ChevronTexaco on trial
October 21, 2003. High-level corporate lawyers from ChevronTexaco sit in the same packed muggy courtroom as bare-breasted Amazonian men and women at the start of what the media calls "The Trial of the Century.' In the ramshackle Amazonian town of Lago Agrio, the oil Titan stands accused of severely contaminating the surrounding region during 20-plus years of oil drilling and production in what once was untouched rainforest, with pristine rivers and crystal clear lakes.
At stake is not only whether the San Ramon, usa-based corporate giant will have to pay more than us $1 billion to clean up the pollution left behind by Texaco's oil production from 1972-1992 (at that time, Chevron hadn't merged with Texaco), but also if the case will effect a fundamental change in how us corporations do business around the world.
The case has already set precedent. First filed in the us in 1993 on behalf of 30,000 plaintiffs in the Ecuadorean Amazon for environmental and health damages, the case bounced around the us legal system until a federal appeals court dismissed it in 2002. As part of the dismissal, the court sent the case to Ecuador under the condition that ChevronTexaco abide by the Ecuadorean court's ruling. "The case is historic,' says Steven Donziger, a us lawyer representing the Ecuadorean plaintiffs. "This is the first time a us oil company has been forced to submit to jurisdiction in a Latin American court in an environmental case with damages of this magnitude.'
That there is pollution in the region, no one is denying. Even ChevronTexaco admits to some. Any damage caused by drilling was "minimal' and "normal for any operation', according to company vice-president and legal counsel Ricardo Reis Vega, who spoke to the press in the courtroom immediately after the opening of the trial. The plaintiffs claim that to save money over the 20 years of production, Texaco dumped 18.5 billion gallons of waste into open, unlined pits instead of reinjecting it back into the ground (the common practice). Now they want the pits cleaned up.
Reis Vega went on to say that Texaco violated no Ecuadorean environmental laws, and that the us $40 million it spent on a remediation contract it had negotiated with the Ecuadorean government in 1995