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Ecuadoreans Won't Back Down in Fighting Chevron-Texaco Over Amazon Oil Disaster
Ofrias, Lindsay
http://upsidedownworld.org/archives/ecuador/ecuadoreans-wont-back-fighting-chevron-texaco-amazon-oil-disaster/Date Written: 2017-11-01 Publisher: Upside Down World Year Published: 2017 Resource Type: Article Cx Number: CX23350 A class-action lawsuit first filed in 1993 against Chevron-Texaco has taken its toll on the lawyers and Ecuadorean people seeking justice for environmental damage. Hope for justice and healing drives people to not give up. Abstract: -- Excerpt: For more than two decades, Soto has been involved in a global campaign to clean up the largest oil disaster to ever occur, in the heart of Ecuador's northern Amazon rainforest, where Soto has lived since he was 15. It is a disaster so devastating that it has been popularly dubbed the "Amazon Chernobyl." .... There's been no remediation," Soto asserts. Through "toxic tours" of the contamination in question that he and other affected people host for those wanting to see it, he shows that "remediation" amounted to little more than covering the pits with soil. In many cases, the pits remain open. At well site Sacha 61 (Sacha is one of six oil fields in the area that Chevron-Texaco operated), black, tar-like crude envelopes a 60 foot by 100 foot swath of forest that is too waterlogged to walk across, but stiff enough to bounce rocks off. Soto believes the run-off from pits like that one, affecting the water and food that locals rely on, is the reason why he lost his brother and father to cancer. Subject Headings |