Texaco's Toxic Legacy in Ecuador

Some of the sludge pools hidden in the jungle are over 6 meters deep, the legacy of decades of oil production and exploration by Texaco, now Chevron. Chevron faced a land mark and higly controversial lawsuit in which it was assessed $9.5 billion in damages and costs. A decade later the clean up has yet to materialize in the Sacha field, Orellana Province. Fruit trees will not in the contaminated soil covering the pools, or if they do struggle to survive they do not produce fruit. People living nearby are forced to use polluted water wells until they finally leave the area. There are an estimated 3,568 sites in Ecuador's Amazon that the government lists as sources of contanmination. Satelite imagery produced for litigation showed 990 waste pits scattered about the forest floor. Texaco was deemed responsible for 1,107. Rather than remediate the waste sites, the company covered them up, despite the fact that it signed a remediation plan. 

The Sacha field is now owned by Petroecuador, the state oil company. The country has been extracting oil from the rainforest since the 1960s, but there is little research and data on the health effects on local populations directly affected by extraction. So far Petroecuador has done very litle to clean-up the mess, recognized as one of the largest ecological disasters in the world. Over the years the waste oil buried by Texaco has seeped up to the surface in Orellana and neighboring Sucumbios province. [photo credits:A. Lara]

Despite international litigation and arbitration against Chevon, which acquired Texaco in 2001,  Ecuador has come out a looser probably due to incompetence-or perhaps coruption--of its former Attorney General, Ignio Salvador. Successive governments have become accustom to ignoring the disasterous pollution caused the dumping of 650,000 barrels of oil and billions of gallons of contaminated water. Petroecuador repeatedly claims that it has remediated 51 million cubic feet of soil and eliminated 1,127 sources of contamination. but the state company does not provide data to corroborate up its public claims, and people continue to die of cancer from toxic exposure. In a famous study of oil exploitation affects on rural health by physician Miguel San Sebastian, people living in San Carlos, Orellana face a cancer risk 2.3 times higher than residents of the capital, Quito. Undiagnosed diseases abound in the region. One resident told interviers, "This is not a spill. This was dumped here forty years ago, and they knew what they were doing."