From: Truth Out
In 1993, US lawyer Steven Donziger and others filed a lawsuit in New York against Texaco on behalf of Indigenous nationalities and campesino communities in Ecuador's Amazon whose land and water had been thoroughly contaminated over a 26-year period.
From 1964-1990, Texaco ran all drilling, waste disposal, and pipeline operations in the region and admitted it had dumped 16 billion gallons of oil waste into rivers and streams relied on by local inhabitants for their drinking water, bathing, and fishing. The damage has been called the "Amazon Chernobyl" by locals and is considered by some experts to be the worst oil-related environmental disaster on the planet and credibly linked to unusually high cancer rates in the area.
Texaco spent almost 10 years fighting to get the lawsuit moved to Ecuador's courts, which it praised in numerous sworn affidavits. In 2001, Chevron (which had just merged with Texaco) won that battle and agreed to abide by any judgment issued in Ecuador, subject only to narrow enforcement defenses. MORE
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