Amazon Pollution: Victims of 'Toxico'
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The Independent - 27 April 2005
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=633329
Amazon Pollution: Victims of 'Toxico'
Environmentalists estimate around 2.5 million acres of rainforest were
compromised or destroyed in Texaco's search for oil in Ecuador. It is a
disaster that has left the jungle ravaged and its people dying of cancer.
by Andrew Gumbel
Rita Maldonado is a woman acutely aware that every day she is slowly
poisoning herself to death. She lives on a tiny farm in the Ecuadorian
jungle with her husband and her elderly mother, where the only water
source is an outdoor well that has long since been contaminated by oil and
oil by-products.
The family uses the water to cook, to wash and to drink, not because they
want to, but because there is no alternative. Since moving about a year
ago to the community of Virgen de la Merced on the western edge of the
Amazonian rainforest, Rita has been suffering acute skin problems -
irritation, redness and regular eruptions of boils and abscesses. She
walks uncertainly, has difficulty breathing and is severely limited in how
much she can do to help raise the animals and perform the daily chores.
Her mother goes through the painful ritual of washing clothes on a bare
plank of wood in the garden, and hanging them up to dry on the strips of
corrugated iron that serve as a washing line. She, too, suffers from skin
problems. Rita's husband, meanwhile, pushes two pieces of corrugated iron
to one side to reveal the well. It neither looks nor smells remotely
clean.
If the experience of their neighbours is any guide, the outlook is
chilling. Half a dozen studies have demonstrated that they are exposed to
an unusual degree of toxicity, bringing with it an elevated risk of cancer
- - of the stomach, rectum, kidney or skin in men, of the uterus and the
lymph nodes in women.
If they do fall seriously ill, they will somehow have to find the money
for a proper biopsy and course of treatment in Quito, the Ecuadorian
capital, which is an 11 or 12-hour bus ride away. There is no nearer
hospital. Most likely, they will go to Quito infrequently or not at all,
relying instead on a thinly spread team of local team nurses with only
antibiotics and painkillers. Rita Maldonado's grim demeanour is partly, no
doubt, prompted by awareness of what might await her. Yet her options are
slim-to-non-existent. "We can't go anywhere else," she says plaintively,
"because it is contaminated everywhere." Everyone in this part of Ecuador
knows people who have died - often in horrible pain - and everyone blames
it squarely on the shocking legacy of 20 years of oil exploration by a
subsidiary of Texaco, in a joint venture with the Ecuadorian state oil
company.
The oilmen dumped their heavy sludge in more than 600 unlined open pits
and flushed as much as 20 billion gallons of waste water directly into the
area's once pristine rivers and wetlands. Environmentalists estimate that
some 2.5 million acres of rainforest - half of the original oil
concession, covering an area from just below the Colombian border down to
the Napo river, a tributary of the Amazon, and beyond - were either
compromised or effectively destroyed in the search for the jungle's very
own black gold.
The oil executives didn't bother with the now-standard industry practice
of re-injecting the waste products into the earth. Even after they pulled
out, they bequeathed to the area an infrastructure of outmoded machinery
and creaky, rusting pipes prone to further leaks.
Texaco left Ecuador in 1992, which might seem a long time ago. But the
devastating impact on the area becomes more apparent with every passing
year. "This is as bad as Chernobyl because over time people are getting
sicker and sicker," said Nathalie Weemaels, a Belgian agricultural
engineer based in Quito who has been very active in resisting oil
exploration in the Amazon. "The impact is cumulative - the cancer comes
out with time."
This is an overwhelmingly agricultural area, where small farmers keep pigs
and chickens around their houses and coconuts and starfruit grow in
abundance in their gardens. Now the fruit, and the livestock, are as
poisoned as the humans. Animals and, occasionally, children, stumble into
the waste pits. The produce is as suspect as the water supply. Sometimes,
when locals cut open slaughtered animals in preparation for cooking, they
say they can smell the hydrocarbon fumes on the raw flesh.
Texaco's experience in Ecuador has become notorious in the oil industry
for a couple of reasons. First, because it has become a textbook case of
how not to go about extracting energy resources from an area of Third
World wilderness. And second, because it has become the subject of an
extraordinary lawsuit that started in US courts more than a decade ago and
has now moved to Ecuador, where the authorities are slowly gathering
evidence of contamination at more than 120 wells and sludge pits and
listening to arguments from the two sides on the validity and competence
of their respective scientific studies.
To environmentalists and other activists working to defend the Amazon
against incursions by multinational energy companies, what has been
perpetrated in the Ecuadorian jungle is a form of slow-motion genocide.
Indigenous tribes have seen their numbers shrivel to almost nothing,
either because their people have fled the area or because they have
succumbed to disease and death. They say the spillages amount to the
equivalent of two Exxon Valdez disasters - a reference to the oil tanker
that ran aground off Alaska in 1988 - and will take at least $6bn
(£3.1bn) to clean up. That is the figure they are seeking to retrieve by
way of compensation in the courts.
"The first time I got off the bus in Lago Agrio [the area's main town], I
stepped right into oil that was running through the streets. I knew then
that I had to fight against this outrage," said Luis Yanza, now a leading
voice in the locally-based Amazon Defence Coalition. "It may take us many
more years to achieve justice, but we're not going to back down until we
have it."
Texaco, now part of ChevronTexaco, does not deny that contamination may
have occurred. But it argues it has more than met its obligations,
particularly in the wake of a $40m payment it made to the Ecuadorian
government in 1995 to cover remediation costs. Any further problems, it
says, are the responsibility of PetroEcuador, the state oil company which
has managed all assets in the protected area since their joint agreement
was dissolved.
The two sides will confront each other today in what has become an annual
ritual at the ChevronTexaco shareholders' meeting in San Ramon,
California. Community leaders from the Amazon, along with Bianca Jagger
and a clutch of other activist celebrities, will be in the forefront of
protests to denounce the company they refer to as "Toxico" and to demand
meaningful reparations as quickly as possible so that people don't keep
dying. Until now, all they have received are aggressive denials of
responsibility.
When the prospectors first came to the region in the early 1960s, they
told the local populations that oil would bring them unimaginable wealth,
but it didn't work out that way. Locals were certainly employed, and
earned modestly above the average subsistence wage, but they were
restricted almost entirely to unskilled jobs, and then predominantly in
the early seismic testing phases of exploration. The technicians and
engineers were brought in from Ecuador's cities on the other side of the
Andes, or from overseas.
Texaco oversaw a road-building programme, but it was designed exclusively
to meet oil extraction needs. The asphalt abruptly stops where the oil
trucks and tankers do not need to travel. Of all the billions of dollars
pumped into the region, not a cent was spent on improving communications
with the rest of the country. Much of the revenue Ecuador generated from
the oil went towards paying off its foreign debt, leaving little or
nothing for education, health or other essential local services, much less
environmental protection.
Oil quite literally took over the jungle. The roads are lined with
anything from a single pipe to a cluster of more than 20. Most people have
had to build gravel ramps to get over the pipes into their property. In
the early days, the company not only showed no signs of caring about
leakages and contamination. It even sprayed the streets and roads with oil
to keep the dust down.
Humberto Piaguaje, a leader of the tiny Secoya tribe, remembers running
barefoot on oil-slicked streets as a child, a radical change from the old
life of the rainforest in which no hint of modern life penetrated. "The
rainforest had it all," he recounted. "It was our market, our pharmacy,
our home. The souls of the great spirits of the rainforest protected us.
When I was four years old I saw trucks and helicopters for the first time.
We didn't know what was happening or what this portended for the future -
they told us oil was a form of wealth. But we thought, how is it possible
they are taking the blood from our ancestors living underground in the
forests?"
Despite the contentions of Texaco's lawyers, there is nothing subtle about
the way the contamination occurred. Above the small town of San Carlos, a
rudimentary barbed-wire fence rings an unlined pit set among the trees.
- From there, it is a clear downhill run to the Huamagacu river, where the
women of the town do their washing. Children often come here to swim, too.
"Seventy-five per cent of the children here have skin problems - abscesses
and pus spots and raw, itchy skin," said Rosa Moreno, one of four field
nurses in the town. "Plenty of others have skin or respiratory problems.
Some of them lose their hair. We've had 12 people here die of cancer." San
Carlos, not far from a well and pumping station centre called Sacha, has
been the community most intently studied by medical professionals, thanks
to a European couple, Miguel San Sebastian and Anna-Karin Hurtig, who have
meticulously gathered data on the town.
It is almost impossible to make a definitive link between environmental
blight and a cancer cluster - a point Texaco has rammed home in court at
every opportunity - but the two doctors have demonstrated over and over
that San Carlos's cancer rates are dramatically higher than in similar
communities untouched by oil pollution. Conditions such as childhood
leukaemia were all but unknown in the area until the oilmen arrived. Now
the leukaemia has taken on the proportions of a small epidemic, with 91
confirmed cases and counting.
"We have many very sick people," Ms Moreno said. "We don't even know what
is wrong with them because in many cases they are not able to see a
doctor. For the most part, there are no confirmed diagnoses." She
explained how she routinely warns new mothers not to bathe their babies.
If they do, their skin becomes angry and red and breaks out in spots. The
babies develop hacking coughs, as well as diarrhoea and fever.
Because of the publicity generated by the medical studies, San Carlos now
receives piped water for about one-eighth of its 3,000 people - an
improvement, for sure, if not a totally satisfactory one because the piped
water is contaminated by raw sewage. The water situation remains dire
almost everywhere else, Ms Moreno said, and the remediation effort
undertaken in the mid-1990s is laughable because the pits were not cleaned
at all, merely concealed. "If you dig just a little you find oil again,"
she said.
The Texaco oil fields are not the only places in the Ecuadorian Amazon
which face ecological and humanitarian disaster. Already, a clutch of
foreign companies is pushing to open up areas deeper in the jungle -
including areas theoretically protected by the state because they are
inside the Yasuni National Park which stretches over hundreds of thousands
of acres in south-eastern Ecuador. Already, members of the Huaorani tribe,
living under the shadow of a project overseen by a large European company,
are complaining of gastro-intestinal disorders, breathing difficulties and
dermatitis - because of what they and environmental activists have
reported as leaks into the groundwater.
A multi-nation inspection team which went into the Yasuni National Park
last summer, with full permission from park authorities, to look at fields
operated by the Spanish company Repsol, was intercepted by private
security guards and thrown out. Repsol, like almost every other oil
company in Ecuador, has a policy of keeping all outsiders away from its
operations. "Indigenous life is being snuffed out," said Mr Piaguaje, the
Secoya leader. "We are tired, but we have to keep fighting. We have to
fight for the lives of our generation."
- --
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