ECUADOR: LAWSUIT FILED AGAINST TEXACO.
| Cargo | Ecological damage litigation on ChevronTexaco Corp. |
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 local population. 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 rivers during 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 rise to 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 polluted rivers. 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 rivers have all been polluted and destroyed. This has caused a lot of damage, and made a lot of people ill."
The lawsuit claims that...
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