Chevron Pollution Case Empowers Indigenous Groups Beyond the Amazon

From the early 1970s into the ’90s, Texaco pumped 1.5 billion barrels of oil out of hundreds of wells dug in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest.

The company disposed of billions of gallons of toxic oil waste from each well into nearby waste pits. Most of those pits are still there, mixing chemicals with groundwater and killing fish and wildlife. Birth defects and cancers are now common among the native people.

The damage to the ecosystem has upended the way of life of the region’s six indigenous groups and its farmers.

Now, big oil could be forced to pay for the cleanup and damage its wells are causing. With the help of U.S. attorneys, the indigenous groups and environmental community sued. They are now awaiting what is likely to be a landmark ruling from an Ecuadoran judge who may hold Chevron, which bought Texaco in 2001, liable for up to $27 billion in damages.

The case, Aguinda vs. Chevron, is emboldening other indigenous groups around the globe to take on multinational companies that have run roughshod over their lands and livelihoods, and it serves as a warning to other companies that are considering projects that would destroy the environment. 

The significance of the Chevron case lies not only in the possible size of the judgment but also in the unusual way in which has traveled through the courts over the last 16 years, as a recent 60 Minutes report explained. (Chevron's PR machine responded by hiring a former CNN reporter to make a similar video that instead flatters the oil company.) 

In 1993, 30,000 plaintiffs filed a class-action lawsuit in New York. After being mired in the court for 10 years, the oil giant won – the judges determined they shouldn’t rule on a case involving land on another continent. But there was a condition: Chevron had to be wiling to go to trial in Ecuador.

As lawyer David Feige wrote in The Los Angeles Times, “The company readily complied, possibly figuring that the plaintiffs would drop the matter and go away.”

They didn’t, and now an Ecuadorean judge is expected to rule soon. Feige says of the upcoming verdict, which he believes is likely to be against Chevron,

“What’s unprecedented about it is having gone to a foreign country, duked it out in their system and coming away with a huge judgment that is enforceable in US courts, or at least theoretically enforceable in U.S. courts.”

Chevron claims it is being defrauded by the plaintiffs. It says it already spent $40 million in a cleanup deal with the government of Ecuador and therefore can't be sued, though this is a civil case brought by the victims rather than the government.

Andrew Woods, legal advisor to the plaintiffs at Donziger and Associates, hopes this case will affect the kinds of environmental precautions multinational companies take:

“It’s not that [Chevron] polluted. It’s that they polluted unnecessarily. They operated using technology standards that were well below what they were doing elsewhere in the world – and things they would never do in the United States.

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