Meet the Amazon Tribespeople Who Beat Chevron in Court-but Are Still Fighting for Clean Water

[Omaha Steve]

X post in Environment-Energy


http://www.takepart.com/feature/2014/10/30/amazon-tribes-chevron-lawsuit-ecuador-oil-pollution?cmpid=tpdaily-eml-2014-10-30





With the judgment in their favor tied up in a New York courtroom, indigenous residents of Ecuador's oil-polluted rainforest are going back to basics.




October 30, 2014 By Alexander Zaitchik

Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance writer based in New Orleans. He has written for The New Republic, The Nation, Salon, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, and many others.


One day in early August, I took a long and lazy canoe trip down the Río Tiputini in northeastern Ecuador. My destination was the village of Guiyero, a remote dot of an Indian community more than a hundred miles downriver from the oil city of Lago Agrio. The riverside hamlet is at the eastern edge of territory deeded to the Waorani, one of the largest tribes in the region. Situated where some of Ecuador’s last unspoiled wilderness meets its oil frontier, it is a good place to see what a resource extraction boom entering its sixth decade can do to a rainforest.

It can be easy to forget the surrounding presence of industry during the slow river ride to Guiyero. As we floated around the bends and buckles of the Tiputini, the jungle beyond the banks looked lush, vast, and untouched, the only sounds bird cries and insect hums. Wooden dugouts tied up along the way suggested the persistence of an undisturbed pre-Columbian culture. But while a fraction of the Indian population along the Tiputini has escaped history, retreating ever deeper into shrinking tracts of forest, the number of these no contactados is minuscule and falling.

I visited Guiyero with three staff members from an organization called ClearWater, whose mission is in its name. The group builds rainwater-filtration systems in the region’s indigenous communities, and it was looking to bring them to Guiyero. After five decades of oil exploration in the area, and as a class-action lawsuit entering its 22nd year drags on in New York, villagers along the Tiputini are taking matters into their own hands, trying to clean the water that’s essential to health as a first step toward political and economic development and self-determination. Our trip was the organization’s first foray into the village, as well as the first trip by a U.S. journalist to report from the communities at the center of the multibillion-dollar suit against Chevron. Oil operations have made this kind of work necessary for more than 50 years. ClearWater has been at it for four.


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As a candidate for receiving ClearWater’s systems, Guiyero has a typical profile, one that tells a larger story. The village is built with a combination of modern cement and traditional thatch on the banks of a heavily polluted river. It abuts a drilling zone crowded with oil infrastructure operated by the Spanish firm Repsol. A few miles upstream from Repsol’s drilling sites are more wells operated by Petroamazonas, Ecuador’s state-run oil company, and Andes Petroleum Ecuador, a Chinese firm. Before we embarked, I was told that the contamination of the Tiputini and the forest creeks is steady, often unseen, and total, but I wasn’t prepared for what I’d find.

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