Suzana Sawyer “Suing ChevronTexaco: Citizenship, Contamination and Capitalism in the Ecuadorian Amazon” November 1, 2004

Suzana Sawyer is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UC Davis. Her current research focuses on conflict over oil operations in Ecuador. Her new research examines the lawsuit against Texaco, focusing specifically on what it tells us about shifting regimes of citizenship, sovereignty and law.

Holding TNCs Accountable: Chevron-Texaco, “SourLake” and Transnational Justice

By Simeon Tegel

A black toxic sludge oozes up through the ground and a thin carcinogenic film shines across the surface of the rivers and streams on which local communities depend. In those communities, incidences of deadly diseases, including leukemia, exceed normal levels by factors of ten. The Oriente, as the Ecuadorian Amazon is known, is the scene of a major environmental catastrophe.

Now, more than a decade after US oil giant Texaco left the people of Ecuador to deal with this mess, its corporate heir, Chevron-Texaco, finds itself the unwilling participant in a landmark legal suit; for the first time ever, a Transnational Corporation (TNC) headquartered in the First World is being sued for environmental negligence through the court system of a “developing” nation where the alleged damage occurred.

In her presentation about the case, Professor Suzana Sawyer, a cultural anthropologist from UC Davis, touched on issues from sovereignty and debt to the cultural clash in the Ecuadorian courthouse between indigenous plaintiffs and the corporate lawyers. The case is still unresolved, with the judge, counsel and witnesses currently engaged in the arduous task of visiting some 250 sites of alleged pollution and toxic dumping deep in the rainforest.

Should Chevron-Texaco lose, the case could have substantial symbolic power and possibly even legal ramifications for the numerous other TNCs from the Global North that have negligently allowed ecocide and public health disasters to occur as a result of their commercial activities in the Global South. Embarking into uncharted legal waters, the case has drawn the attention of anti-globalization activists, environmentalists, human rights lawyers and others around the world.

The story begins in 1967, when crude oil was first discovered deep in the Oriente subsoil. By 1972, a pipeline had been built and the following year Ecuador optimistically joined OPEC in a bid to maximize its oil revenues. From 1967 to 1992, Texaco extracted billions of barrels of crude oil, much of it consumed on the West Coast of the US, principally in California, Professor Sawyer said. At the time, Ecuador’s environmental legislation was non-existent, providing no statutory safeguards against corporate negligence. In an apparent bid to reduce operating costs, the oil major adopted antiquated and unsafe practices that would have been illegal in the US at the time.

Instead of re-injecting the “formation waters”, toxic sludge brought up in the drilling process, into wells between one and two miles deep as was standard practice in the US, Texaco dumped them by the wellheads in a series of pits known as “piscinas”, some as large as soccer fields. Currently, there are more than 600 of these pits scattered across the Oriente, the result of a practice that was stopped in Texas in 1919 and has been prohibited by US federal law since the 1970s, said Professor Sawyer. Meanwhile, over the course of two decades, Texaco’s principal pipeline in the region leaked roughly 1.5 times more crude oil than the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska. Predictably, there have been major impacts on the health of the local population, with some epidemiological studies finding rates of some cancers up to 30 times higher than in unaffected rural communities.

However, during the 1990s, with the help and encouragement of lawyers from the US, local communities around the “rough and tumble” frontier town of Lago Agrio, on the dangerous Colombian border, began to stir. In November 1993, a class suit was thus filed against Texaco in a federal court in Manhattan. The court was chosen because it was near the corporation’s White Plains headquarters. Residents of the area around Lago Agrio – the name means “Sour Lake” and is derived from the eponymous oil boom community in Texas – alleged that Texaco had used sub-standard equipment and adopted practices that would have been illegal in the US, and that its subsequent multi-million dollar clean-up operation was inadequate. The Ecuadorian cost-saving measures adopted as the result of decisions in Texaco’s boardroom in White Plains caused massive damage to the rainforest environment and the health of its human inhabitants, they claimed.

After various appeals, the US court system decided in 2002 that the best place to try the case was Ecuador. This decision was based on three conditions: Texaco would have to submit to Ecuadorian jurisdiction; information revealed in the US “discovery” process could be used in the Ecuadorian case; and the decision of the Ecuadorian court system could be enforceable in the US. This ruling by a US court, raising issues of sovereignty, legal governance and the accountability of transnational capital, was unprecedented. Effectively, a US court told a US corporation to show up in the dock in another country where it no longer operated.

Thus, the landmark case resumed in a packed courthouse in Lago Agrio in October 2003, taking advantage of a change in Ecuadorian legislation that paved the way for something akin to the US’s class action lawsuits. A total of some 30,000 plaintiffs, mainly small farmers but also including some indigenous peoples were collectively suing the oil giant. Journalists from around the world, activists including Bianca Jagger and environmental NGOs such as Acción Ecológica were all present as the precedings resumed in the rainforest town, where most roads were only paved since the turn of the millennium.

After two weeks of hearings, the case went into the “evidentiary” (“pruebas”) stage, in which it is still engaged, with the judge, lawyers and witnesses leaving the courtroom behind them to tour the sites of contamination. This stage is likely to take another two years. Both sides are expected to appeal the ruling up to Ecuador’s supreme court, should they lose. A definitive judgement may thus take several years. However, just getting the case heard has already been a major achievement, one which at last puts TNCs on notice that damaging public and environmental health on a massive scale in developing countries may no longer be either an acceptable or a cost-free approach to business.

Suzana Sawyer is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Davis. Her research focuses on the impacts of hydrocarbon extraction in the Ecuadorian rainforest. Simeon Tegel is a graduate student in the LAS program.