"There was a crime against humanity here."
In an earlier post, I mentioned the idea of us as Americans being without clean water—or water at all. For most, this is unimaginable. For the Cofan people of Ecuador, this is a common, everyday truth. Their water and the rivers that are their community’s lifeblood, are literally part oil; they are thick, black, murky, and cancer-causing. And their water isn’t dirty because they picked a bad place to settle, or clean water has stopped flowing down the river.
Their water has been poisoned.
Over many years and many wrongs at the hand of an oil company, the Ecuadorian rainforest (and its people) has been dying.
In 1964, Texaco Petroleum Company (now owned by Chevron Corporation) began looking for oil in northern Ecuador. The rainforest and indigenous peoples, however, surrounded the land—known as the Lago Agrio Oil Field—where they eventually found the black gold. After they began drilling, Texaco extracted over 1.7 billion barrels of oil, producing a $25 billion dollar profit. In 1990, Texaco turned the land over to a local oil company Petroecuador (who isn’t without its own faults, surely).
And in 1993, due to the destructive extractions and immense pollution done by Texaco, 30,000 Ecuadorians filed a lawsuit against them.
Recently, I watched a documentary called Crude: The Real Price of Oil to learn more about the issue and to experience just what I’m trying to do with this blog and with all of my writing: give a face and a voice to people who have none in modern-day America. Its stories were moving and tragic, and while I thought that seeing the affected peoples with my own eyes would help me to learn, it really just made me blindly angry. Angry at Texaco. Angry at Chevron. Angry at a world that sacrifices human dignity and quality of life for a profit.
One man told the story of his two children and their deaths. They were bathing in the river, as the indigenous people often do, and accidentally swallowed some of the (apparently) oil-filled water. Only hours later, they began to cough up blood and quickly died in their father’s arms.
Their water has been poisoned.
Over many years and many wrongs at the hand of an oil company, the Ecuadorian rainforest (and its people) has been dying.
In 1964, Texaco Petroleum Company (now owned by Chevron Corporation) began looking for oil in northern Ecuador. The rainforest and indigenous peoples, however, surrounded the land—known as the Lago Agrio Oil Field—where they eventually found the black gold. After they began drilling, Texaco extracted over 1.7 billion barrels of oil, producing a $25 billion dollar profit. In 1990, Texaco turned the land over to a local oil company Petroecuador (who isn’t without its own faults, surely).
And in 1993, due to the destructive extractions and immense pollution done by Texaco, 30,000 Ecuadorians filed a lawsuit against them.
Recently, I watched a documentary called Crude: The Real Price of Oil to learn more about the issue and to experience just what I’m trying to do with this blog and with all of my writing: give a face and a voice to people who have none in modern-day America. Its stories were moving and tragic, and while I thought that seeing the affected peoples with my own eyes would help me to learn, it really just made me blindly angry. Angry at Texaco. Angry at Chevron. Angry at a world that sacrifices human dignity and quality of life for a profit.
One man told the story of his two children and their deaths. They were bathing in the river, as the indigenous people often do, and accidentally swallowed some of the (apparently) oil-filled water. Only hours later, they began to cough up blood and quickly died in their father’s arms.
Another woman teared up as she told her family’s story. She was a mother of two, and aside from where she was born, she was a mother like any other. Like yours, like mine. This mother, however, was a member of the indigenous Cofan nation born near a river that would eventually be commissioned and destroyed by the white man’s oil company. This mother, like many other mothers, had cancer. And, thanks to the river, so did her 18-year-old daughter. The family couldn’t afford medical care for the mom or her daughter, so in an attempt to raise some of the necessary treatments, they bought chickens to raise and sell for a profit. The chickens, however, died from drinking the river’s water shortly after.
Stories like these are endless in both Ecuador and in Crude, and the documentary is definitely worth a watch. But for those who might not have the time or the heart to swallow the painful truth that the Cofan people face everyday, here’s a few facts about the Texaco/Chevron oil situation:
Stories like these are endless in both Ecuador and in Crude, and the documentary is definitely worth a watch. But for those who might not have the time or the heart to swallow the painful truth that the Cofan people face everyday, here’s a few facts about the Texaco/Chevron oil situation:
—The amount of oil that has spilled into the Ecuadorian Amazon is 30 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989.
—Out of the original 15,000 indigenous peoples who lived on the land near the Lago Agrio Oil Field, only a couple hundred remain. The rest have been driven off their ancestral land due to the destruction of the environment by Texaco/Chevron.
—For those who do still live on the land, it is common to get cancer at only 18 or 19 years old.
The lawsuit filed in 1993 was not settled until a whopping 18 years later in February 2011 when Chevron was ordered to pay $18 billion in damages. The oil company then appealed the decision for years, and just last month in March 2014, a U.S. court ruled that the Ecuadorian plaintiffs’ lead attorney used corrupt means to obtain the 2011 Ecuadorian court verdict. While this most recent ruling doesn’t override the Ecuadorian one, it does complicate the due payment for damages. Appeals will likely continue for more years to come.
At one point in the documentary, one of the commentators gave viewers a profound image: “The Amazon is the lungs of the world,” he said. And what is a body—or a world—with lungs full of oil?
When current Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa visited the site in 2006, he was confronted with a grim picture of devastation and abuse. “The world needs to know about this,” he said. “There was a crime against humanity here.” And though the crime wasn’t overtly violent, although there were no guns or wars or traditional prisoners, humanity was wronged the very day Texaco began dumping oil runoff onto the pristine land of the Cofan people. Humanity was disregarded in the name of oil and money, and it can only begin to be rebuilt if we pay attention and stand with the people of Ecuador.
For more information about the court case against Chevron, click on the following interviews and articles from Democracy Now! To get involved and help the Cofan people and the area in need, click here.
When current Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa visited the site in 2006, he was confronted with a grim picture of devastation and abuse. “The world needs to know about this,” he said. “There was a crime against humanity here.” And though the crime wasn’t overtly violent, although there were no guns or wars or traditional prisoners, humanity was wronged the very day Texaco began dumping oil runoff onto the pristine land of the Cofan people. Humanity was disregarded in the name of oil and money, and it can only begin to be rebuilt if we pay attention and stand with the people of Ecuador.
For more information about the court case against Chevron, click on the following interviews and articles from Democracy Now! To get involved and help the Cofan people and the area in need, click here.