50 more, largely in an effort to legitimise the Ecuadorean government's mandate over the area during a time of regional instability and land wars... naturally, the impoverished and disenfranchised flocked to the jungle and set up small farms near the roadways that had been built by Texaco - which, of course, were right next to the development of oil wells.
Ecuadorean environmental law in the 1960s was particularly ambiguous; its reference to the exploitation of oil was simply to protect the area's "flora, fauna and other natural resources" and to "prevent pollution of the water, atmosphere and the land". There was no specific instruction as to levels of acceptable contamination, nor references to the methods required for environmental protection - in effect, the laws required self-regulation and a standard of integrity on the part of the contractor. Unfortunately for the area's peasant settlers, the indigenous communities, and the Jungle God itself, Texaco possessed neither of these qualities. Today this region of rare biodiversity is a toxic waste dump.In this area of the Amazon, the earth is made up of the following components - a layer of topsoil which is formed from clays and organic matter, typically about one metre deep with a layer of sand and gravel at the bottom and below that the "ground water" at approximately four metres: the source of all drinking and washing water, accessed through wells dug by the inhabitants. Oil is found deep below the earth's surface - nearly two kilometres down - and with the oil lies what is termed "formation waters" - water that is laced with heavy metals, excessive levels of salts and carcinogenic petroleum compounds - obviously incredibly toxic to living beings. When oil is extracted, the formation waters are also extracted - usually 60% crude oil and 40% formation water, sometimes 50/50. The liquids are pumped directly from the earth into huge storage tanks where the oil rises to the top (as it is lighter than water) and is "scooped" off before being sent down networks of above-ground feeder lines to the huge 500 kilometre "Trans-Ecuadorean" pipeline (also constructed by Texaco) which leads west to a coastal town, Esmeraldas, before being shipped to the United States for refining and selling.
Formation waters are a waste product which under legislation in the United States require testing and re-injecting deep into the ground so as not to contaminate water or soil sources. In Ecuador however, Texaco simply dumped the formation waters into unlined pits dug directly into the earth about three metres deep, dangerously close to the ground water aquifers.
When drilling for oil, a substance is used for lubrication and sealing, commonly termed "drilling muds", which is formed from a combination of highly toxic chemicals including cadmium and barium. After the drilling is completed, this fluid also becomes a waste product which requires careful disposal - in Ecuador, Texaco slopped the drilling muds into the unlined pits along with the formation waters and the waste crude that is produced when a well is first drilled (also highly toxic).
Texaco drilled approximately 340 wells in its concession area, with between two and five earthen waste pits for every well, amounting to somewhere between 800 and 1,000 abandoned pits of poisonous "soup" and, not surprisingly, this liquid waste has seeped through the clays and down into the ground water, contaminating the freshwater source of the campesino settlers with highly toxic substances. In addition to the toxic waste pits, formation waters and chemicals used for well maintenance (including the highly carcinogenic chromium 6) were pumped into small streams in the forest, where they flowed downstream into the rivers used by the local communities and indigenous tribes for drinking, washing and fishing - before continuing into the Napo River, a direct tributary to the Amazon.Texaco left Ecuador in 1992 after dumping more than 45 billion litres of waste into this fragile ecosystem.
For some 30 years the nearly 30,000 local inhabitants have been forced to drink, wash and fish in contaminated waters - they simply have no other choice. In San Carlos, a tiny, hot, impoverished oil town near Sacha the cancer rates are astonishingly high: children in this area are four times more likely to suffer from leukemia than in the rest of the country and are frequently born with genetic mutations and physical deformities. Women have abnormally high rates of cervical, uterine and lymph node cancers and suffer from spontaneous abortions. Cancer rates in men are also abnormally high, and abnormally aggressive, typically of the stomach, rectum, soft tissue and skin. Skin irritations, respiratory and sight problems are also unusually frequent and severe.
Walking the edge of a river near San Carlos on a hot afternoon highlights just how important water here really is - the rivers are a central tenet of life - they are where the women wash clothes, the children play and swim, families bathe and where cooking and drinking water is collected. It also shows the extent and severity of the contamination: rainbow patches drift gently downstream and when the sediment is disturbed, black globs of oil hiccup into the water. I watched, in anguish, a woman who stood waist deep in this river, scrubbing clothes on a rock, toxic water being gently absorbed by her internal soft tissue as she laboured for her family, and downstream, her children played by the river's edge next to an old Texaco oil drum. These people know their waters are contaminated, but there is simply no alternative. During recent testing in the area polynuclear hydrocarbons were found in freshwater rivers with levels up to 10,000 times greater than allowed under guidelines of the US Environmental Protection Agency; chloride levels between 100 and 400 times greater than the limits accepted in California and salinity levels 30 to 100 times greater. These are all toxic components found in crude oil and formation waters.
This environmental disaster is akin to the entire population of Chernobyl living in the town after the nuclear accident. People here literally live on top of toxic waste sites. Near the notoriously lawless oil town of Shushufindi we visited a family whose house had been constructed directly next to an abandoned waste pit where after some 30 years vegetation has grown over the surface and the poisonous sludge has permeated deep into the surrounding earth and ground water. The elderly campesino who lived there greeted us warmly and led me to the rear of his property where he attempts to grow some fruit and coffee trees. He broke pieces of soil with his work-roughened hands: thick black crude literally oozed from the centre and the smell of the oil was overpowering. Crude has literally seeped up from the ground and formed hardened crusts on the surface, the underside remaining a thick gooey mess of toxins. We walked around the old waste pit and poked a stick into the surface - the ground literally rolled with the liquid underneath and the stick was covered in black sticky waste. The trees here don't produce any fruit, and the ground water has been so contaminated that this man is losing his eyesight and his arms are unusually pale, covered with small irritated lumps. His wife lay ill inside the wooden house, dying slowly from cancer while they remain here in enforced passivity - trapped alive in a site with petroleum hydrocarbon contamination thousands of times higher than accepted limits under US legislation.
The smell of the waste crude in the area is overpowering. At the abandoned pits, the fumes were enough to give me a headache in a few minutes. And yet people live directly next to these areas. Nowhere else in the world would it be possible to be so close to toxic waste without even a fence for protection. Testing carried out in the soil surrounding the waste sites has proven dangerously high levels of chromium 6, cadmium and barium - all toxins associated with the drilling and maintenance processes.And as if the dumping of waste products was not contamination enough, the pipelines constructed by Texaco have proved to be dangerously substandard - running almost entirely above-ground (through towns and villages and next to people's homes) and in the 17 years of Texaco's management of the major Trans-Ecuadorean line, it suffered 27 breaks, spilling over 64 million litres of oil into the environment, most of which was not cleaned up.
It is difficult to convey the enormity of this situation, probably the largest environmental disaster in the world. Texaco knowingly used production methods outlawed by its home-state of Texas in 1939 and knowingly breached its contractual and ethical obligations to protect the natural environment and the local communities which it exploited and profited from. At the same time as conducting this substandard behaviour in Ecuador, it adhered to stricter regulations in other parts of the world which chillingly seems to show that the lives of the impoverished and indigenous are viewed as having less worth than those of the wealthy and the white.
"In this battle I have understood that working for a clean environment today is working towards peace for humanity tomorrow - facing the future. That is what I intend to do." - Pablo Fajardo
In 2003 a class action lawsuit was filed in the region's first oil town, Lago Agrio (ironically meaning Sour Lake), against the multinational corporation Chevron (who acquired Texaco in 2001) on behalf of the 30,000 peasant settlers and indigenous communities for the remediation of the area which covers some 2,700 square kilometres. This is potentially the largest environmental trial in history, and an emotional battle fought by a small team of Ecuadorian lawyers, supported by an American litigator, Steven Donziger. The lead Ecuadorean lawyer is a mestizo peasant named Pablo Fajardo, a man who after being born into extreme poverty, grew up in these violent oil towns where the fish floated dead in the rivers and the rain fell with oil. Pablo Fajardo acquired his law degree at night school and only graduated in 2004: this is his first case, and he is against a powerful team of corporate lawyers from the United States and Ecuador's oligarchy who are well trained in the art of litigious delays - presumably to drain their opponents of resources and will for as long as it takes. Chevron is a dangerous enemy and the case has already been delayed for some 15 years after it was first filed in a New York court in 1993. The Federal Court in New York ruled that the case did not have jurisdiction in the United States as the contamination and original contracts were made in Ecuador - and so in 2003 the proceedings were shifted to Lago Agrio and the litigious dance has begun again.
Chevron does not dispute that the areas have been contaminated; it simply disputes that the contamination is the fault of Texaco. This isn't helped by the fact that since Texaco pulled out of the region, the nation's petroleum company, Petroecuador, has been operating there with some dubious environmental practices of its own. But this does not detract from the fact that most of the waste pits date from the 30 years when Texaco was the sole operator in the region and the extent of the contamination is clearly in the hands of Texaco. In 1994 Texaco signed a remediation agreement with the Ecuadorean government, to clean up 37.5% of the waste (the percentage that Texaco accepted responsibility for) and paid an American engineering firm $40 million to carry out the cleanup. The cleanup was never monitored and no independent testing of the remediated areas was ever carried out by the then Ecuadorean government - the efficiency of the cleanup has been vociferously disputed by the plaintiffs who have tested the areas supposedly remediated which still show levels of toxicity thousands of times above the legal contamination limits. It would seem that the 1994 remediation effort was solely a ploy to have the contamination suit discredited.At stake is a remediation bill estimated to be some $8 billion, with a potential additional fine of $8 billion for "unjust enrichment" at the judge's discretion. This might sound like big money, but in the first quarter of this year alone Chevron posted profits of nearly $6 billion. This is no small time company. And this is no small lawsuit.
The Court process in Ecuador is slow and mainly evidence-based. The judicial inspections of contaminated sites have now finished and the closing statements of both sides are due. Judgement is expected in perhaps one or two years time. And after that... who knows. From Chevron's behaviour thus far, it doesn't look promising. There are still several levels of appeal courts within Ecuador, and after that, Chevron can argue (and it is likely that it will) that the Ecuadorean court system was unfair and corrupt and the case will return to the United States. It seems a systematic tactic to drag this out for as long as possible and the longer that the contamination is allowed to exist, the more that the people of this region will suffer.
How can one even put a price on freshwater ecosystems, on soil integrity, on a river's right to flow? How can you put a price on human life, on a child who suffers from leukemia or birth defects; how can you compensate a mother whose ability to give life has been taken from her? It is simply not possible to restore this environment to its previous condition and to remediate the contamination will be at least a 20 year process. You can't clean river water, but the polluted sediment can be cleaned and the toxic waste in the pits can be removed, or re-injected deep into the old wells. Clean water can be provided to the inhabitants and the health care costs of those who are suffering can be paid. But the real costs of this contamination can never be compensated. The lands and rivers of the indigenous communities have been destroyed, their fish are gone and their historic culture sits on a dangerous precipice as globalisation creeps ever more slowly into their world and erodes their traditions and erases their ancient wisdom.At the very least this case provides a strong precedent for the rest of the world's resource-extracting industries that no longer will people stand by and watch as their environment is destroyed for the greed of multinationals. No longer will it be more profitable to ignore the strictest environmental regulations and most efficient technologies. No longer will the "Davids" fear the "Goliaths" in this world - and the people, united, with truth on their side, will rise up and fight again.
