It is hard to imagine a more unlikely place for a high-stakes trial of a multibillion-dollar claim against a multinational oil company than Lago Agrio, Ecuador, population 35,000. Lago Agrio is a gritty, diesel-fumed city, a through-station for workers heading to the nearby petroleum wells, and a gateway for tourists heading to the nearby Amazon jungle. It is 20 miles from the paramilitary-controlled Colombian border. It has just one paved road in and out of town. Its streets are lined with open-air markets, fuel trucks bump along the road, and stray goats occasionally wander by.
And yet Lago Agrio is the central theater in a nearly 15-year war between 30,000 residents of Ecuador’s Amazon basin and Chevron Corporation, the second-largest oil company in the United States. The war began in federal court in New York, where the personal injury class action went through a nine-year jurisdictional battle. For the past three years, the two sides have been engaged in a contentious trial in Lago Agrio over Chevron’s alleged contamination of the Amazon region. According to the plaintiffs’ allegations, Chevron is guilty of the most dire of environmental and human disasters: dumping 18.5 billion gallons of oily water into rivers and streams in Ecuador’s Amazon region, where a subsidiary of Texaco Inc. (which merged with Chevron in 2001) operated from 1964 to 1992. They say the dumping caused a high incidence of cancer, spontaneous abortions, and birth defects. Chevron says it complied with Ecuadorian law at the time. It says the plaintiffs are just trying to score a hefty settlement.
