Chapter 7. Crude Contamination

Abstract

Between 2004 and 2007, dozens of judicial inspections of alleged contaminated sites unfolded in the Ecuadorian Amazon as part of a lawsuit filed in 2003 on behalf of thirty thousand local inhabitants against the Chevron Corporation for environmental contamination. Presented in the Superior Court of Nueva Loja (or Lago Agrio as the town is commonly known)—a bustling Amazonian oil frontier town—the lawsuit alleged that, between 1964 and 1990, Texaco (which merged with Chevron in 2001) spewed industrial wastes in its oil concession, contaminating the environment during its thirty-odd years of operating in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon. Industrial wastes, plaintiffs claimed, devastated the local ecology and endangered the health of local inhabitants. The judicial inspections comprised the legal teams from both sides accompanying the judge (variously followed by the press, interested observers, and local inhabitants) as he tramped through the secondary rainforest surrounding former Texaco oil wells, processing stations, and exposed or purportedly remediated waste pits. At each site the plaintiffs’ and the defendant’s team of technical experts extracted soil and water samples, examined them visually, and sent them off to laboratories to be analyzed for their chemical content. Two written reports—one from the plaintiffs and one from the defendant—with multiple appendices resulted from each site