Chevron's Chernobyl in the Amazon
While drilling for oil in Ecuador's Amazon rainforest region, Texaco – which merged with Chevron in 2001 – operated without concern for the environment or local residents. The company deliberately dumped billions of gallons of toxic wastewater into rivers and streams, spilled millions of gallons of crude oil, and abandoned hazardous waste in hundreds of unlined open-air pits littered throughout the region. The result is widespread devastation of the rainforest ecosystem and local indigenous communities, and one of the worst environmental disasters in history.
Due to Chevron's toxic contamination of their soil, rivers and streams, and groundwater, local indigenous and campesino communities continue to suffer an epidemic of cancer, birth defects, miscarriages, and other ailments. Chevron has never carried out a meaningful clean up of the mess it is responsible for, and its infrastructure continues to poison the communities of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Today, more than 30,000 Ecuadorians are fighting for justice with an international campaign and a landmark class action lawsuit in Ecuadorian courts. Despite Chevron's repeated efforts to sabotage the trial, the local people remain determined to hold Chevron accountable, demanding clean-up costs and compensation for the devastation the company caused.
Since 2002, Amazon Watch and our Clean Up Ecuador Campaign has been working with shareholders, consumers, and other concerned people to support justice for the communities of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
History
In 1964, Texaco (now Chevron), discovered oil in the remote northern region of the Ecuadorian Amazon, known as the Oriente; the East. The indigenous inhabitants of this pristine rainforest, including the Cofán, Siona, Secoya, Kichwa and Huaorani tribes, lived traditional lifestyles largely untouched by modern civilization. The forests and rivers provided the physical and cultural subsistence base for their daily survival. They had little idea what to expect or how to prepare when oil workers moved into their backyard and founded the town of Lago Agrio, or "Sour Lake", named after the town in Texas where oil company Texaco was founded. The Ecuadorian government had similarly little idea what to expect; no one had ever successfully drilled for oil in the Amazon rainforest before. The government entrusted Texaco, a well-known U.S. company with more than a half-century's worth of experience, to employ modern oil-drilling practices and technology in the country's emerging oil patch. However, despite existing environmental laws, Texaco made deliberate, cost-cutting operational decisions that, for 28 years, resulted in an environmental catastrophe that experts have called "Chernobyl in the Amazon."
More:
http://amazonwatch.org/work/chevron
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This is the only place these people could find their drinking water. This is also where all their livestock found drinking water, as well as all the animals of the forests, the birds, everything that lived found water to drink. This filth has killed them, made them fatally ill, they have suffered needlessly because of the greed of the oil company.
This is NOT A JOKE FOR ANYONE BUT MENTALLY IMPAIRED, MORALLY DEAD RIGHT-WINGERS. Sober human beings couldn't laugh about this, not in a million years.
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