ChevronTexaco on trial.

• Author: Koenig, Kevin

Lago Agrio, Ecuador -- Huddled under the awning of the La Ganga appliance store, nearly a hundred indigenous men, women, and children and their campesino (peasant former) neighbors tried to keep their bodies warm and their headdresses dry. One of the heaviest rains of the season had begun the night before and showed no sign of letting up anytime soon.

"The forest is crying, crying for all those years of injustice," explained Luis Yanza, a campesino leader of the Frente de Defensa de la Amazonia (Amazon Defense Front), the regional grassroots umbrella organization for indigenous and former communities. "Of, they could be tears of joy that our day has finally come," said Emergildo Criollo, leader of the indigenous Cofan.

Just after 8 a.m., the crowd had swelled to 200 and begun to march through town to the courthouse, chanting "Justice and truth!" They arrived to find riot police and several armed soldiers forming a human barricade at the entrance. A flatbed truck rolled up laden with a sound system, and banners reading "Justice" and "Amazon Free of ChevronToxico" were draped over the balconies of the buildings across the street. Huaorani women in traditional clothing, faces red with achiote paint, began singing "Hermanos Unamonos," a traditional chant sung when the community needs to unite to defeat an enemy. They would continue the mesmerizing atonal chant throughout the day.

It was October 21, 2003, a Tuesday. A new and hopeful chapter in one of the worst ongoing ecological and social disasters in the Western Hemisphere was set to unfold. ChevronTexaco, the world's second largest energy company, was due in court to face charges brought on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorian indigenous people and campesinos--people forced to live alongside the toxic legacy left by the energy giant's oil operations in the rainforests of the Oriente, as the Ecuadorian Amazon is known. First filed in New York 10 years ago, the case was delayed because, among other reasons, the company (Texaco, until its merger with Chevron in 2001) refused to accept the jurisdiction of the U.S. court. It was one of the first environmental lawsuits ever filed in the United States by foreign plaintiffs alleging that a U.S. corporation violated international law by causing pollution abroad.

The significance of the case extends beyond the walls of the tiny courtroom in this provincial town. Many consider it a trial of globalization itself. While the promise of benefits from the "rising tide" of unfettered free trade and global capitalism has often gone unfulfilled, millions of people in the global South believe that multinational corporations have reaped billions of dollars in profits while leaving behind ravaged ecosystems, exploding health crises, and socioeconomic decay--and shielding themselves from accountability behind a screen of subsidiaries. "If globalization creates the conditions for multinational companies to come here, then profit, pollute, and run, it certainly should create the conditions to hold them accountable," said Yanza.

Perhaps it has begun to do so. When New York courts dismissed file case against Union Carbide on behalf of Indian victims of the deadly Bhopal gas leak, the matter was left entirely to India's courts. But the ChevronTexaco case, brought under the 1787 Alien Tort Claims Act, has paved the way for other such suits now in U.S. courts by yielding a remarkable decision: an order issued last year by the 2nd Court of Appeals in New York to ChevronTexaco to submit to the laws of Ecuador, a Latin American country where it no longer has assets, and a commitment from the court to enforce any judgment for damages leveled against the oil giant. Environmental remediation experts have estimated those damages at over $6 billion.

"To the best of our knowledge," says John Bonifaz, a member of the plaintiffs' legal team, "dais is the first [case] of its kind in world history: where an American company is forced by American courts to show up in another country's courtroom and comply with whatever judgment that comes out of that courtroom."

GAINS AND LOSSES

Thirty years ago, the rainforests of the northern Ecuadorian Amazon were a pristine zone harboring some of the greatest diversity of plant and animal life in the world. In these important Amazon headwater areas, a thriving indigenous population could be found collecting drinking water and catching fish from the Aguarico and Napo Rivers. The forest and river ecosystems have been these traditional communities' subsistence base, both environmentally and spiritually, for thousands of years. However, since Texaco's arrival in the early 1970s, indigenous groups the Cofan, Secoya, Siona, Huaorani, and Quichua--and the environment they depend on have been pushed to the brink of collapse.

In the words of Quichua leader Inocencio Macanilla, "Before Texaco's arrival we were the guardians of all of the sickness of the Amazon. Today, we are the guardians of contamination. We are the guardians of poverty and sickness. All the indigenous peoples of the Amazon are facing death."

After oil deposits were found in the Oriente in the late 1960s, Texaco was the first international oil company invited into the country, to install the drilling technology and a 498 mile trans-Andean pipeline to bring the oil to the coast for export. On behalf of its partners (Gulf Oil and the national oil company Petroecuador, originally known as CEPE), Texaco designed, managed, and controlled all of the consortium's oil operations from 1971 to 1992 in a 1 million hectare area of undisturbed rainforest. When Texaco's contract expired in June 1992, the assets and operations were turned over to Petroecuador. Texaco's hundreds of toxic waste pits, scattered near local communities, rivers, and streams, were simply abandoned.

The premise of the case is that Texaco made a cost-cutting decision that led to most of the environmental devastation and the resulting health crisis in the region. Oil operations routinely bring toxic waste waters to the surface during extraction. The lawsuit charges that instead of designing the operations to re-inject those waste waters back into the deep subsoil formations they came from--standard industry practice at the time--Texaco chose to dump the dangerous brew, which included benzene, toluene, arsenic, lead, mercury, and cadmium, directly into local streams and tributaries. (ChevronTexaco has been unable to cite one other instance, anywhere in the world, where it dumped toxic wastewater into streams of unlined pits.) The suit alleges that these practices saved the company money while violating laws and swamping local communities in a devastating wake of environmental destruction and contamination--a legacy that remains widespread and easily visible in the polluted fluvial systems that local indigenous and former communities use for drinking, bathing, fishing, washing, and swimming. At the height of its operations in-Ecuador, ChevronTexaco was releasing some 4.3 million gallons per day of toxic wastewater directly into the environment. This amounts to 464,766,540 barrels, or roughly 20 billion gallons, over the company's 21 years of operation.

The payoff? The case argues that during the company's two decade tenure...