Chevron's scorched earth tactics in Amazon case

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Posted By: Mitch Anderson
The story is relatively simple in its brutality. So simple, in fact, that one would think Chevron has Machiavelli on retainer. Let me explain.

Nearly half-a-century ago, an American oil company, Texaco, discovered large quantities of oil in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The region was pristine then, inhabited by six indigenous tribes (the Cofan, Siona, Secoya, Quichua, Huaorani, and Tetete), who had been thriving for centuries, if not millennia, off of the abundance of the forest and the rivers.

Deep in the Amazon, unchecked by any meaningful regulations or ethics, Texaco created what has now become one of the world's worst oil-related disasters, deliberately dumping an estimated 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater into rivers and streams, and spilling roughly 17 million gallons of oil into the sacred ancestral territory of the indigenous peoples.

Children were born with tumors. Women began dying of cancer. Terrible oil-related diseases began ravaging the region. Texaco abandoned their oil fields in the early 90s, claiming to have remediated the damage. A lawsuit against the company was filed in 1993 on behalf of more than 30,000 indigenous and campesino people, whose lives had been torn apart by poisoned water, toxic soil, contaminated game, and hopelessness.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/manderson/detail?entry_id=82494

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