Daniel Herriges – Amazonwatch

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A devastating report by Herriges of Amazonwatch.org on the legal battle between the indigenous people of Ecuador’s Oriente and Chevron seeking compensation for the rape of their lands and the lasting effects of the lethal contamination of natural resources resulting in the rise of cancer, birth defects, miscarriages and more…

This was the case in 1964, when helicopters belonging to the U.S.-based Texaco oil company appeared without warning in the Cofán’s remote rainforest territory in Ecuador’s Oriente, or Amazon region. Unbeknownst to the Cofán, Texaco had signed an oil production contract with an Ecuadorian government that had virtually no presence or influence in the Oriente. Texaco now hoped to strike black gold beneath land that had been occupied for centuries by indigenous people including the Cofán, Siona, Secoya, Kichwa and Huaorani. These people had maintained their traditional cultures and subsistence lifestyles well into the second half of the twentieth century, despite occasional encounters with missionaries and rubber tappers. Now, the arrival of Texaco set in motion a chain of events that would nearly obliterate those millennia-old ways of life in merely decades. So begins the strange story behind what, some 45 years later, has become the largest environmental lawsuit in history and a growing global movement for corporate accountability and environmental justice. Indigenous people who, upon Texaco’s arrival, had scarcely seen money, now find themselves at the center of a lawsuit which may demand as much as $27 billion – an unfathomable amount in Ecuador – in cleanup and recompense for the shocking devastation Texaco left in its wake.