Chevron is charged $8.6B for Texaco pollution in Amazon
Judge Nicolas Zambrano in an Equadorian court in the Amazon awarded $8.6 billion to Ecuadorian residents of the Amazon who had sued Chevron for years of crude oil pollution. The judgment is the latest in 18 years of litigation between Amazon residents and Texaco, which was later purchased by Chevron Corporation, headquartered in San Ramon, California and active in over 180 countries.
The lawsuit, Aguinda v. ChevronTexaco, was first filed in 1993 in New York, on behalf of 30,000 inhabitants of Ecuador‘s Amazon region and later transferred to the Ecuadorian court and Ecuadorian jurisdiction.
The Amazon Defense Coalition provided a fact sheet alleging that Texaco used a number of substandard production techniques that resulted in pollution that injured several indigenous groups in the region, including cancer and other health problems that were reported at higher rates.
According to the group, Chevron has admitted that Texaco abandoned over 900 waste pits, spilled over 17 million gallons of oil from pipeline ruptures, burned millions of cubic feet of gases with no controls, and dumped more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into Amazon waterways.
Both sides in the litigation will appeal. Chevron charges that the verdict against them is the “product of fraud,” and plaintiffs say that the size of the award is too small to do a real cleanup.
-Bill at
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