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In all my years of travel, I have never experienced any country quite like Ecuador. The contrast that exists within its borders is remarkable. Geographically, the country is full of gigantic Andean peaks, as well as a spectacular coastline, and dense Amazonian rainforest. Ecuador’s people are also full of contrast. Our group encountered several bands of brazen robbers (one of which was desperate enough to snatch my passport and wallet out of my pack from right under my seat on a public bus), but we also met many lovely, congenial locals that went out of their way to help us. I travelled to Ecuador with a group called Global Exchange based out of San Francisco. Our goal was to explore the connection between the destruction of the environment and human rights violations by diving into the Amazon jungle and talking with affected local families, indigenous leaders, and environmental organizations.

From 1964 until 1990, Texaco (now Chevron-Texaco) drilled deep into the heart of the Amazon rainforest spilling millions of gallons of crude oil along the way. Texaco also left behind nearly 1000 open toxic waste pits scattered across the Amazon, many of which were designed to overflow during hard rains, then spill directly into the water sources of thousands of indigenous people. The company also dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste water into Ecuador’s rivers. These are the same rivers that 30,000 indigenous people use for swimming, fishing, bathing, cooking, and drinking every single day. Now, these innocent people suffer from cancers, skin fungi, birth defects, and spontaneous miscarriages because of the standard environmental practices Chevron-Texaco failed to implement. These are just statistics, numbers that we read about before the trip, but when we travelled into the Amazon these facts were transformed into faces.

In 1995 Ecuador asked the company to clean-up some of this contamination, so the company “cleaned” less than 1% of these sites by hiring locals (the same people already forced to live with the company’s contamination) to scoop out some of the waste by hand, fill the toxic pits with dirt, then re-sell the land to locals. We visited a woman who raised her family on some of this reclaimed land. We pierced the ground in her front yard with a shovel and she showed us how crude oil still lies just inches from the surface. The crops the family has attempted to grow here are small and sickly, and the smell of petroleum surrounding their home is overwhelming. She and her children suffer from debilitating headaches and even a bizarre skin fungus on their faces and chests.

Photo courtesy Emily Sabelhaus

Ecuador is not letting Chevron-Texaco get away without a fight. In 1993, a class-action lawsuit was filed against the company and has slowly been making its way through the judicial system. After 17 years of waiting, the ruling is expected to be made this year by a single judge in a small courtroom in Lago Agrio. If the judge rules in favor of the indigenous people of the Amazon, the case would result in the largest environmental damages award in history- up to $27 BILLION. The indigenous people of this region deserve justice and I sincerely hope that Chevron-Texaco is held responsible for the environmental destruction, cultural devastation, and pain they’ve caused the people of this beautiful country. We also need to think deeply about our own dependence on oil. If it weren’t for the US and its insatiable craving for petroleum, this disaster may have been avoided. For more information, please visit:

CBS 60 Minutes, “Amazon Crude”

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/05/01/60minutes/main4983549.shtml

Amazon Watch-

http://chevrontoxico.com/

NY Times-http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/business/global/15chevron.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=ecuador%20texaco&st=cse&scp=3

Chevron’s side of the story-

http://www.chevron.com/ecuador/?gclid=CK3FiKvrzZoCFQ6jagodZ0072g

This entry was posted on Monday, May 24th, 2010 at 7:23 am and is filed under Eco Travel, Smart Energy, Wetlands. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.