The Colonizers: How Oil and Missionaries Shaped the Amazon

O ye lugar a in Agosto, the mill noveci yai we progrimes petroleo in Las Carters in de la de las Suga.

This is Luis Janza. He moved to the Oriente area of the Ecuadorian Amazon, on the eastern side of the country in the seventies. He says, when he stopped off the bus in Lago Agrio, the largest city in the area at the time, the streets were literally filled with oil, that there was oil running down them. He stepped onto a street of oil.

There is a societ and yomama, there's a there's a demos mia siemprevis negras yeh Principio Nosavilla kravis Negras.

Jansa says growing up he would see big black clouds in the distance nubis Negras. He didn't know what those clouds were from, but he found out later that they were from the oil refineries in the area. Later he would see pits of oil and wastewater in various parts of the Amazon as well. All of that, the oil streets, the black clouds, the pits. Who created those and whose responsibility it is to clean them up? That's what's at the center of a lawsuit that started in nineteen ninety

Hello, I'm Kyle Thomas. I've just been reading about Simon Believer. Believer, the great patriot of Latin America, fought for the freedom of not just one country, but for the freedom of six Spanish colonies in Latin America. For centuries.

In their poor and remote villages, most of the people lived quiet lives, close to the soil. Then in the early nineteen twenties something happened which changed forever. The life of the Venezuelan people oil.

As you can hear in these vintage oil industry promotional films, oil companies didn't see themselves as colin Colonialism was something Spaniards did American companies they brought freedom. Oil Colonialism was deeply intertwined with religion, and the situation in Latin America was no different. Missionaries throughout the continent were often funded by oilmen, most intensely from the nineteen twenties through the

Not all oilmen are developed Christian, but many of them are.

Dochuk says, there's a long history of missionaries and oilmen partnering, and it was no different in the Amazon.

These missionaries are pushing into the jungles of the Amazon. It's no accident that they are coming in direct contact with petroleum geologists and they are going to collaborate, they are going to partner in terms of the flow of information.

These partnerships weren't just bringing religion to the supposedly godless primitive people of the Amazon and opening up new land for oil exploration. They were also exporting American style democracy throughout the world.

Of course, this is all premise on the assumption of a superiority of the modern Christian who, as ambassador of the American Way, privileges their knowledge and their expertise and sees it as again a God given way for them to help uplift the world, and that has deeply, of course, racist undertones.

As the Cold War began in the late nineteen forties and continued until nineteen ninety one, churches and oilman teamed up again against a common enemy, Communism.

This pursuit of black gold is going to be all the more intensified against the backdrop of the Cold War and the fight with communism, in the fear that Latin America might lose itself to the great secular communist threat of the Soviet Union, So oil and the pursuit of souls is going to become all the more important.

At that point, people began exploring for oil and Ecuador in the nineteen twenties, but it wasn't until the nineteen sixties, and then once again oilmen and missionaries teamed up to explore deep into the jungle. In the nineteen eighties, Judith Kimberling, an environmental lawyer from Alabama, was drawn to Ecuador by that timeless desire of environmentalists everywhere. She wanted to save

What of the groups the Bia, they had no contact with the outside world until nineteen seventy.

The Biwayeti are a subgroup of a larger tribe called the Wadani, who lived throughout the Amazon in Ecuador.

They were subjected to a program of forced contact because after Texco discovered commercial quantities of oil and Lago Agrio, the company knew that it would want to expand its operations into Warani territory.

Lago Agrio is the name of the first well Texaco drilled in Ecuador in the great tradition of American companies exploring overseas. Texaco named that well and the town it built up around it after its own history. Lago Agrio means Sour Lake, and back when Texico was just the Texas Oil Company, it first struck black gold in the tiny sundown town of Sour Lake, Texas. Thirty years later Lago Agrio would be the center of this big legal case we've been talking about. But in the nineteen seventies

And the Warni who lived in those areas had no contact with the outside world. They were Fearce warriers and great hunters, and so the company collaborated with US missionaries to subject the Warani to a forced contact.

Kimberly wanted to see for herself what was happening in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and when she first got to Quito, she met an American oil consultant who repeated something she'd read back home.

I had read that there was some oil development in Ecuador, but I had read in this literature that oil extraction, oil drilling, expiration, and production does not harm the rainforest.

That the only harm is caused by road construction, that oil companies have to build roads in order to lay their pipelines. And that road construction by the oil industry Leacity Fares station and there's never there's no other. I had read that without thinking about it, and then after I got to Quito, I met a consultant for an oil company who said the same thing to me, and somehow when he said it, it just didn't sound right.

That consultant gave Kimerling a copy of his company's environmental management practices and its plans for further drilling in the Amazon. She took it to a group called Company I, an organization that represents fifteen hundred communities in the Amazon.

An environmental management plan for Block sixteen, which is in a really important areas of Yasuni National Park and also the territory of the Warani nation. You know, they looked at it and they asked me if they could see it, if they could copy it, and I said, of course. And I think that what made an impression on them was that I was the first person who had ever shared information with him.

Confany I asked her to come back, and then they asked her, Okay, so you want to help. What exactly do you want to do? She said, she wanted to go out and see what the oil companies were really doing in the rainforest.

So I went with company I. They took me out they and they took me to Coca, which is an oil boom town, and they introduced me to the local federation and I met with the with the leaders there, and I told them about, you know, what I had heard about oil extraction. And I asked them, you know, I said, I have some doubts.

Is it true?

Is their contamination? And they looked at each other, they looked at me. They had never heard that word before. They did not know what it meant. And so when I explained what the word contamination meant, they understood immediately and they began to tell me about the oil operations, the routine waste, the spills, and then they took mend so that I could see for myself. And so I still remember the first waste pit that I saw, the

A US company was doing in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador in the you know, I went there in nineteen eighty nine and they were still doing it.

Then, This practice digging unlined open air waste pits, filling them and just leaving them behind, and the dumping of oil into rivers what we heard Hostino talk about in the last episode. These are the original issues at the center of this decades long case that Chevron ultimately inherited from Texico, and that the Ecuadorians are still trying to settle today. No one really denies that this was done. It's more a question of who did what and whose

I've worked or lived in about seventy different countries. I lived ten years in Latin America, eight in Brazil, two in Ecuador. Going there, I did see these these oil roads where they the crude oil was. It seemed like it was deliberately spilled. I don't know how it happened, but it seemed like it was also almost wat deep, and it was lush, lush jungle out there.

An issue in this case is not whether this happened or even whether Texaco was involved, it's whether they were responsible for more cleanup than they actually did. Texicos and now Chevron's arguments in this case boiled down to two things. First, Texico cleaned up with the government said it had to, and second that any remaining issues were the res responsibility

So Texico real lies in now chevrun on what they call the settlement agreement that was signed I think it was in ninety eight where they say they cleaned up thirty seven percent of the unlined waste pits because they said that's the percentage of their share of the consortium. Is that a normal kind of thing where they would only clean up whatever their share is and then leave the rest for Petro Ecuador.

I think that's an outlandish statement because what happens is the major runs everything. No, I don't want to say they're like, you know, imperialists or whatever, but they definitely go in there with this big boy attitude a lot with these broad shoulders, and they're there to do the operations, to operate it, and usually the national oil company it's just an observer. They really don't get their hands on

Kimberlin gives the example of the Trans Ecuadorian Pipeline, a three hundred and thirteen mile pipeline that runs from the Amazon up over the Andes and to the Pacific Ocean. It was initially built by Texico in nineteen seventy two.

This pipeline that during the time it was operated by Texico, this pipeline alone had spilled more oil than the Exxon Valdis And this doesn't count the secondary pipelines, the flow lines. I mean, most of the spills that occurred during Texico's operations weren't even recorded. And there's actually a was a directive from Texico in the US to the office in Keito telling them not to record those spills, basically unless they had to.

Both Texico and Chevron have admitted that Texaco was the operator of the partnership, in other words, setting up oil fields, refineries, and pipelines and running them from the beginning in nineteen sixty four into at least nineteen ninety. They were still in charge when Kimberling made her initial Save the Rainforest trip.

I was invited by a former law school classmate of mine and his father, his father from Ecuador, but was practicing law in Massachusetts, to go on with them on a trip to Ecuador to do an investigation of what they described as a massive pollution problem. Caused by Texaco.

In nineteen ninety three, Fast filed suit against Texaco on behalf of a group of indigenous tribes. Here he is at a press conference about the case in New York. What happened with Texico didn't have to be that way, he says. He goes on to say more or less exactly what Tim lagoon Neegro, the petroleum engineer we heard from earlier said. Lago Negro worked throughout South America, the US, and Africa as an engineer for Baker Hughes, an oil

It was almost like a war on the environment.

That's what it seemed like.

Texico argued that it had cleaned up what it was responsible for. The company also argued that New York, where the suit was filed, had no jurisdiction over what had happened in Ecuador. For almost a decade, the plaintiffs, led by Bonifas, fought to keep the suit in New York. That's at least in part because at the time, Ecuador's government was almost entirely in the pocket of the oil companies, whose profits were helping the country develop and modernize. In fact,

Before leaving, Texaco spent forty million dollars and worked with independent environmental experts to clean up its share of well sides. The whole process was overseen and verified by the Ecuadorian government.

Texico spent forty million dollars cleaning up its agreed upon share of production sites, getting a complete release from the Ecuadorian government and local communities.

An independent panel of experts found that Texico's remediation here had followed Ecuadorian government requirements.

It was the Ecuadorian government's cozy relationship with the oil industry that made Bone and the Equadorian plaintiffs fight so hard for so long to keep their case in the US, especially given that Texico was an American company. Here's Donziger again, Given that.

The ecuador legal system seemed completely incapable of standing up to the powerful Texico and then Chevron corporation, it didn't exactly engender a whole lot of confidence that a lawsuit in Equator could be successful, which is exactly why Texico and then Chevron was so desperate to have the case litigated down at Ecuador. They were so desperate that they agreed, as a condition of the removal of the case to Ecuador, they accepted jurisdiction of the Ecuadorian courts as an American company.

At this point, Donziger was becoming increasingly involved in the case. It was unusual for an American company to agree to conditions like these, but maybe less so when you consider how friendly the Equadorian government had always been to oil companies.

They thought they could engineer a dismissal because of their political influence. You know, they saw what we saw, which was, you know, we saw a court system that for decades hadn't issued even one ruling against Texaco, even though the

They knew that still the concessions Texico had made and that Chevron accepted too, gave the plaintiffs enough of a reason to keep going.

Having gotten those two concessions, which are huge because oftentimes companies will then you know, the case will be removed to another country, and these big companies like Texico just won't show up, or they'll show up and say, hey, this has to be dismissed because you lacked jurisdiction in this case. That was not going to be an issue for us. So the upshot is we decided to go continue the case in Ecuador, which began what I call really phase two of this battle.

Next time on Drilled, the case kicks off in Ecuador and the surprising election of a wildly popular socialist president changes the maths entirely.

Youa file prea Aliana Fay.

Drilled is an original production of the Critical Frequency podcast Network. It's reported and produced by me Amy Westerbelt. My co reporter on this season is Karen Savage. Our editor is Julia Ritchie. Mixing and mastering by Mark Busch. Additional reporting from Emily Gertz. Additional production help from Sarah Ventry. Original score was composed by b Beeman. Matt Fleming created our