Chevron (CVX) Fact Sheet
Oil Rights or Human Rights in the Amazon? Printer friendly PDF version. »“Our health has been damaged seriously by the contamination caused by Texaco. Many people in our community now have red stains on their skin and others have been vomiting and fainting. Some little children have died because their parents did not know they should not drink the river water.”
Excerpt: Affidavit of the Secoya tribe given by Elias Piaguaie -Aguinda, et al v. Texaco Inc. - Case # 93-CV-7527.
An unlined waste pit filled with crude oil left by Texaco drilling operations years earlier lies in a forest clearing near the town of Sacha, © Lou Dematteis courtesty of Amazon Watch
- For over four decades, Indigenous communities have witnessed multinational oil companies cut through the delicate Ecuadorian Amazon jungle and their ancestral lands in search of the country's vast petroleum resources.
- Texaco, which merged with Chevron (CVX) in 2001, began prospecting for oil in Ecuador in 1964, becoming the first company to discover commercial quantities of oil in the country. Texaco set the standards for oil operations in the region and remained the operating partner through its joint venture with the state-owned oil company.
- According to the 1993 report "Amazon Crude" by the environmental lawyer Judith Kimerling, from 1972 until it left Ecuador in 1992, Texaco intentionally dumped more than 19 billion gallons of toxic wastewaters into the region and was responsible for 16.8 million gallons of crude oil spilling from the main pipeline into the forest. The report alleges that these actions contaminated both the soil and the groundwater of the communities in the area and will continue to threaten the economic and cultural bases of Indigenous peoples' survival. By comparison, the infamous Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in 1989 spilled 10.8 million gallons of crude off the coast of Alaska.
- Health reports published in renowned medical journals point out the relationship between higher cancer rates and living in the proximity of oil fields, and between spontaneous miscarriage rates and living in the proximity of contaminated water streams. In some streams, the levels of oil chemicals like hydrocarbon concentrations were as high as 280 times the permitted levels in the European Community.
- Meanwhile, Chevron (CVX) has not only refused to acknowledge any link between the public health hazards and the environmental problems caused by its drilling policies in the Ecuadorian Amazon, but has also refused to clean up the pollution, claiming that a controversial ‘clean up’ agreement with the Ecuadorian Government has released it of any further liability. The company has further denied direct compensation to the affected communities for threatening their health and their economic and cultural survival by polluting their environment. The Amazon residents have been fighting this problem in courts since 1993.
- Amnesty International USA, along with other socially responsible investors that include the two largest pension funds in the US, has engaged in shareholder activism to demand accountability for the people suffering in the Amazon. AIUSA has co-filed a proposal to Chevron’s Board of directors calling on the company to report all costs relating to the health and environmental consequences of contamination associated with Texaco drilling sites in Ecuador's Amazon.
- You can demonstrate solidarity with Amazon communities and help garner more shareholder support for the proposal on Ecuador by joining Amnesty’s SHARE POWER Campaign!
Learn more and find out how you can take action. »
E-mail Amnesty’s Corporate Action Network (CAN).
