Ecuador Lawsuit Filed Against Texaco

ECUADOR: LAWSUIT FILED AGAINST TEXACO

A US legal team filed a billion-dollar lawsuit in an Ecuadoran court on May 7 against US oil giant ChevronTexaco. The plaintiffs, a group of Ecuadoran Indians, accuse the company of destroying large areas of rain forest in Ecuador and contaminating local land and rivers. They say the pollution has increased the incidence of cancer among the localpopulation. ChevronTexaco rejects the allegations and says the company met all its obligations under Ecuadoran law. The suit was filed in the Corte Superior de Justicia in the Amazonian town of Lago Agrio, 185 km northeast of Quito. Attorneys said the trial could last two years. Texaco Petroleum Company (TexPet), a Texaco subsidiary, operated in Ecuador from 1964 to 1990 in partnership with PetroEcuador,the Ecuadoran state oil company. PetroEcuador was the majority partner, holding a 62.5% interest. TexPet held the 37.5% minority interest. The suit, brought by thousands of residents near the company's former oil fields, alleges Texaco, which merged with Chevron in 2001, dumped roughly 18.5 billion gallons of highly toxic oil-laden water and crude oil into unlined pits, estuaries, and riversduring its operations in Ecuador's Oriente between 1971 and 1992. In addition, it says that the company left behind nearly 350 open waste pits, some just a few feet from the homes of residents. As a result, crops were damaged, farm animals killed, and cancer increased among the local population. "We believe that what ChevronTexaco did in the Ecuador rain forest was not only negligent but might riseto the level of reckless behavior," said Joseph Kohn, another lawyer for the plaintiffs and a partner in Kohn, Swift & Graf in Philadelphia. Drinking, bathing, and cooking with the contaminated water damaged the health, culture, and livelihood of five indigenous tribes and 30,000 people, the plaintiffs allege. Several tribes were forced to abandon their ancestral lands because of the pollutedrivers. They claim that the population of one tribe, the Cofan, shrank to 300 people from 15,000 as a result of the environmental damage. "We are suffering from diseases like leukemia, and thousands of our people have been killed," said Elias Piguaje, a leader of the Secoya indigenous group. "We are now living in tiny areas in the Amazon, in what was once our rain forest. The land and the big rivershave all been polluted and destroyed. This has caused a lot of damage, and made a lot of people ill." The lawsuit claims that Texaco used methods "that had long been abandoned or prohibited in other countries, because of their deadly effects to the environment and to human health." Plaintiffs say Texaco should have re-injected oily water into the ground instead of releasing it into theenvironment. They say the release saved the company US$4 billion. "These are not just random spills," said Steven Donziger, one of the plaintiffs' lawyers. "This is the result of a decision made by Texaco to install a type of drilling process that would lead to a

systematic dumping of toxins. Texaco made a decision to dump these toxins into the Amazon to save money and increase its profits."Company denies wrongdoing ChevronTexaco officials say that PetroEcuador set policy for the joint venture and that the drilling met the country's environmental requirements. Ecuador's laws allowed oil drillers to dump wastewater, rather than require the more expensive process mandated in the US of re-injecting the oil-contaminated water back into the well. In addition, company officials said Texaco paidUS$40 million to survey and clean up more than 250 drilling sites. "The company operated in accordance with all applicable Ecuadoran laws and used practices that were consistent with international practices for the time," ChevronTexaco spokesperson Chris Gidez said. He added that the oil operations took place over about 6,400 acres, or less than 1%, of the Ecuadoran rain forest. "The Ecuadoran...