“Like a War on the Environment” —Texaco’s 30 Years in Ecuador

Blood of the Devil

[00:00:07] Yogi, may I say, Losar, a ghost, the media. You know, as simple as that, Ben is here.

[00:00:16] Yeah, we put primitiveness Petronio in last. Got a status in the car. Okay, here's the deal. The last few that.

[00:00:34] This is Luis Gonzales. He moved to the audience. The area of the Ecuadorian Amazon on the eastern side of the country in the 70s. He says when he stepped off the bus in Lago Agrio, the largest city in the area at the time, the streets were literally filled with oil, that there was oil running down them. He stepped onto a street of oil, goes everywhere going these days.

[00:00:59] San Francisco. And you'll meet others a la workers. There's a there's a lot Cassaday going to be rearms Madama not his son. CMPD movies megahed us yelping Sepehr Mousavi get on this as Nobis Nagus youness says growing up he would see big black clouds in the distance.

[00:01:22] Newby's Nygard US. He didn't know what those clouds were from, but he found out later that they were from the oil refineries in the area. Later he would see pits of oil and wastewater in various parts of the Amazon as well. All of that, the oil st's, the black clouds, the pits who created those and whose responsibility it is to clean them up. That's what's at the center of a lawsuit that started in 1993 against one company, Texaco.

[00:01:51] That suit has lasted through an acquisition. Chevron acquired Texaco in 2000 and multiple trials and settlements and appeals. Aspects of this case have been heard in courtrooms in Ecuador, New York, Canada, Argentina and The Hague. An American lawyer, Steven Donziger, he met last time, is on house arrest and facing prison time for his role in the case.

[00:02:18] Jansa is still working on aspects of the case on the ground in Ecuador and in various other courts around the world. And various indigenous groups are just trying to figure out how they're going to clean this stuff up and get access to clean water. This is Drilled Season five Lucha Mangler episode to the colonizers. Today, we're gonna go all the way back and look at how that oil got onto those streets in the first place. That story coming right up after this quick break from today's sponsor.

[00:03:09] Hello, I'm Carl Thomas. I've just been reading about Simon Bolivar, Bolivar, the great patriot of Latin America, fought for the freedom of not just one country, but for the freedom of six Spanish colonies in Latin America for centuries in their poor and remote villages.

[00:03:29] Most of the people lived quiet lives close to the soil.

[00:03:33] Then in the early 1920s, something happened which changed forever, the life of the Venezuelan people.

[00:03:42] Boy. As you can hear in these vintage oil industry promotional films. Oil companies didn't see themselves as colonizers. Colonialism was something Spaniards did. American companies, they brought freedom.

[00:03:58] Oil colonialism was deeply intertwined with religion. And the situation in Latin America was no different. Missionaries throughout the continent were often funded by oilmen most intensely from the 1920s through the 1960s. And it wasn't purely cynicism. Men like Lineman's Stewart and John D. Rockefeller were extremely devout Christians who believed God had ordain them to find oil and prosper from it. Darren Dubcek, a history professor at the University of Notre Dame, has written several fascinating books on this subject.

[00:04:32] All oil men are developed Christian. Many of them are.

[00:04:37] Dubcek's says there's a long history of missionaries and oilmen partnering, and it was no different in the Amazon.

[00:04:43] These missionaries are pushing into the jungles of the Amazon. It's no accident that they are coming in direct contact with petroleum geologists. And they are going to collaborate. They're going to partner in terms of the flow of information.

[00:04:58] These partnerships weren't just bringing religion to the supposedly godless, primitive people of the Amazon and opening up new land for oil exploration. They were also exporting American style democracy throughout the world.

[00:05:12] Of course, this is all premised on the assumption of superiority of the modern Christian who as ambassador of the American way, privileges their knowledge and their expertize and sees it as, again, a God given way for them to help uplift the world. And that has deeply, of course, racist undertones.

[00:05:36] As the Cold War began in the late 1940s and continued until nineteen ninety one, churches and oilmen teamed up again against a common enemy, communism.

[00:05:47] This pursuit of black gold is going to be all the more intensified. Against the backdrop of the Cold War and the fight with communism in the fear that Latin America might lose itself to the great secular communist threat of the Soviet Union. So oil and the pursuit of souls is going to become all the more important. At that point.

[00:06:10] People begin exploring for oil in Ecuador in the 1920s. But it wasn't until the 1960s.

[00:06:24] Then once again, oilmen and missionaries teamed up to explore deep into the jungle in the nineteen eighties. Judith Kimberlin, an environmental lawyer from Alabama, was drawn to Ecuador by that timeless desire of environmentalists everywhere. She wanted to save the rainforests.

[00:06:42] When she arrived, Kimberly learned about the exact partnership between oil and religion that Dotun describes one of the groups, The Byway Ettie.

[00:06:51] They had no contact with the outside world until 1970.

[00:06:56] The Eddie are a subgroup of a larger tribe called the Watani, who live throughout the Amazon.

[00:07:02] In Ecuador, they were subjected to a program of forced contact because after Testico discovered commercial quantities of oil in Lago Agrio, the company knew that it would want to expand its operations into more any territory.

[00:07:16] Lago Agrio is the name of the first well, Texaco Drilled in Ecuador in the great tradition of American companies exploring overseas, Texaco named that well and the town it built up around it. After its own history, Lago Agrio means Sour Lake and back when Texaco is just the Texas oil company. It first struck black gold in the tiny sundown town of Southlake, Texas. 30 years later, Lago Agrio would be the center of this big legal case. We've been talking about the 1970s. There was still more exploring to do. That's where the missionaries came into it.

[00:07:54] And the war ended. Lives in those areas had no contact with the outside world. They were fierce voyeurs and great hunters. And so the company collaborated with U.S. missionaries to subject the we're on it to a forced contact.

[00:08:09] Kimberly wanted to see for herself what was happening in the Ecuadorian Amazon. And when she first got to Quito, she met an American oil consultant who repeated something she'd read back home.

[00:08:21] I had read that there was some oil development in Ecuador, but I had read in this literature that oil extraction, oil drilling, exploration and production does not harm the rainforest, that the only harm is caused by road construction, that oil companies have to build roads in order to lay their pipelines. And that road construction by the oil industry leads to deforestation. And there's never and there's no other harm. I had read that without thinking about it. And then after I got to Quito, I met a consultant for an oil company who said the same thing to me.

[00:09:00] And somehow when he said it just didn't sound right.

[00:09:08] That consultant gave Kimberlin a copy of his company's environmental management practices and its plans for further drilling in the Amazon. She took it to a group called Company AI, an organization that represents fifteen hundred communities in the Amazon, an environmental management plan for block 16, which is in really important areas.

[00:09:30] Yasuni National Park and also the territory of the Bahraini nation. You know, they looked at it and they asked me if they could see it, if they could copy it. And I said, of course. And I think that would've made an impression on them was that I was the first person who had ever shared information with them.

[00:09:51] Company. I asked her to come back. And then they asked her, OK, so you want to help? What exactly do you want to do? She said she wanted to go out and see what the oil companies were really doing in the rainforest.

[00:10:03] So I went with company. They took me out. They and they took me to Koepka, which is an oil boom town. And they introduced me to the local federation. And I met with with leaders there. And I told them about, you know, what I had heard about oil extraction. And I asked them, you know, I said I have some doubts. Is it true?

[00:10:26] Is there contamination? And they looked at each other. They looked at me. They had never heard that word before. They did not know what it meant. And so when I explained what the word contamination meant, they understood immediately and they began to tell me about the oil operations, the routine waste those bills.

[00:10:50] And then they took me around to so that I could see or my cell. And so I still remember the first waste pit that I saw, the first abandoned waste pit that I saw.

[00:11:02] It was at an exploratory well site. And the company had just dug a hole in the ground to dump their toxic drilling waste and then abandoned it in the rainforest. And when you abandoned toxic waste in the rainforest, some of it seeps into the ground. You also get a lot of rain. So it overflows into the surrounding areas. And I was appalled because when I was a lawyer in York City, I had worked on the Love Canal litigation. I had worked for a New York state attorney general's office suing Occidental Petroleum Company and Occidental Chemical Company to recover the moneys that New York state had spent to buy out people's homes and and contain the contamination at Love Canal.

[00:11:51] And I thought that we had learned in this country from Love Canal that you can't just dig a hole in the ground, dump your toxic waste and walk away. But that is exactly what Texaco was doing a U.S. company was doing in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador in the not, you know. And I went there in nineteen eighty nine and they were still doing it. Then.

[00:12:21] This practice, digging online. Open air, waist pads, filling them and just leaving them behind. And the dumping of oil into rivers. What we heard Justina talk about before. These are the original crimes at the center of this decades long case that Chevron ultimately inherited from Texaco and that the Ecuadorians are still trying to settle today.

[00:12:44] No one really denies that this was done, including the companies themselves and anyone else who happened to have been in Ecuador in the 90s or in any of the decades after. In fact, we even found a geologist who worked for an oil services company in Ecuador in the mid 1990s.

[00:13:02] Tim Lugger, Negro, 36 years in the petroleum industry out of work. J.R. lived in about 70 different countries. I lived ten years in America, eight in Brazil, two in Ecuador. Going there.

[00:13:14] I did see these these oil roads, really, the crude oil was it seemed like it was deliberately spilled.

[00:13:23] I don't know how it happened, but it seemed like it was also almost waist deep.

[00:13:27] And it was lush, lush jungle out there.

[00:13:32] At issue in this case is not whether this happened or even whether Texaco was involved. It's whether they were responsible for more cleanup than they actually did Texaco's. And now Chevron's arguments in this case boil down to two things. First, Texaco cleaned up what the government said it had to. And second, that any remaining issues were the responsibility of the state run oil company, Petro, Ecuador. The plaintiffs say basically, we don't care who owned what percentage of this partnership. It was Texaco that was operating everything. Texaco showed the Ecuadorians what to do. Texaco showed Petro Ecuador what to do. And they're responsible. My co reporter on this series, Karen Savage, asked Lago Negra about that.

[00:14:18] So Texaco were allies and now Chevron on what they call the settlement agreement that was signed. I think it was in 98 where they say they cleaned up 37 percent of the unlined waste pits because they said that's the percentage of their share of the consortium. Is that a normal kind of thing where they would only clean up whatever their share is and then leave the rest for Petroecuador?

[00:14:42] I think that's about Landis statement, because what happens is the major runs everything. I don't want to say they're like, you know, imperialists or whatever, but they definitely go in there with this big boy attitude a lot, these broad shoulders, and they're there to do the operations, to operate it. And usually the national oil company is just an observer. They really don't get their hands on the operation. So I think that's an outlandish deception there, really and truly. And don't believe that for a second. Number one, you never waste water in unlined pit. Never. Everyone knows that's toxic water, putting that into a rainforest. That is an outlandishly bold faced drilling, one on one air. Very, extremely wrong, extremely dangerous. Doesn't happen. Thirty seven percent. I think that's an outlandish deception, really. That doesn't work that way.

[00:16:03] Kimberlin gives the example of the trans Ecuadorian pipeline a three hundred and thirty male pipeline that runs from the Amazon up over the Andes and to the Pacific Ocean. It was initially built by Texaco in 1972.

[00:16:17] This pipeline during the time it was operated by Texaco. This pipeline alone had spilled more oil than the Exxon Valdez. And this doesn't count the secondary pipelines, the flow lines. I mean, most of the spills that occurred during Texaco's operations weren't even recorded. And there's actually a was a directive from Texaco in the U.S. to the office in Quito telling them not to record those spills, basically unless they had to.

[00:16:45] Both Texaco and Chevron have admitted that Texaco is the operator of the partnership. In other words, setting up oil fields, refineries and pipelines and running them from the beginning in 1964 until at least 1990, they were still in charge when Kimberlin made her initial save the rainforest trip. That experience prompted Kimberlin to write the book Amazon Crude, which introduced Americans to what was happening in the Ecuadorian Amazon, including crystal ball Bonifaz, an Ecuadorian who had immigrated to America and was practicing law there, when he read about what was happening back home. Bonifaz convinced his son, who had just graduated from law school, to go on a fact finding mission with him and see if they might build a case.

[00:17:28] His son brought his law school pal, a young Steven Donziger, the attorney we met last time I was invited by former law school classmate, a boy and his father, his father. Ecuador was practicing law in Massachusetts to go on with them on a trip to Ecuador to join investigation of what they describe as a massive pollution problem caused by Texaco.

[00:17:54] In 1983, Bonifaz filed suit against Texaco on behalf of a group of indigenous tribes. Here he is at a press conference about the case in New York. So far, basically nothing yet as you. What happened with Texaco didn't have to be that way, he says. He goes on to say more or less exactly what Tamla gonna grow. The petroleum engineer we heard from earlier said, Go Nigro worked throughout South America, the U.S. and Africa as an engineer for Baker Hughes, an oilfield services company. He said that plenty of oil companies were drilling responsibly at the time, that the pollution in Ecuador was really over the top.

[00:18:34] It was almost like a war and the environment. That's what it seemed like.

[00:18:50] Texaco argued that it had cleaned up what it was responsible for. The company also argued that New York, where the suit was filed, had no jurisdiction over what had happened in Ecuador for almost a decade. The plaintiffs, led by Bilney Phos, fought to keep the suit in New York. That's at least in part because at the time, Ecuador's government was almost entirely in the pocket of the oil companies whose profits were helping the country develop and modernize. In fact, the government even filed amicus briefs backing Texaco in this case. They asked the judge to dismiss the case, saying it would harm Ecuador's own oil industry and its relationship with the U.S. in an internal Texaco memo from 1994. Dr Rodrigo Perez, one of the company's representatives in Ecuador, is reporting back on a meeting with the president of Ecuador and various ministers and the executives of various oil companies. This seems to be a fairly regular occurrence. The last monthly meeting of the representatives of the oil companies was organized by city investing and took place on Saturday, September 3rd, in the town of Bahia, where President Oron Bulan owns a beach house that reads, We flew down in Petro Ecuador's airplane. Keep in mind, this is 1994. So two years after Texaco has officially left Ecuador. But the company is still pretty cozy with the government there. When he gets to a section entitled Ecological Problems, Perez writes, quote, The companies express their deep concern with what is happening to Texaco. President Duran stated that the environmental issue is being brought up by all lending agencies such as the World Bank, etc., which are conditioning their loans to sound and firm environmental policies with regard to the Texaco problem. He indicates that they're in the process of being resolved through direct negotiation between the government and Texaco. The minister also said that he had met with the leaders of the indigenous groups who have told him that they are not interested in the lawsuits against Texaco, but rather desire to have direct conversations with the company. The president finally said that he received several letters from ecological organizations from all over the world asking him to cancel all contracts with foreign oil and mining companies, which he will obviously never do.

[00:21:17] OK, so the oil companies are all meeting with the president during his beach vacation and he and the environment minister are telling them, don't worry, we'll sort all of these environmental issues out for you. But also, hey, we're kind of going out on a limb here with these banks and environmental organizations. So don't forget the fever. It's all right there in black and white.

[00:21:40] This is something that comes up in this case a lot, the corruption of the Ecuadorian government for years. The plaintiffs said they wouldn't get a fair trial in Ecuador because of it. Then Chevron said they wouldn't get a fair trial. But Chevron also points to agreements the government made with Texaco around this time as both valid and binding, particularly a document in which the Republic of Ecuador signed off on Texaco's cleanup efforts in the country. That agreement was signed in nineteen ninety eight in various videos defending themselves. And in a written statement to us, Chevron is careful with the language they use around this. They always say the cleanup was done according to the government's requirements.

[00:22:24] Before leaving, Texaco spent 40 million dollars and work with independent environmental experts to clean up its share of well sites. The whole process was overseen and verified by the Ecuadorian government.

[00:22:35] Texaco spent 40 million dollars cleaning up its agreed upon share of production sites, getting a complete release from the Ecuadorian government and local communities.

[00:22:44] An independent panel of experts found that Texaco's remediation here had followed Ecuadorian government requirements.

[00:22:51] It was the Ecuadorian government's cozy relationship with the oil industry that made Bonifaz and the Ecuadorian plaintiffs fight so hard for so long to keep their case in the US, especially given that Texaco is an American company. Here's Donziger again.

[00:23:07] Given that the Ecuador's legal system seemed completely incapable of standing up to the powerful Texaco and Chevron Corporation. It didn't exactly engender a whole lot of confidence that a lawsuit that would have to be successful, which is exactly why Texaco and Chevron was so desperate to have the case litigated down in Ecuador. They were so desperate that they agreed as a condition of the removal of the case to Ecuador.

[00:23:36] They accepted jurisdiction of the Ecuadorian courts as an American company.

[00:23:41] Very, very significant victory for our side. And they also agreed to pay any adverse judgment that might come out of Ecuador if they were to lose the case subject to certain conditions.

[00:23:55] By this point on the Kert was becoming increasingly involved in the case. It was unusual for an American company to agree to conditions like these, but maybe less so when you consider how friendly the Ecuadorian government had always been to oil companies.

[00:24:10] They thought they could engineer dismissal because of their political influence. You know, they saw what we saw, which was, you know, we saw a court system that for decades hadn't issued either one ruling against Texaco, even though the pollution was all over the place.

[00:24:27] I think they theorize that we would either give up, that is the law firm or lawyers in the US who are financing the case would just quit because it be such a hassle to start litigating in a foreign jurisdiction where none of us were lawyers, none of us were members of the bar. We would have to get a local legal team, pay them the inconvenience factor rose significantly.

[00:24:50] And they knew that still the concessions Texaco had made and that Chevron accepted to give the plaintiffs enough of a reason to keep going.

[00:25:00] Having gotten those two concessions, which are huge because oftentimes companies within, you know, the case will be moved to another country and these big companies like Texaco just won't show up or they'll show up and say, hey, this has to be dismissed because you lack jurisdiction in this case. That was not going to be an issue for us. So the upshot is we decided to go continue the case in Ecuador, which began what I call really phase two of this battle.

[00:25:36] Next time on Drilled, the case kicks off in Ecuador. And the surprising election of a wildly popular socialist president changes the math entirely.

[00:26:02] Drilled is an original production of the Critical Frequency Podcast's Network. It's reported and produced by me. Amy Westervelt, my co reporter on this season is Karen Savage. Our editor is Julia Ritchie, mixing and mastering by Mark Bush. Additional reporting from Emily Gert's additional production help from Sarah Ventry original score was composed by B Beamon. Matt Fleming created our beautiful artwork for this season. Our fact checker is good on yarn. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaten and the 1st Amendment Project. Maggie Taylor is our marketing director. You can find supplemental stories, documents, photos and interviews on our Web site at Drilled News.com. If you're a patron subscriber, thank you. Your membership is paying for this broadcast right now. Patrons, subscribers get access to an ad free podcast feed. And we're working on getting you more perks for your membership, including early access to episodes for this season. If you don't want to wait a whole week for the next episode, consider becoming a member at Patreon dot com slash Drilled. That's it for this time. Thanks for listening and we'll see you soon.

Transcription

How did this case come about in the first place? We go back to the early days of oil colonialism in Ecuador, in the 1960s, the partnership between oil men and missionaries, and the impact on indigenous communities in the Amazon.

S5 Chevron Ecuador Documents

La Lucha En La Jungla

S5, Ep3 | The Trial